Hasta La Gadget!

Citizens of Portland, unite: a do-it-yourself construct-it-yourself camera by the name of Konstruktor has been shown to the public via the photography collective and movement called Lomography. The folks at Lomographische AG have brought on a new machine that stems from the original love of old camera technologies, creating in the end a 35mm SLR

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When you work in an office, sending emails all day long can be tedious and boring. Sometimes, you just want to rock out and play your guitar. Well, now you can do both thanks to David Neevel’s email guitar.

Emails and memos are boring as hell. Get your typing done while shredding on your axe. Brilliant. The email guitar is a musical keyboard device that takes the boring out of the job and lets you type by hitting notes. Each guitar stroke translates into certain computer keyboard letters.

Of course Neevel had to attach several electronic components – including a MIDI translator, an Arduino, a number of relays and the USB interface from a keyboard – to the guitar to make it work and translate the feeds from the guitar to the computer. Thanks to all of the relays, it even sounds a bit like a mechanical keyboard.

I wonder what Smoke on the Water would type? It’s the only song I know how to play – and it sounds nothing like the song when I do.

[via Trendhunter]

As a lover of all things mechanical, I’m in awe of Chris Fenton’s Entabulator. Using an old book about mechanical loom-making, a 3D printer and some serious patience, he engineered a computer that can read a program off of punch cards and, in this case, calculate the Fibonacci sequence. The machine runs using a hand crank (Fenton notes you can overclock it by cranking faster), and it is quite finicky but also quite beautiful in its own way.

Obviously the world doesn’t need this Entabulator. It is so wildly impractical that it’s almost ludicrous, and the usability is limited (at least in this iteration). But isn’t it great that it exists? I’ve been messing around with 3D printers for most of this year and I’ve found a great deal of joy in wresting the means of production from Big Plastic by mass producing little parts and trinkets (this is my new business card) but I’ve also come to understand the real value of 3D printing.

In short, these things allow us to create what we can imagine. Whereas a few years ago, building something like this out of wood and metal required a different set of skills and tools, now you can build most of it online and “build” it in a few hours. It allows for hacking in a very real sense — the consequences of failure are almost nil when you use these tools as compared to situations where a builder has to work in less forgiving materials.

The Entabulator, while beautiful, is more important as an artifact of a post digital age when machines can beget machines. It’s actually quite thrilling.

You can download the project here and build one yourself. Because it’s programmable, you can entabulate all sorts of stuff — a dubious but exciting prospect, to be sure.

We’ve seen all kinds of Stormtrooper get-ups, but how about a Sound Trooper? This project by Unbox Therapy is just that. This crazy suit that features 20 JBL Micro 2 speakers attached to a hockey shoulder pad using industrial strength Velcro.

It turns the wearer into a walking speaker fit to broadcast Imperial propaganda or just some cool tunes. The Imperial March is of course best. The JBL Micro 2s are daisy-chained together and connected to a Nexus 4 for sound input. Watch the entire video below if you want to see the build process, or skip to 3:45 to see and hear it in action.

This thing will definitely get you noticed on the street as evidenced above. This is an awesome project. You are your own soundtrack.

[via Damn Geeky]

The concept of personal 3D printers has spread like wildfire, and Michigan Tech wants to make sure that the first things that people think of when the innovative product making platform is mentioned include harmony, joy and other peaceful goodies.