Design and Technology » Cool Stuff

So Deffinitly a Project for this Summer…

Lullabel — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:55:02 +0000

Ooooh! Circuit bending!

Ahhhh!!! Must have one of these!!

Lullabel — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:47:46 +0000

This has to be the best wireless charger I’ve ever seen! You place the item to be charged in the ‘bird bath’ and watch the ripples of charge flow out. The level of the ‘water’ indicates the level of charge and when your device it fully charged the birds glow! Designed by Sun Kyung Kim this charger is tech meets still life sculpture.

You may think this looks a little like a chunky graphics tablet and you’d sort of be right, except it’s a toaster!

You can write your significant other, house mate or family a message on their morning toast. Anything written on the screen is burnt accurately on to the toast. Totally breakfast innovation of the century

It’s a Keyboard Jim, but not as we know it…

Lullabel — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:23:21 +0000

When you think of a computer keyboard it’s not really that exciting is it? It just needs to be a functioning method of transferring your key strokes, nothing special…

Think again!

I came across these while I was trawling the Internet in an effort to avoid working, procrastination is occasionally so worth it

Optimus Tactus

The Optimus Tacticus has no keys!! it’s basically on big screen that can be programmed to perform any function or to display any image. You’re designing your own keyboards set up. It’s not yet in production but it would be so cool if this also encompassed tablet technology, all you’d need is a stylus and you wouldn’t have to have a separate piece of tech!

Optimus Maximus

The Maximus ,on the other hand, has all the keys you’d expect on a normal keyboard… except they’re all programmable. Not only that but each one has a small OLED screen to display your chosen function. Good for typing multiple languages but that’s not the main benefit, I know a couple of web developers who’d love to get their hands on one of these to program it to HTML!

Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard

This one doesn’t even have a physical body, just a projector! It uses an optical recognition mechanism to ‘see’ which key you’ve pressed, you can use it on any flat surface and, as it says in the name, it can connect to any keyboard compatible bluetooth device. It even uses simulated key ‘click’ sounds just in case it was a but too far out for you

DataHand Ergonomic Keyboard

It’s quite obvious to see the unique selling point of this keyboard. It was designed using detailed ergonomic data to make it one of the most comfortable and strain free typing platforms available. Using it’s various modes it has more keys than a regular keyboard and has the added bonus of incorporating a mouse, no more switching over!

orbiTouch

This one is really special, it’s been designed for use by people with severe arthritis, carpel tunnel, partial blindness and it has shown to be really successful in helping people with autism or cognitive difficulties to communicate. It works by sliding the left and right domes in a sequence dictated by the colour of the letter to be typed, like this:

Neat

Finally, the real developers keyboard: apparently only amateurs need more keys…

Arrgggg!! Alien Shark Car!!

Lullabel — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 23:40:23 +0000

Panic over it’s just BMW’s concept car GINA “Geometry and functions In ‘N’ Adaptations” (the ‘N’ stands for infinite)

Nixie Tubes!

Lullabel — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:05:25 +0000

Oh boy, I have to build me one of these!

Ever since I looked into vacuum tubes for my brief history of the IC chip I’ve been lusting after this clock. It’s made using nixie tubes, close cousins to the vacuum tubes that eventually led to the invention of the transistor and the development of the IC. Nixie tubes are the forerunners to LED displays, it’s basically a glass tube with a wire mesh anode and lots of cathodes, mainly shaped as numbers but you can get letter and symbol ones, you can see these in the broken tube below:

The tube is filled with a gas mixture like a regular lights bulb. When you power one of the cathodes (about 170volts worth) it makes it glow this beautiful soft orange colour. The main difference between vacuum tubes and nixie tubes is that the nixie tube is classed as a cold cathode tube, it rarly gets hotter than 40 °C where as vacuum tubes relied on (and here’s a cool technical term for you…) thermionic emissionof electrons from a heated cathode to work (really not gong to try and explain this one…).

Nixies were used to provide numeric displaysfor loads of early digital voltmeters, calculators and multimeters. They were also used in time displays for industry and military, even some lifts used them to display floor numbers. They were replaced by LEDs as these new comers were much smaller and stronger and required much lower voltages to work allowing them to be used with IC chips.

All is not lost however, nixies have such a cool aesthetic (being kind of retro in an obsolete tech kind of way) tons of people are buying all these unused tubes that have been sitting around for years and making them into amazing gorgeous digital clocks, date displays and even wrist watches!

I’ve found a couple of net tutorials so you never know… I might be posting my own clock at some point

The Modified Toy Orchestra

Lullabel — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:56:42 +0000

Just watched the Gadget Show and saw these guys, I can’t beleive that all they use are modded toys (Jason was cheating a little with the mixing desk and the ipad I feel )

Here’s a link to the performance http://fwd.five.tv/tags/gadget-orchestra/videos

Their website http://www.modifiedtoyorchestra.com/index.php

and a YouTube video explaining what they do…

I think a trip to the early learning centre is required…

The Most Useless Machine Ever

Lullabel — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:29:29 +0000

I don’t know why but I found this stupidly funny

Flying Penguins!

Lullabel — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:55:47 +0000

Just thought I’d share this as I think they are one of the coolest robotics developments out there:

AirPenguin – autonomously flying robotic penguins

With the AirPenguins, the engineers from Festo have created artificial penguins and have taught them “autonomous flight in the sea of air”. For this purpose, control and regulating technology had to be further developed into self-regulating biomechatronic systems, which could also play a future role in adaptive production.

A group of three autonomously flying penguins hovers freely through a defined air space that is monitored by ultrasound transmission stations. The penguins are at liberty to move within this space; a microcontroller gives them free will in order to explore it.

The bionic Fin Ray® structure, derived from the anatomy of a fish’s fin, was extended here for the first time to applications in three-dimensional space. If the 3D Fin Ray® structure of the head and tail sections is transferred to the requirements of automation technology, it can be used for instance in a flexible tripod with a very large scope of operation in comparison with conventional tripods.

Excerpt from http://www.festo.com/cms/en-gb_gb/10247.htm

Video from YouTube.com

This is not just a case of ‘cool, we made a flying penguin’ the tech involved in making the penguins so flexible can be applied in some really cool areas for example…

The Festo BionicTripod with FinGripper! (great name isn’t it)

This amazing piece of kit has taken the bionic Fin Ray® structure used in the flexible nose and tail sections of the AirPenguin and applied it to a versatile gripping device. It can grip varying irregularly shaped objects in direct sucession without needing calibration, as it is so flexible it can grip very delicate objects like the lightbulbs below. This has so many potential applications, areas that a delicate, complex grip is needed but the human hand can’t go, production lines that could produce differently shaped objects without needing a seperate peice of kit for each product. So cool.