Hasta La Gadget!

Hey there maker. Have you run out of toys to tinker with? Have you refurbished all of the gizmos in your local junk shop? Have you written programs to automate every appliance in your house? Chris Novello has something that should keep you occupied for a long time. It’s called Illucia, and it lets you mess stuff up.

Illucia is a patch bay controller that lets you manipulate software using various electronic devices and even other software. It does this through Open Sound Control (OSC) and an array of jacks that can serve as input or output. Check out the controller’s user guide for more on how it works.

Here’s Chris breaking Super Mario Bros. by using the Illucia and a multitouch music instrument called the Soundplane:

Here Chris controls The Legend of Zelda through Super Mario Bros., manually triggering events in the latter that in turn trigger events in the former:

You can find more of Chris’ demo videos on his Vimeo page. Chris made Illucia fully open source – he posted all of the necessary build information on GitHub – but he also made 19 units by hand, 13 of which have been sold as of this writing. You can buy one from the Illucia website for $495 (USD).

[via Illucia via PSFK]

…or at least try to do so. The electronics repair specialists at iFixit put together a set of tools that will help you dust off and possibly even repair a variety of gadgets. It comes with spudgers, tweezers, cleaning swabs, and most importantly a 28-bit driver set that works with a variety of screw heads and sizes.

ThinkGeek says you can use the Refurbisher’s Toolkit to open up and clean practically any console. That includes the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, as well as Nintendo and Sony handheld systems. The kit should also come in handy with some smartphones, laptops and desktop computers.

You can order the Refurbisher’s Toolkit from ThinkGeek for $100 (USD), $20 off its selling price on the iFixit store.

[via Boing Boing]

Aside from being very strong and rigid, carbon fiber is also a very good conductor of electricity. Hack A Day Projects member Shenzhen took advantage of the wonder material’s property to make an electroshock-proof coat.

Shenzhen simply stuck strips of carbon fiber tape under the lining of his coat using iron-on hem tape.

Because carbon fiber is more conductive than human skin, the current from the taser will flow through the tape.

Because it’s just a matter of sticking carbon fiber strips, you can actually do this to practically any piece of clothing. Shenzhen also used carbon fiber tape to make heated clothing, although that mod is a bit trickier and requires a power source to work.

[Hack A Day Projects via Hack A Day]

If I had to fight off hordes of zombies, I’d want a good car that could quickly escape, and could also keep me out of harm’s way from the biters. And while the forecast has yet to be cloudy with a chance of walkers, it’s still never too early to prepare for our eventual demise at the hands of these mutants. These guys in Russia seem to have a good head start.

This insane vehicle apparently started out as a Nissan Maxima, but with a little nip here and tuck there in some 3D modeling software – and a whole lot of metal bending and welding, it sure doesn’t look like a Nissan anymore. Actually, if you stand back and squint really hard, it looks kind of like a massive VW Beetle.

Those giant tires and its 1.7 ton curb weight should be perfect for driving over mounds of zombies lining the road, if not right over piles of abandoned vehicles on the roads.

The vehicle was posted for sale for 1.5 million rubles (~$41,689 USD) last year, but I don’t know if it ever sold. Guess I’ll just have to build my own.

[via English Russia via SPLOID]

Netflix recently held a Hack Day for its engineers to come up with tweaks to the popular streaming video service. Even though the activity was made primarily for fun, one of the resulting hacks is quite promising: a hack that uses information from a Fitbit to detect when you fall asleep and then pauses the video in response. It could give lazy people a reason to buy a fitness tracker.

Made by Sam Horner, Rachel Nordman, Arlene Aficial, Sam Park and Bogdan Ciuca, the Sleep Tracker not only pauses the video but also makes a bookmark of that point. And then it’ll report the boring video to Netflix. Just kidding. It should though.

Netflix makes no guarantee that the hack will make it into their software, specially since not everyone has a Fitbit or fitness tracker in general. But wouldn’t it be nice if all displays had this technology built in? Check out the Netflix blog to see more hacks from their engineers.

[via TechCrunch]