Arduino
Electronic waste is a huge global problem, and its often devastating impact on our environment is not going to lessen any time soon – in fact, it's predicted to get worse. Faced with a panorama of mountainous e-waste when passing an immense landfill site in suburban Phnom Penh, Cambodia and seeing young children working there instead of going to school, a researcher at Keio-NUS CUTE Center and Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore came up with a novel idea to help tackle both issues. His plan involves creating simple and cheap-to-produce edutainment kit modules that could be shipped out to those unfortunate areas of the world where e-waste is transported for disposal, where they would be paired up with discarded but functional tech such as PS/2 keyboards and mice, speakers and old CRT monitors. Read More
Adafruit's "Internet of Things Camera" is a neat mashup of existing Arduino components into a versatile remote monitoring camera. The key here is in the word remote - a capability that's granted by the inclusion of a first-generation Eye-Fi card, which is an SD card with built in Wi-Fi, that can upload images to your computer or other device, or better yet to a variety of photo-sharing websites such as Flickr. Read More
Update Twitter in Morse Code with the Tworsekey
Urgent messages sent using Morse Code via radio waves or by electrical telegraphy are, by necessity, quite short - after all, you don't want to spend all day dotting and dashing your way through War and Peace. These days, of course, if you want to send the latest piece of gossip or news to those near and dear there are quite a few quicker options - from email to instant messaging and Facebook to Twitter. For users of the latter networking platform who are looking for a novel way to merge the old with the new, Martin Kaltenbrummer's open source Tworsekey Morse Code interface can deliver messages direct to the Twitter API via Ethernet LAN. Read More
FLORA - a platform for your wearable DIY electronics projects
A new platform for wearable electronics, known as the FLORA, was announced by its creators Adafruit Industries on Friday. Essentially a small, round, fabric-friendly circuit board that looks a little like a flower, the FLORA will, when ready, be launched with a variety of accessories and software. These will include, we gather, controllers for iPhone, iPad and Android hardware. The FLORA is ripe for wearable DIY electronics projects: announced modules include Bluetooth, GPS, 3-axis accelerometer, compass, and, intriguingly, OLED. Read More
Something of a prospective big stepbrother to Arduino, BoardX is a new DIY electronics kit dreamt up by robotics enthusiast turned entrepreneur, Kevin Green. Like Arduino, BoardX is a customizable and expandable motherboard that forms a base, schematically and structurally, to whatever electronics wizardry the end user has in mind. What separates BoardX from Arduino is its larger physical size, greater current-carrying capacity, and the fact that the board does not come with an integrated processor. Users must select their own. Read More
Within just the past few years, scientists have developed an impressive number of experimental systems designed to help the blind navigate city streets. These have included devices that mount on the wrist, are incorporated into glasses, are worn as a vest, and that augment a traditional white cane. A young researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bangalore, India, however, has come up with something else - a navigational device for the blind that's built into a shoe. Read More
DIY gadgets' makers have a new solution for quick and easy building of custom devices in the form of the .NET Gadgeteer platform. Utilizing .NET Micro Framework and C# programming language, .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit combined of a basic ARM CPU-equipped mainboard and a choice of easily attachable modules, including displays, buttons, camera, Ethernet, USB ports, or WiFi. The idea resembles the Arduino platform or EZ-Builder kit for DIY robotics projects like DJ Sures' WALL-E. Read More
The ultimate air duo of keyboards and guitar has now taken a step closer to becoming a full band with the creation of the Air Drums by Israeli electronics tinkerer Maayan Migdal. His system is comprised of a couple of modified hand rakes, a pair of sandals, the ever-useful Arduino Uno and some custom circuitry which feeds through to a laptop via a standard MIDI interface. Read More
Connecting blocks are one of the all-time greatest types of toys. Unfortunately, when we grow up, many of us seem to think that it’s silly to make stuff just for the sake of making it – we still enjoy putting things together, but they have to be functional. That’s where B-Squares come in. The flat electronic modules serve a variety of functions, and can form a variety of devices when connected in different combinations. Read More
While we've looked at a couple of efforts to upgrade the humble white cane's capabilities, such as the ultrasonic Ultracane and the laser scanning cane, the decidedly low tech white cane is still one of the most commonly used tools to help the visually impaired get around without bumping into things. Now, through their project called NAVI (Navigation Aids for the Visually Impaired), students at Germany's Universität Konstanz have leveraged the 3D imaging capabilities of Microsoft's Kinect camera to detect objects that lie outside a cane's small radius and alert the wearer to the location of obstacles through audio and vibro-tactile feedback. Read More
