Hasta La Gadget!

Moritz Simon Geist has an unusual name. He’s also a electronic musician who has been getting bored with the production of electronic music, probably because the technology has reached a stage when you can call up practically any instrument with virtually no effort. So he decided to make a drum machine that plays samples in real-time, using actual drums. And robots.

Geist decided to emulate the legendary Roland TR-808, the drum machine that kickstarted the careers of many artists, despite – or is it because of? – the fact that it doesn’t sound like any real drum kit. The TR-808 uses analog circuits to create its sounds, but Geist’s installation replicates these sounds physically via percussion instruments, hence the name Mechanical Replica-808, or MR-808. The real kicker here is that Geist doesn’t play the instruments himself; he built robots that he triggers with the help of an Arduino microcontroller and Ableton, a music software. Then he housed the robots in an oversized case that resembles the TR-808.

Now that’s a high tech emulation of a low tech gadget. Check out Geist’s blog for more details on his creation.

[via Hack A Day]

A few weeks back we mentioned a customized Kia Optima SX Limited done in partnership between Kia and DC Entertainment in a Batman theme. I don’t think a billionaire/playboy/superhero would be seen cruising around in a Kia personally. Still the Batman car was pretty cool.

Kia has now unveiled four more super hero themed customized cars at SEMA 2012. The other four cars are styled after other core members of the Justice League include the Flash Forte Koup, Aquaman Rio 5-door, Cyborg Forte 5-door, and Green Lantern Soul. All four of the new cars have customized exteriors with cues from the superheroes outfits as well as customized interiors.

Most of the cars were done in cooperation with West Coast Customs, with help from RIDES and Super Street for others. All five customized superhero vehicles are on display in Las Vegas right now. I guess this will reveal my comic book ineptitude – but I’ve never even heard of Cyborg. I hear there’s a Wonder Woman car somewhere in that picture parked next to her jet. I can totally imagine Doctor Sheldon Cooper cruising the streets in the Flash Forte Koupe, even though he doesn’t like to drive.

Light painting can be a pretty awesome technique, which involves the capture of a moving light source, using long-exposure photography. Photographers have created some pretty amazing images using the medium, but it can be complicated to pull off unless you know exactly what you’re doing, and have a camera with full manual exposure controls. Now the fine folks at Japan’s Takara Tomy Arts have released a little gadget and app combo which makes it easy for anyone with an iPhone or iPad to make their own light paintings.

This little penlight gadget, thats name roughly translates to “Oekaki: The Night Sky” provides a bright, point source of light, and works with a companion iOS app to let you record long-exposure images. Simply start up the app, place your phone in the included base (or stand up your iPad), and start drawing in space. The penlight itself lets you choose from combinations of cyan, magenta or yellow light in 8 levels each, providing for a total of 27 colors for your images, and you can shoot either stills or time-lapse video with the app.

You can check out the app and pen in action in this clip (though it is in Japanese, it’s pretty easy to follow), or you can download the app itself for free here – though you’ll really want to have the light pen or a good point light source to make it work. I tried it out with a laser pointer aimed at the wall and it worked pretty well.

The app and light pen combo makes it shockingly easy to create light paintings. While the gadget was designed for Japanese markets, you can pre-order one for worldwide shipment over at Gizmine now for $69.99 (USD) with an estimated ship date of November 20th.

As you know, we love our LEGO around here. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, my faith in the creativity of humankind is restored by yet another LEGO build. This particular construction was inspired by the Mexican tradition of Dia de los Muerto, or The Day of the Dead.

LEGO-maniac Brickbaron created this bright and colorful scene of a fun house, loaded with happy (and somewhat terrified) minifigs as they make their way in and out of the FunHaus (which, coincidentally isn’t Spanish at all).

It’s embellished with skulls and a facade loaded with eyeballs and chompy teeth to lure you in. It’s also got an awesome moving scene in the middle, which you can check out in the video clip below:

Brickbaron also says the scene was highly influenced by the works of artist Pooch, and I suggest that you check out his website for some cool and unusual paintings. Be sure to check out the hi-res images of FunHaus over on Flickr too.

[via Brothers Brick]

If you’re a fan of Mega Man (or Rockman if you live in Japan), then you’ll definitely want to put down your NES controller long enough to grab this set of cool and bubbly Mega Man Bobble Buddies.

These 3.5-inch-tall bobble heads capture the spirit some of my favorite Mega Man characters, including Elec Man, Proto Man, Guts Man and of course, Mega Man himself. Now they need to make a Sniper Joe bobble head to go with. You can pre-order them over at Entertainment Earth for $34.99(USD) for the complete set of four, and they ship this November.

On a totally unrelated note, have there ever been Bubble Bobble bobble heads? There really should be.

[via GeekAlerts]