Hasta La Gadget!

High quality microscopes cost thousands of dollars and can be hard to operate and maintain. A group of researchers from Stanford University are close to changing that with a microscope that’s made mostly out of paper and costs less than a dollar to make.

The Foldscope was conceptualized by Jim Cybulski, James Clements and Asst. Prof. Manu Prakash. They were moved to develop the revolutionary microscope because they wanted to speed up the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases in developing countries. In his recent TED presentation, Asst. Prof. Prakash said that right now it can take months for patients in developing countries to get diagnosed and treated partly because microscopes are bulky, hard to maintain and expensive to acquire . So they set out to design a microscope that’s portable, easy to operate and can be mass produced at low costs. It looks like they succeeded.

In their paper, Jim, James and Asst. Prof. Prakash. said that the Foldscope can provide a magnification of up to 2,000X depending on the lens used. All of its components can be packed on a single sheet of card stock, which can also serve as an instruction manual.  Foldscope is also resistant to impact and water. It’s so small that you can carry multiple Foldscopes in your pocket. The only part of the microscope that needs electricity is an LED, which can last over 50 hours on a button cell battery. Best of all, it only costs between $0.58 to $0.97 to make. Below is Asst. Prof. Prakash’ TED presentation about the Foldscope:

How amazing is that? A copy of Jim, James and Asst. Prof. Prakash’s paper is available from the Cornell University Library archive. If you want to get your hands on one, head to the Foldscope team’s website and apply to become one of the their 10,000 beta testers.

[via Wired via Reddit]

The folks at PiFace – makers of hardware interfaces for the Raspberry Pi – wanted to make a camera rig that could create the bullet time effect popularized by The Matrix, but they didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on cameras. Naturally their first instinct was to see if they could use the Raspberry Pi to make a cheaper alternative. To their surprise, their idea worked!

PiFace calls its rig the Frozen Raspberry Pi or Frozen Pi. It consists of 48 Raspberry Pis each with a Raspberry Pi Camera and a PiFace Control and Display interface, all mounted on a laser-cut wood frame. The computers are networked via Ethernet so they can be simultaneously triggered remotely and so that the pictures they take can be sent to a single computer. PiFace wrote a Python script to collect the pictures and arrange them in order. Skip to around 2:17 in the video below to see the rig in action and people in inaction.

Slow down time and head to the PiFace blog to find out more about how they made the Frozen Pi.

[via MAKE]

Mobile devices let us look up practically anything we want to know about anywhere and anytime, but there’s nothing like looking at the real deal. Relics and artifacts invoke a sense of wonder and fire up our imagination. Product designer Hans Fex thought of a brilliant way for us to experience that spark anytime and anywhere with his Mini Museums.

Hans says he’s wanted to make the Mini Museum since he was seven years-old. He got the idea from his father, a research scientist. In 1970 the elder Fex brought his son some artifacts that he embedded in clear resin, perhaps to protect them from his child’s curious and unsteady hands.

Now in his forties, Hans has gathered 33 very rare specimens that he’s chopping into tiny bits to share with you. These include a meteorite from the Moon, a T-rex tooth and even a 4,568,200-year old object, the oldest piece of matter ever collected.

Help Hans feed his growing beard. Pledge at least $99 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a Mini Museum as a reward. Pledge at least $230 if you want to get the Mini Museum that has all 33 specimens.

[via NOTCOT]

Here’s another computer looking for a dumb terminal to mate with. Like the ICE xPC, Tango crams in the main components of a computer into a palm-sized case. It also uses a dock to connect to an HDMI display and other peripherals.

Tango has a 2GHz quad-core AMD A6-5200 CPU with an integrated Radeon HD 8400 GPU. It can have between 2GB to 8GB RAM as well as a 32GB to 512GB SSD. Like the ICE xPC, Tango can be loaded with pretty much any desktop operating system.

Unlike ICE xPC, Tango keeps it simple and only has one dock. That dock has an HDMI port, three USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, an Ethernet jack and a Wi-Fi adapter. The dock of course needs to be plugged into an outlet for the whole setup to work.

Pledge at least $349 (USD) on Indiegogo to get a Tango PC and a docking station as a reward; there are also separate pledges for additional docking stations.

I still don’t think that this is the best solution to portable computing on a budget. Yes, it has decent specs and is quite cheap, but it’s clunky and messy. You’ll need multiple docks, keyboards, mice and a whole lot of cables for it to be worth it. Windows 8.1 tablets like the ASUS Transformer Book T100, the Dell Venue 11 Pro and the new ThinkPad 8 are more useful than the Tango, but they also cost more and run only Windows. Chromebooks are cheap and come with a keyboard and screen but they might not have access to the programs you need. I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

A small robotics company called UFactory is working on the uArm, a small version of the industrial robot arms we often see tirelessly moving about in modern manufacturing assembly lines. The uArm is about the size of a desk lamp and is controlled through an Arduino-compatible board.

The current build of the uArm is made largely out of laser cut wood or acrylic and uses four off-the-shelf servo motors. It also has three different “hands”: a gripper, a suction cup and a small circular platform.

uFactory currently has a Windows program that lets you control the robot through a mouse or a keyboard. They’re currently working on Android and iOS apps too.

The company also wrote an Arduino library for uArm, so if you’re familiar with the language you can program the robot through that as well.

uFactory promises to make its design files, hardware and software open source after its Kickstarter campaign ends.

Pledge at least $185 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a uArm assembly kit as a reward. I’m waiting for Iron Man fans to reenact this scene with their armored pets.

[via Gadgetify]