The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
Maker Shed’s Marc de Vinck sent us this pic from the Isotoner booth where they’re hawking their SmarTouch 2.0 glove “Now with 3rd finger function.” Woot. Why not make your own, use any gloves you like, and enable all the finger functions you like. Here, let Becky show you how…
It’s hard not to get excited when you see assistive technology like the sign language interpreting Show and Tell Glove from Tel Aviv area makers Oleg Imanilov, Zvika Markfield, and Tomer Daniel. The glove uses a LillyPad Arduino to sample flex sensors, an accelerometer, and gyro into an ADK board that then talks to an Android app that translates sign language and gestures into written text. To improve performance, a neural network is fed gestures manually to compensate for varying hand sizes directly on the handset. They’re still working out the bugs, but the current results are more than encouraging.
Maker Shed Product Development Mucky-Muck, Marc de Vinck, sent us these phone snaps today of the MAKE team at the MakerBot Industries booth at CES. Tonight, our team found itself at the MakerBot Industries party, too. It was all pizza, PBR, cups o’ quarters, and vintage pinball. Let’s just hope that Bre didn’t get them all drunk and had them make 3D prints they’re going to regret in the morning (the 21st century version of the Xerox machine at the Christmas party).
Uwe Oehler has written a simple program that prints out fold-up paper templates for the conic sections that make up the reflective surface of a Fresnel mirror. Cut the templates out of cardboard, cover the cardboard with aluminum tape, fold up the sections, and apply them to a flat backing. Even the relatively simple, five ring, 59% coverage reflector shown in the video will burn holes in construction paper under modest sunlight.
We haven’t even had a moment to work off the extra holiday weight yet and it’s already that time again: the Consumer Electronics Show! Here at MAKE, each year, we program a little thing we call alt.CES.
Master modder Ben Heck is at it again. This time around he’s created a hand-held game controller for the iPhone using the guts from an Ion iCade iPad game controller and some laser-cut parts. As ever, Ben pulls off a slick portable mod suitable for the store shelves.
If you’re building a standalone project with an embedded PC (say, a CNC rig or a MAME cabinet) one of the easiest ways to get instructions to the software is using the PC’s baked-in keyboard interface. But if you don’t want to actually use a keyboard to control the thing, you need some way to convert button presses and/or joystick movements from your custom control panel into signals that look like keyboard input.
