Hasta La Gadget!

Have you ever wanted a watch you could hack to display whatever you wanted it to? With the advent of so-called “smartwatches,” rooting or hacking one isn’t going to be too far off. But if you can’t wait for this, then you should check out Solder: Time II. This DIY watch kit is hackable and programmable, which is interesting if you like fiddling around with stuff.

The Solder: Time II watch has a 7 × 20 LED matrix that can display time, scrolling text, and animations. There’s an alarm and stopwatch as well. The simple soldering required to assemble the watch should take users less than an hour to complete. In the worst case scenario, you can always find someone you know who can help you out. The Arudino-based programming interface is exposed at the back, and it’s ready to be hacked to display that Pac-Man or Space Invaders animation you always wanted on your wrist.

The Solder: Time II watch is available as a kit for $59 at the Maker Shed.

[via Make:]

In Soviet Russia, you carry the Helicarrier. But that’s all right, because just like the S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying fortress, this small remote-controlled replica made by a Russian RC enthusiast can also float and take to the sky.

The replica was made by RC Design forum member native18, the same guy who made the DeLorean quadrotor. Strangely enough, native18 also pointed out a very similar toy that was shown off at an RC airplane show way last February, except this one is literally an (RC) aircraft carrier:

Here’s native18′s Helicarrier in action:

Brush up on your Russian (or use Google Translate) and head to native18′s thread on RC Design for more details and images. Combine this with this and you have a winner.

[via Buzzfeed]

It’s not easy being a new father. Infants are so tiny and delicate that I’m scared to even look at them. So I totally understand why this guy went the extra mile to look after his new child. Before his daughter was even born, hacker and blogger Gjoci was working on putting together a breath detector from a Wiimote and three 1 milliwatt lasers.

He positioned them above the crib and it sets off an alarm anytime his daughter’s breathing seems to stop or becomes irregular. It sort of does look like an alien is abducting your child, but it works and gives him some peace of mind while she sleeps. And that is priceless.

A simple program asks the camera every couple of milliseconds whether the lights are still moving. If they are, then everything is good. As long as there’s a little bit of motion, the detector knows everything is just fine. Should anything bad should happen, an alarm sounds, alerting the parents immediately.

[via Hack A Day via Geekosystem]

Do you use an extra battery grip for your DSLR? Since they can be kind of bulky anyhow, Irish photographer Dave Hunt managed to squeeze a fully-functioning Raspberry Pi SBC inside his detachable battery grip, and programmed it so that it would push the images he takes to his iPad for easy viewing. Sounds pretty awesome to me.

It’s very useful to have a general purpose computer attached to your digital camera. The pros do it all the time when they do shoots indoors. This setup allows you to check out the photos you have just taken on a portable high resolution screen, an iPad. Dave managed to get this working for his Canon 5D Mark II camera, using the Raspberry Pi, a Wi-Fi dongle and  a Perl script to push the images.

In addition to sending images to the iPad, the on-board computer could be used for everything from remote operation, to rapid image format conversion, to automatically timing time-lapse sequences. If you’ve got the skills, and get  your hands on a Raspberry Pi, then you can the mod for yourself. Dave explains in detail how he went about his hack on his blog.

[via Make:]

Old consoles never die, they just get digitized. The Game Boy Color is one such system. You can find emulators of it running on PCs, Macs, PSPs, smartphones and even calculators. Here’s a GBC emulator for the cloud age: a JavaScript & HTML5 emulator that you can play on your browser.

The emulator was written by Software Engineering student Grant Galitz. Like most browser games, it doesn’t need you to install anything on your computer. It even has built-in games! You can also load .gb or .gbc files, although I wasn’t able to test that. I also don’t know how the emulator handles game saves.

Technically the emulator can run even on mobile browsers, but it was slow and unplayable on my iPad 2. Perhaps newer devices will fare better. Check out the emulator on Grant’s website before Nintendo falcon punches it down. You can also check out its source code at GitHub.

[via TechCrunch]