Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve watched and enjoyed the program known as “The Good Doctor Who” in which an alien of some sort who flies around with his little, knobby robotic buddy (I’m not entirely clear on the details), you’ll be pleased to note that one fan, our own former employee Greg Kumparak, has built a real Tardis police box which, using some digital trickery, is really bigger on the inside.

Greg built his little Tardis around Thanksgiving and added a little light on top. Because he’s a Dr. Who fan, he found his device to be lacking in realism. He then programmed a 3D model of the inside of the Tardis – it looks like the inside of the Teletubby house – and added an augmented-reality element to make the room inside appear when you held up your smartphone. Bang: instant Tardis.

Greg quit working with us so he could start building things and this is one of his coolest little creations. I’m not a huge Dr. Who fan, but anyone who has enough love and intensity to build a cute little model and make it all the cooler is a good guy in my book. Now he just needs to make the Millennium Falcon from Star Trek.

Even though people haven’t been that hyped up about Google’s Project Glass of late, some technophiles still couldn’t wait and decided to hack together their own augmented reality eyewear. This particular design makes you look like some sort of space pirate.

Gregory McRoberts designed his augmented reality specs to look like an angry eyepatch. Apart from serving as a cool disguise for Halloween, it was designed as a aid for the visually impaired. Instead of an LCD screen to show information, the patch uses a simple set of glowing LEDs to translate temperature and distance information to the wearer, helping provide depth and safety cues to those without 3D vision.

A flashing green LED will blink faster or slower depending on whether an object is closer or farther away. Blue LEDs will shift to red if an object or a room is above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gregory also suggests that the device could be fitted with vibration motors to provide similar feedback to the totally blind.

[via Pinterest via Adafruit]

Eighty-nine years ago, Congress passed the 21st amendment and repealed Prohibition. The country breathed a collective, blind drunk sigh of relief. You can commemorate the presence of no sauce in the states by making some gin of your own, and you don’t even need a whole fancy distilling system. More »

Some of you will think this guy is the best dad ever, while others will think he is lazy. Personally I think he’s pretty awesome. Paul Wallich has entrusted a quadcopter to walk his son to the bus stop.

The quadcopter was keyed in to track a GPS beacon in his son’s backpack. This is high-tech parenting at its best. This flying drone can follow his child from a set distance and make sure the kid stays safe and out of trouble, while pop watches the remote video camera from the comfort of his computer screen.

Getting this device to follow his kid was the tricky part. An RFID solution would have required a bulkier antenna than the craft could really carry. So he used a navigation program that keeps the copter a set distance away from the GPS beacon it is following. This kid is hopefully pretty popular right now thanks to his dad’s inventiveness.

Now he just needs to rig it to fire projectiles at any bullies his son encounters on the way to school.

[via iEEE Spectrum via Geekosystem]

If you have a bunch of beer cans lying around and no money for Star Wars toys, you can always go on an alcohol-fueled toy creating bender. That’s presumably what happened here, since this X-Wing Fighter is made out of recycled beer cans. Though the end result doesn’t look like drunken art at all.

It was made by Tamás Kánya almost entirely from Kaiser beer cans and even has a little Astromech droid behind the cockpit. Forget making a run at the Death Star, make a beer run and see if you can make one of these yourself.

Pro Tip: Don’t drink and DIY at the same time. Always wait at least an hour afterwards – otherwise your creation will look like something from a Jawa salvage camp.

[via Obvious Winner]