Hasta La Gadget!

If you have $400 and a serious case of nostalgic yearning, may we then suggest you spend the money on a wonderful USBTypewriter? Described as a “groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence,” the typewriter can hook up to any machine with a USB port and lets you clickety-clack your way through your latest novel, e-mail or even spreadsheet.

The Typewriter Dock, seen in the video above, is an even better version. It holds an iPad in its carriage whilst simultaneously inputting typed letters. All it needs is a Bluetooth component to replace the cable, and a writing app that can use the accelerometer to detect a carriage return and move you to a new line. Ding!

UPDATE: Creator Jack Zylkin emailed to say that the USBTypewriter can detect carriage returns all by itself using a magnetic sensor.

Inside there is a sensor strip under the keyboard which detects the key-presses that hit it, and this pulse of electricity is then passed on to an Arduino circuit-board, whereupon it is translated into a standard USB key-down event. All you need to do is plug it in and type.

$400 buys you a pre-modded typewriter, but Jack Zylkin, the man behind the USBTypewriter, will sell you the electronics to make your own for just $75, or you can send him your typewriter and have him fix it up for you. For true geeks, the design can be had for free under a Creative Commons license, and you can roll your own from scratch.

For those who really love typing on a typewriter, this seems to actually be better than paper: you no longer have to retype whole pages, and white-out will be a thing of the past. For everyone else, using one of these for a few minutes will be a reminder of just why books used to be so much shorter than the word-processed novels of today.

USBTypewriter product page
[USBTypewriter via Etsy]

See Also:

• Steampunk Keyboard MkII: Now with Built to Order Option
• iPad Keyboard: Pricey and Awkward, But a Must-Have for Productivity

Sprint and Verizon may have shunned the Nexus One, but that doesn’t mean the handsets can’t be put to good use: these Android-controlled, Arduino-powered Cellbots now feature the one true Googlephone as the CPU. At Intel’s 2010 International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, we got our hot little hands on the DIY truckbots for the first time, and found to our surprise they’d been imbued with accelerometer-based motion control. Grabbing a Nexus One off a nearby table, we simply tilted the handset forward, back, left and right to make the Cellbot wheel about accordingly, bumping playfully into neighbors and streaming live video the whole time. We were told the first handset wirelessly relayed instructions to the second using Google Chat, after which point a Python script determined the bot’s compass facing and activated Arduino-rigged motors via Bluetooth, but the real takeaway here is that robots never fail to amuse. Watch our phone-skewing, bot-driving antics in a video after the break, and see what we mean.

Continue reading Cellbots get Nexus One upgrade, ad-hoc motion control (video)

Cellbots get Nexus One upgrade, ad-hoc motion control (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 May 2010 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Arduino-powered clothing is nothing new; we’ve seen CO2-detecting dresses, compass belts and inbox-checking T-shirts all within the last six months. But this Ping social networking garment concept is not quite the same thing. Where those were DIY projects with a single-function, Ping is the brainchild of a professional UI designer… and the fabric itself is a social network UI that registers your movements as attempts to communicate. Woven with flexible sensors and conductive threads connected to an Arduino Lilypad and Xbee, clothing made from the fabric can detect when you lift a hood or tie a ribbon and wirelessly send Facebook status updates accordingly — or tap you on the shoulder in a number of different rhythms so you know not only when, but who might be trying to get in touch. Designer Jennifer Darmour imagines a future in which clothing offers full-body 3D gesture recognition and senses our environment. When we can reliably use it to control our computers, we hope she’ll get in touch.

With ‘Ping’ clothing, status updates literally tap you on the shoulder originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading T-shirt modded to let you know when you have new emails, won’t tell you why your friends are avoiding you

T-shirt modded to let you know when you have new emails, won’t tell you why your friends are avoiding you originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080p TV, yet Carnegie Mellon student Chloe Fan has blown our minds by showing that you only need 64 of them to have a little fun with Super Mario Bros. She wired an Arduino to an 8 x 8 LED matrix through a breadboard, then scaled the first level of the game down to a resolution that makes the 160 x 144 resolution Game Boy look positively high def. The controls are similarly simplified: one button to move Mario (the slightly more orange dot) right, and a second to jump. She also wired up a separate board to play the game’s theme song, as you can see in the embed below, but be aware: the video ends before the theme song does, meaning you’ll be humming it to yourself all day long.

Continue reading Carnegie Mellon student shows that 64 pixels is enough for Mario (video)

Carnegie Mellon student shows that 64 pixels is enough for Mario (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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