An electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries broke its own world record for the longest EV trip without recharging when it completed a 623.76 mile run.
The Daihatsu Mira EV, featuring Sanyo batteries and converted from gas to electric by the Japan EV Club, already set a record for the longest single trip without recharging when it took a 345-mile journey from Tokyo to Osaka last November.
Ben Krasnow explains how he built a liquid nitrogen generator from less than $500 in surplus components. This was filmed at Maker Faire California 2010 by Jeri Ellsworth.
Are you a guitar hero whose tired of the same old songs? Or maybe you’re a dancer whose ready for a new revolution? A few enterprising hackers have found some interesting pairings that just might change the way you think about that old Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) pad, or give you a reason to build your own guitar controller!
OpenChord, a Guitar Hero-style game controller created by open-source hardware hackers from real guitars, has been re-purposed to emulate a Playstation 3 DualShock controller. Instead of using it as a rhythm controller, one of the OpenChord team have paired it with Street Fighter 4 to create some sweet chin music. Check out the video for an example of Chun Li strumming her way to victory!
If you hate the taste of Brussels sprouts it’s likely genetic and now you can prove it to your mom and dad with the Pro Biotech’s open source PCR project. Gene sequencing at home. Filmed at Maker Faire California 2010 by Jeri Ellsworth.
Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading contaminated a computer chip which was then inserted into his hand. The device, which enables him to pass through security doors and activate his mobile phone, is a sophisticated version of ID chips used to tag pets. In trials, Dr Gasson showed that the chip was able to pass on the computer virus to external control systems. If other implanted chips had then connected to the system they too would have been corrupted, he said.
Over the past year or so, Microsoft’s robotics group has been working quietly, very quietly. That’s because, among other things, they were busy planning a significant strategy shift.
Microsoft is upping the ante on its robotics ambitions by announcing today that its Robotics Developer Studio, or RDS, a big package of programming and simulation tools, is now available to anyone for free.
The Microsoft RDS supports a number of hardware platforms, including the Lego Mindstorms NXT, iRobot Create and Parallax Boe-Bot, and it provides a physics-based simulation environment to allow you to test your designs.
While there might be a brand-name bowling system out there that would be universally easier to understand, it doesn’t matter because there’s no big demand for that kind of system from the bowlers. One bowler does not go to all sorts of different alleys asking for the same system enough for any alley to switch from the one that was originally most convenient for them.
Thus, this! Hundreds if not thousands of different setups and systems.
Now there might be some bowling systems out there trying to dominate the market, and good luck to them! But bowling is and always has been a sport that’s basically just for the love of it – there is no gigantic market or popular sporting event for it, thus happy mediocrity.
And thus the uniqueness of each alley.
Now behold these screens.
Has anyone ever worked on these systems? Post up in the comments!
Ever since last year’s sold-out Nerd Nite — when East Coast nerds descended upon our fair city bringing beer and presentations on real-life zombies, parasitic birds and ancient foodstuffs — San Francisco nerds have been hankering for another chance to get edified. Well, hanker no more. Nerd Nite SF returns! And this time, local nerds get to do all the edifying.
Nerd Nite is an informal gathering at which brainy folk get together for nerdery of all sorts — well, mostly presentations and drinking. It was conceived in a Boston bar in 2003 when Chris Balakrishnan, a doctoral fellow at Harvard, spent so much time at his local watering hole talking about his research into the parasitic finches of Cameroon that the bartenders asked him to give a presentation on it for his friends, hoping he’d just get it over with.
Now there are Nerd Nites in New York, Austin, Washington, DC, Munich and San Francisco, with more coming soon to LA, Chicago and Seattle. All the presentations are given by volunteers who are eager to share their knowledge. No advanced degrees are required, just a passion for the subject matter.
At June’s Nerd Nite SF, find out why dead fish in stinky jars matter, how scientists are using your lipoproteins to create medicine nano-taxis, and how World of Warcraft gold can be exchanged for real sex. Alpha Bravo will man the turntable, spinning records not merely for their rhythmic aptitude, but also for their nerdy subject matter.
For the rest of the week we’re going to experiment with giving away one of our soldering badge with purchase of $120 or over – all you need to do is shop on Adafruit like you normally do and once you reach $120 (not including shipping) you’ll get a soldering badge added to you order. We’ll see how this goes!
Reader Albert Y. from Seattle, Washington sent in his latest creation. It is a scope clock based off of the Thiem-Work components. He was helped by Eric C. both in vision and execution. It has a similar styling with the exposed CRT and the (what appears to be) aluminum base. Nice work!
+1 kudos to him for documenting this unique approach to job hunting, given the cutthroat economic climate.
Please note: Mr. Veredas’ project has proven so popular that his hosting has gone offline a number of times. If the link doesn’t seem to work, try it again later.
New York City, May 25th, 2010 - Artist Michelle Rogers responds to the financial crisis through an urban poster project placed on Broad Street beside the New York Stock Exchange entitled “My God, My God…The 3 Stock Traders”
The artist will present large poster reproductions of her oil paintings of stock traders “in panic mode,” as the global financial meltdown takes grip. Protesting the financial scandal that has engulfed the world economies for the last two years, Rogers, addresses the crisis on Wall Street, at the actual “scene of the crime”.
Inspired by Venetian master Titian’s portraits of figures looking up to the heavens in terror, Rogers’ stock traders are in similar poses and are fixed looking up at screens while the numbers plummet.
“I want the Wall Street guys to know, that they are not the masters of the universe and to accept that they have caused great pain in the world and they need to make it right”. – Said Rogers
On a positive note – The 2008 financial crisis allowed Adafruit to move to a bigger space in the Financial District, the landlords seemed to have imply our electronics business was a better bet than the stock broker(s) & banksters that lived here before and quickly left.
The vast amount of information at our fingertips these days can be as distracting as it is useful. Tracking something like the movement of an index on the stock market by feverishly checking a ticker all day is often more than you want to deal with. So this cube lets you display data it receives wirelessly from the Internet—trends in the market, the weather, your Twitter traffic—in the simplest form possible, as light that subtly changes in color and intensity. Say the skies are expected to clear up: Per your programming instructions, the cube will just turn a pleasant blue. Inside, an open-source Arduino microcontroller with Wi-Fi connectivity runs the show, downloading any data source (RSS feeds, for example) and translating it into instructions for the attached LEDs. Then you can just kick back and enjoy the light show.
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