Hasta La Gadget!

Living spaces are getting smaller and smaller unless you can afford to pay the premium for a larger apartment. It makes sense to only have essential furniture at home, since they’re bulky and will give your flat a cramped feeling if you’ve got too much of them.

Cue the Bloc’d Sofa, which turns into a whole host of furniture options, depending on what you need at the moment.

First and foremost, it’s a sofa with cube cushions. If you want a flatter sofa or a bed of sorts for a quick nap, then all you need to do is rearrange the cushions this way and that to form the final arrangement of your choice.

Bloc’d Sofa was designed by Scott Jones, who explains that his goal behind the piece was “to try to understand why we hold on to some objects, while we discard others.”

Scott adds that Bloc’d started out as “a pile of discarded furniture I [Jones] walked past on an NYC sidewalk.” He is currently looking for a manufacturer for Bloc’d but is currently accepting individual orders on his site.

[via Gizmag]

LEGO toys aren’t just for kids so it makes sense that LEGO watches wouldn’t be just for kids either. The company has introduced a line of watches specifically for adults. The LEGO watch collection for men and women will be launched in November and be called the LEGO Watch System.

The watches are completely customizable with the ability to swap bracelets, bezels and watch faces. So basically they will be just as fun as LEGO sets. Some of the watch models include: LEGO happiness, LEGO Skull and LEGO brick skull.

Some watches have day/date combination, chronograph, and calendar. The Lego watches will come in digital and analog models in a wide variety of color options. Some watches in the collection are made of plastic body and some are made partially from aluminum or steel.

The watches are water resistant from 50 meters to 100 meters depending on the model you pick, and they will sell for $85-$185 (USD). Hit A Blog to Watch for more shots of these cool watches.

[via A Blog to Watch via Gizmodo]

An LED Matrix Display is a very affordable and versatile tool for showing information. But Stephen Wylie and Stacy Devino made an even more affordable and useful version of it. They call it LEDgoes, a display that you can expand by snapping modules together like LEGO.

Each module measures 1.5″ x 2″ and has 35 LEDs that can display red, green or yello. You can connect boards in real-time and even stack up to two rows as one. They also each have two ATMega microcontrollers as well as 26 hackable GPIO pins.

Out of the box, you can type a message to display on your LEDgoes using a PC or mobile device, or you can sync it to a Twitter or RSS feed. But because they’re ready to be hacked, you can make your own apps and display whatever you want on them.

Pledge at least $29 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a LEDgoes kit with two small display panels as a reward.

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.

Everybody loves robots, but the initial ardor for building one can quickly be snuffed out by the complex reality of actually programming it to do anything. That’s where Linkbot comes in, a new project from the Barobo team that brought us the Mobot. It’s designed as a modular system that can be expanded infinitely with accessories like a camera mount, gripper, and wheels, thanks to three separate mounting surfaces — which also have standard #6-32 screw attachment holes on the mounting plate to attach personality-enhancing cutouts. Despite the expansion potential, though, it can still be used right out of the box to do robotics without touching a lick of code. That’s thanks to several built-in modes like BumpConnect, which permits wireless connections between the modules by touching them together; and PoseTeach, to program complex motions by hand in a similar (but less time-consuming) manner to stop-motion animation techniques.

For those who want to step it up a notch, the system lets you go far past basic mech fun. The Linkbot itself has two rotating hubs with absolute encoding, along with an accelerometer, buzzer, multicolored LCD and ZigBee wireless system with a 100m line-of-sight range. There are also optional breakout and Bluetooth boards to connect sensors like range finders, IR proximity sensors, photo detectors and thermostats. The outfit’s BaroboLink software for Mac, PC or Linux is included to program the Arduino-compatible bot in several languages as well, and can even translate previously created PoseTeach motions into computer routines. So far, the company has created working prototypes and even shipped them to local schools, so if you’re interested, you can pledge a minimum $129 toward the company’s $40,000 target to grab one. That’ll net you a Linkbot, two wheels, the BaroboLink software, access to the MyBarobo community — and hopefully a jolt to your robotics confidence.

Filed under: Robots

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Source: Kickstarter

If you live with other people, then you know how difficult it is to get some privacy sometimes. People barging in your room, people barging into you while you’re in the shower (hopefully, unintentionally), and people walking past you every other minute while you’re in the den.

The good news is that you can get a little bit of privacy – even just a little – by getting furniture like the Abri-Boca Living Pod.

You can’t exactly live in it, but you will be able to do stuff like take naps, read, or work on your laptop in relative peace. It provides you with an extra dome-like barrier that should tell people that you want them to leave you alone when it’s up. And when you’re ready to join the rest of the world again, just push the dome down and carry on.

The Abri-Boca Living Pod was designed by Philipp Sussmann. It was recently on display at the ‘Meet My Project‘ exhibition during Milan design week.

[via designboom]