Hasta La Gadget!

Due to its lack of durability, it’s not often that gadgets are made out of paper. Sure, you might get the occasional cardboard boombox, but I can honestly say this is the first flashlight I’ve seen that’s made out of paper instead of plastic or metal.

The LiteLite produces a soft, diffused glow thanks to its paper light path. The flashlight comes as a flat-pack, pre-scored sheet of thick paper, which you can fold up and assemble into a square, tubular flashlight. Just fold it, attach the battery and LED, and wrap the rubber band around it to hold it together. The flashlight turns on when you squeeze the back part of the grip, and turns back off when you release it.

It’s a cool design, but there are obvious practical limitations to the LiteLite. You certainly wouldn’t want to use it outdoors – at least not on a rainy day, and it’s also quite expensive for what it is. Selling for $29.99 (USD), you could buy yourself a really nice MagLite for that price – and you wouldn’t have to worry about getting that one wet.

Every house needs lamps, and every lamp needs a home. A pretty sound statement, but I bet you’ll be surprised to hear that someone took this statement literally. Hence, the House-Lamp came to be.

What more can I say that the pictures don’t? Designed by Lauren Daley, House-Lamps are basically lamps shaped like houses. They also come optional task lights beside them to provide light, but they can stand alone as an accent piece too.

House-Lamps playfully draw on classic house forms and integrate the warmth of light to create a lamp like no other. Seeing a House-Lamp can remind one of homes once dwelled in, fond memories shared, and dreams to come.

House-Lamps are currently up for funding on Kickstarter, where a minimum pledge of $250(USD) will get you one of the lighted houses, and $275 will get you the version with the task lamp. Or if you just like the houses and want to support the project, a $25 pledge will get you an (unlighted) wooden kit that you can assemble yourself.

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.

We’ve seen connected light bulbs before, some more sophisticated than others, but they’re rarely as straightforward as GreenWave Reality’s just-shipping Connected Lighting Solution. Eco-friendly LED bulbs in the lineup include support for WiFi and are immediately controllable from a smartphone or tablet as soon as they’re receiving power. Basics controls like group presets and timed lighting are just the start; if you’re not worried about leaving anyone in the dark, the bulbs can respond to motion sensors and only illuminate the rooms that need attention. And while the intelligence isn’t new in itself, GreenWave would argue that sheer accessibility gives it an edge, with electric utilities in Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden skipping the retail middleman by selling directly. Don’t despair if you live in the US: the linked-up lighting is cleared for eventual use by Americans who’d like to save both energy and a trip to the light switch.

Continue reading GreenWave Reality ships WiFi-aware light bulbs that flick on through motion and smartphones

Filed under: Household

GreenWave Reality ships WiFi-aware light bulbs that flick on through motion and smartphones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Oct 2012 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yes, we’ll admit that we borrowed that pun in the title. MooresCloud founder Mark Pesce’s Xzibit reference is still a very apt description of the Light, his company’s Linux-based LED lamp. The Australian team’s box-shaped illumination runs the open OS (including a LAMP web server stack) on an integrated mini PC with an accelerometer and WiFi. The relative power and networking provide obvious advantages for home automation that we’ve seen elsewhere, but it’s the sheer flexibility of a generalized, web-oriented platform that makes the difference: the Light can change colors based on photos or movement, sync light pulses to music and exploit a myriad of other tricks that should result from a future, web-based app store. When and how the Light launches will depend on a Kickstarter campaign to raise $700,000 AUD ($717,621 US) starting on October 16th, although the $99 AUD ($101 US) cost is just low enough that we could see ourselves open-sourcing a little more of the living room. At least, as long as we don’t have to recompile our lamp kernel before some evening reading.

Continue reading MooresCloud Light runs Linux, puts LAMP on your lamp (video)

Filed under: Household

MooresCloud Light runs Linux, puts LAMP on your lamp (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Oct 2012 10:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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