To Philip Torrone, a principal at Adafruit, and therefore one of the people with a legitimate claim to kicking off the entire field of Kinect hacking, this is a very exciting time to be trying to find, or stretch, the controller’s limits. “The Kinect as it is wasn’t meant to do anything it’s doing now,” Torrone said. “We’re only at version 1 [and] the best part about all these hacks will be all the things we cannot possibly imagine.
That said, with his prognostication hat on, Torrone sees a rich future of new projects made with the device.
Robots and mo-cap ”A few things come to mind, since the Kinect–once hacked–is a great input device specifically [for] whole-body movements,” Torrone said. “I think we’ll see the Kinect hackers start out using it to control machinery in some manner. There are some small robotics and telepresence examples already [but] that’s just the start.”
Torrone explained that he imagines Kinect telepresence projects along the lines of people employing the device as “puppet strings for controlling robots with vision systems over small and large distances.” At the same time, he envisions the Kinect being used to run anything from industrial machinery to giant Burning Man projects. In each case, “the hacked Kinect allows the user to control extremely complicated machines just [by] using their bodies, distance, and shapes.”
But limiting the Kinect to controlling Earth-bound projects is small potatoes, Torrone suggested. He finds it easy to imagine hacked Kinects “being used to control planetary or moon probes as we land new rovers in our solar system.”
NASA, of course, might prefer to work within Microsoft-authorized uses.
At the same time, Torrone thinks that the Kinect could be a very attractive new tool for young robot enthusiasts and predicted that First, a large high school robotics organization, could start implementing the device in its competitions. And then there’s the obvious military, industrial, and research uses. For one, Kinects could be employed to operate underwater robots, and for another, scientists might be able to use the controller to conduct microscopic studies. “I suppose we might see weaponized robots,” Torrone said. “‘Robot wars’ with human puppeteers [using Kinects] and giant robots fighting is certainly going to happen.”
…the small car only houses 512MB of storage, which can only hold 12 minutes of video, but at $60, Mattel also includes a rubberized mini USB to USB cord for connecting the cam to a Mac or PC and child-friendly editing software.
Bask in the glow of over-bright phosphors that flash on and slowly fade away. Customize the screen’s curvature, colors, and transparency. Slow the bit-rate to a crawl.
Watch the strange dance of beam desyncs and shifting colors. Turn up the noise, jitter, and flicker to add a realistic warmth.
Disregard thirty years of GUI advancement by immersing yourself in full-screen mode. Impress curious onlookers at internet cafes.
Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio address, the president declared that “We can out-compete any other nation on Earth.”
…Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity.
By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelt’s appointment on the grounds that at least he represents a company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst this bubble, but these days G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing — indeed, GE Capital, which received a government guarantee for its debt, was a major beneficiary of the Wall Street bailout.
The goal of this hack is to import the data from the Xbox Kinect, process it, and create various effects in the Minecraft universe. The project is currently in its third phase. The first phase aimed to take a snapshot from a Kinect and transform it into a Minecraft save file. The depth and color information was used to approximate the position and types of blocks to best represent the 3D point cloud in MineCraft. The second phase aimed to animate the data captured by the Kinect at 30FPS by means of stop-motion animation.
LONDON – IPC, the industry association that looks after interests of companies involved in electronics interconnection, has released IPC-1071, a standard on printed circuit board intellectual property protection. The standard is titled Best industry practices for intellectual property protection in printed board manufacturing and it is intended to assist printed board manufacturers in the development of requirements for the protection of intellectual property (IP) for their customers in commercial, industrial, military and other high reliability markets, the IPC (Bannockburn, Ill.) said.
You can read about it here, if you’re willing to pay $31. We wonder what they think of open source hardware and creative commons.
The new fashion accessories were originally created as an experiment by two Japanese designers and are now being used in a commercial advertising a winter sale at a Japanese clothing store, Laforet Harajuku. They are quickly becoming a sought after accessory. The LED smiles can easily be affixed to your teeth and glow different colors while you smile. The colors can be changed wirelessly through a computer interface. Of course they work best in the dark.
Motoi Ishibashi, one of the designers involved in the project, explained in a blog post that the original idea for the LED smiles came after he saw a video last year of LED Throwies, which are little lights that can be affixed to a magnet and thrown on metal surfaces. They are like lighted graffiti.
Mr. Ishibashi and Daito Manabe, the other designer and technologist on the project, are offering workshops in Japan showing people how to build their own LED smiles.
A new business in the Flatiron district of Manhattan called General Assembly is not a university, but its founders hope it will seem like one. The 20,000-square-foot space offers desks, Internet access, classes and other services for entrepreneurs. “We wanted to recreate the feeling of a college campus, ” said Adam Pritzker, one of the creators of the space. “Something that was outside the structure of an institution but had the same academic tendencies.”
NEW PRODUCT – Large Lithium Ion Polymer Battery – 2700mAh. Lithium ion polymer (also known as ‘lipo’ or ‘lipoly’) batteries are thin, light and powerful. The output ranges from 4.2V when completely charged to 3.7V. This battery has a capacity of 2700mAh for a total of about 10 Wh. If you need a smaller battery, we also have a 1300mAh model
The batteries come pre-attached with a genuine 2-pin JST-PH connector as shown and include the necessary protection circuitry. Because they have a genuine JST connector, not a knock-off, the cable wont snag or get stuck in a matching JST jack, they click in and out smoothly.
The included protection circuitry keeps the battery voltage from going too high (over-charging) or low (over-use) which means that the battery will cut-out when completely dead at 3.0V. It will also protect against output shorts. However, even with this protection it is very important that you only use a LiIon/LiPoly constant-voltage/constant-current charger to recharge them and at a rate of 1200mA or less.
Like most lipos, the batteries we sell do not have thermistors built in. This is why we suggest charging at 1/2C or even less – 1200mA max in this case. Even 500mA is a good charge rate, which is how much you can get from a USB port.
Additional safety notes: Do not use a NiMH/NiCad/lead-acid charger! Also, do not abuse these batteries, do not short, bend, crush or puncture. As with all Lithium ion polymer batteries and with any power source – they should be used by experts who are comfortable working with power supplies.
The batteries come pre-attached with a genuine 2-pin JST-PH connector as shown and include the necessary protection circuitry. Because they have a genuine JST connector, not a knock-off, the cable wont snag or get stuck in a matching JST jack, they click in and out smoothly.
The included protection circuitry keeps the battery voltage from going too high (over-charging) or low (over-use) which means that the battery will cut-out when completely dead at 3.0V. It will also protect against output shorts. However, even with this protection it is very important that you only use a LiIon/LiPoly constant-voltage/constant-current charger to recharge them and at a rate of 500mA or less.
Like most lipos, the batteries we sell do not have thermistors built in. This is why we suggest charging at 1/2C or even less – 500mA max in this case which is how much you can get from a USB port.
Additional safety notes: Do not use a NiMH/NiCad/lead-acid charger! Also, do not abuse these batteries, do not short, bend, crush or puncture. As with all Lithium ion polymer batteries and with any power source – they should be used by experts who are comfortable working with power supplies.
USB/Serial Converter – PL2303. This USB cable adds a DB9 serial port to your computer or laptop. Works with MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Note that this provides +-12V serial (RS232) not 5V serial (TTL), good for old devices like GPS, handhelds, programmers, etc with chunky DB9′s on the side.
These are tested and work great with bit-bang serial devises MiniPOVs, DASA programmers and Serial SpokePOV adapters – note that they are slow in comparison to hardware serial ports due to the high overhead of USB.
A great post on WebUrbanist covering monuments to the space race in both the USA and the USSR. These monuments are only partly about the astronauts and cosmonauts. They’re also testaments to the technology that put them up there, and the society which embraced that technology and made it happen. “We are what we celebrate”, indeed.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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