Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve featured a variety of rapid fire rubber band guns before, but they were either custom made or crazy expensive. XYZbot is here for us poor, lazy and non-mechanically-inclined folks. They launched a Kickstarter fundraiser for a fully automatic and electric rubber band machine gun that’s cheap and easy to assemble.

The gun is made of laser cut wood. All you need is a pair of pliers, a screwdriver and 30 minutes of your time to assemble the gun. Judging from the image and the video, you’ll need five AA batteries as well, which is a bummer. I suppose you can use rechargeable batteries to cut down on costs and waste. The gun only has one mode, rapid fire, which spews rubber bands at about 800 rounds per minute. You can only load 64 rubber bands at a time though. XYZbot said you can try loading two rubber bands per slot for a total of 128, but you’ll have to be more careful – and more patient – when loading.

Now comes the best part: a pledge of at least $49 (USD) on Kickstarter will be enough to get you a kit. You can also pledge at least $59 to get the gun in time for Christmas.

[via DudeIWantThat]

There are a lot of wall chargers and docks out there for iOS devices. A lot. So many. But it’s nice to see one that’s simple, portable, flexible, and smartly designed. It’s just sort of a relief. If you need this, here it is, and it’s 10 bucks. Done.

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As the old adage goes, “practice makes perfect.” I had a coach in high school that was fond of a different adage it went something like “perfect practice makes perfect”, because if you practice something incorrectly, you’ll learn it incorrectly. With that little fact in mind a company called Zepp Labs has unveiled a 3D motion sensor to help improve your game in three different sports.

The company behind the GolfSense swing sensor has announced Zepp Tennis, Zepp Baseball, and Zepp Golf – which all share the same sensor tech -designed to track statistics about your swing and help you learn where and how to improve. The sensor connects via Bluetooth to sports-specific applications running on a smartphone or tablet. The application is available for Android and iOS devices.

Each sensor has a mount specifically designed for the sport you’re playing and captures 1000 points of data per second when you swing. The sensor has an internal ARM procuessor, multiple motion sensors, and of storage for up to 200,000 swings depending on the sport. The sensors will be available next month for $149.99(USD) each.

[via Engadget]

There are huge number of headphones available on the market today running the gamut from dirt cheap to incredibly expensive. There are headphones aimed at everyone from users who don’t really care what the music sounds like all the way up to audiophiles who will pay huge money to hear every little nuance in their favorite tracks. One thing all of those headphones have in common is that the speaker drivers use moving parts.

A group of researchers have created a new type of headphone that uses a driver with no moving parts, based on carbon nanotubes. The headphones are able to create sound using thermoacoustic effect. That means that sound is created relying on the expansion and contraction of air.

It’s unclear at this point how high the quality of music these carbon nanotube speakers will be able to create. We don’t know if it will be an everyman headset or capable of creating audiophile grade sound.

We also don’t know how much headphones using carbon nanotubes will cost or when they might be available. However, early indications are that headphones using this technology could be reasonably priced, since they could be produced using techniques similar to those used to create computer chips.

[via Chemical and Engineering News via HotHardware]

E-coli outbreaks crop up every now and then. Some are more widespread then others, but if they’re related to food and especially if that food may have crossed state lines, the FDA starts tracing to find the source. If foodborne bacteria cause an outbreak in the U.S. today, though, the FDA won’t do anything. Because the FDA is closed.

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