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Over on oreilly.com they’re covering the iPad launch with a dedicated section that includes developer articles and video. If you feel like you’re not getting enough iPhone coverage from the current media onslaught, check back throughout the week as new content is posted.
IFixIt has gotten their hands on an iPad and are tearing it down as we speak. In-process pics on the their site. Some highlights discovered so far: * This machine is absolutely gorgeous inside. There’s clear symmetry that is there for aesthetics alone. * The rear case is CNC machined from a solid block of […]
The tinkerpaws over at iFixIt managed to scare up the prematurely posted FCC internal photos of the iPad and were able to remove the PDF layer obscuring the manufacturer parts information. Check out their analysis of the FCC photos. Apple requested this information stay concealed until August 17th. Clearly, the FCC ignored them. iPad FCC […]
So the bragging rights I mentioned in Monday’s post about the newly-discovered single shape that tiles the plane aperiodically go to mathematician and artist Edmund Harriss, aka Gelada, who produced these beautiful renderings of the Socolar-Taylor tile in Blender and uploaded printable 3D models to Thingiverse. There’s more info and images on Harriss’s blog, Maxwell’s Demon. [Thanks, Edmund!]
In the Apple guide tour videos, you can see that the person using the iPad has MAKE magazine bookmarked! I haven’t seen an iPad in person, but tablets are interesting to think about when it comes to portable computing. I’m really looking forward to hacking an iPad. When the iPhone came out, jailbreaking and doing […]
While this dress by Abbey Liebman incorporating flexible photovoltaics for charging personal electronics is interesting, what really caught my eye was the fact that it uses an improved type of conductive thread based on a proprietary blend of polymers and nanoparticles.
You click on a link and buy some silver-based conductive thread right now, but over the course of years, the current silver-based threads will slowly oxidize in air and the conductivity will start to degrade. Presumably, the new material (from the Hinestroza research group at Cornell) does not.
About a year ago I was considering a tutorial for Make: Projects about making one’s own conductive thread using carbon nanotubes (CNTs). At the time, you could buy small samples of CNTs from several places around the web at “educator’s” prices. Research on CNT-based conductive inks has shown that carbon nanotubes dispersed in water bond strongly enough to cellulose in paper to resist washing and prolonged mechanical wear, and would also, presumably, show similar performance on cotton thread. So I’m pretty sure you could make durable conductive thread just by soaking regular cotton thread in a dispersion of CNTs in water. Unfortunately, more research has shown, pretty conclusively, that carbon nanotubes are bad for you. Which is probably why the supply of those accessible “educator” samples seem to have dried up. Oh well.
Xeni from Boing Boing managed to get ahold of a pre-release Apple iPad (seen above). The folks at iFixit got their hands on a pre-release Apple unit too and did their usual teardown trickery on it. Kyle writes: We had to resort to some subversive techniques involving a cop from Ottawa, a donkey, and three […]
