Hasta La Gadget!

Vintage oscilloscopes are amazing devices. It turns out that they make great clocks too. It was around 1960, when Aaron’s grandfather purchased an Heathkit OR-1 oscilloscope, which he passed down in his family in excellent condition. Aaron later used his electronic hacking skills to turn the oscilloscope into a clock.

Turning an oscilloscope into a clock is no easy task. It takes some interesting control circuitry to get its display to show anything other than waveforms. So Aaron created a custom control board that can draw any shape on the CRT screen using just circles. It also squashes circles to draw a line, and cuts the beam entirely to slice a circle in half.

The end result looks spectacular and I bet you want one now. So do I. The good news is that Aaron sells custom-built oscilloscope clocks, as well as circuit boards for you to convert your own scope with. For more information, check out his website, Oscilloclock.com.

[via Hack A Day]

Sony Xperia Z gets a physical camera shutter button.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It Original content from Ubergizmo.

Colin Furze has a need for speed, and he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty in order to speed up stuff that normally doesn’t go more than a few miles an hour. That’s because they’re not supposed to exceed those speeds, but hey, tell than to Colin.

If his name sounds familiar or if you feel like you’ve seen him before, then maybe you already have since he’s the guy behind the baby stroller that can go as fast as 50mph.

This time around, Colin set his sights on a plain old bicycle.

When he was done with it, the bike had been completely transformed into a jet pulse bike. And because the previous owner of the bike was his friend’s mom named Norah, that’s what the bike has been named also.

The bike is elongated for two reasons: to fit the jet and to make sure that the cyclist doesn’t get burned while he’s on it. Colin explains: “Had I binned the pedals idea, yeah, it could have been shorter, but the heat this thing chucks of is intense, and at times I’ve struggled to turn a valve of 40 centimeters away from it, so sitting on top of it would need some sort of heat shield, and I think it would start to look less bicycle like.”

Because of this, Norah was cut and stretched by almost one meter. Check out the video above to see this insanely dangerous ride in action.

[via C|NET]

Sure, you love the HDR pictures coming from your point-and-shoot, smartphone or perhaps even your Glass. But what if you want to Hangout in HDR? An enterprising grad student from the University of Toronto named Tao Ai — under the tutelage of Steve Mann — has figured out how to shoot HDR video in real-time. The trick was accomplished using a Canon 60D DSLR running Magic Lantern firmware and an off-the-shelf video processing board with a field programmable gate array (FPGA), plus some custom software to process the video coming from the camera. It works by taking in a raw feed of alternatively under and over exposed video and storing it in a buffer, then processing the video on its way to a screen. What results is the virtually latency-free 480p resolution HDR video at 60 frames per second seen in our video after the break.

When we asked whether higher resolution and faster frame rate output is possible, we were told that the current limitations are the speed of the imaging chip on the board and the bandwidth of the memory buffer. The setup we saw utilized a relatively cheap $200 Digilent board with a Xilinx chip, but a 1080p version is in the works using a more expensive board and DDR3 memory. Of course, the current system is for research purposes only, but the technology can be applied in consumer devices — as long as they have an FPGA and offer open source firmware. So, should the OEM’s get with the program, we can have HDR moving pictures to go with our stationary ones.

Filed under: Cameras, HD

Comments

Aside from its functional uses, mirrors come in pretty handy when you’re trying to achieve some cool optical illusions. A good example of this is the classic infinite effect. It looks like a pretty complicated effect, but it’s easily achievable and only requires a mirror, glass, and a light source.

Employing this effect to create an uber cool computer desk is Redditor Jacks_RagingHormones. His setup makes it look like his keyboard is on the surface of an abyss that has no end, which is what makes it so awesome.

Want to try and do what Jack and his raging hormones did? Head over to Imgur for more details on the build.

[via Obvious Winner]