Hasta La Gadget!

Earlier this month we saw a car with a joystick shift lever. It looks cool, but it doesn’t have any additional function. Ford engineer Zachary Nelson made a more high-tech shift lever mod that’s geared towards newbie drivers. It’s a shift knob that vibrates to tell you when to shift gears.

The shift knob is based on the Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller. Using an Android app and the OpenXC Vehicle Interface, the knob “monitors the vehicle’s speed, RPM and accelerator pedal position. Based on this information, the application calculates and then indicates to the driver when he or she should shift by vibrating the shift knob.” Additionally, the knob can be set to prioritize speed or fuel economy. Zach used a motor from an Xbox 360 controller to make the knob vibrate and then designed and 3D printed the knob’s case. It was then installed onto the manual shift lever from a Ford Mustang.

Start your browser’s engine and head to OpenXC to find out how to make a vibrating shift knob. Or not.

[via Wired via Gearfuse]

If you liked Benjamin Berg’s glitch art throw pillows, check out Phillip Stearn’s Glitch Textiles. With the help of professional knitters and weavers, Stearns turns patterns generated from broken digital cameras and binary files into blankets and tapestries.

According to Fast Co. Design, Stearns makes the patterns by rewiring digital cameras and by “custom-made data visualization software, which translates raw binary data into images.” 

This must be extremely embarrassing for computers. You can buy knitted and woven blankets and tapestries from Glitch Textiles for $250-$350 (USD). And when the robot uprising commences, you will be one of the first to go.

[via Fast Co. Design]

Tired? Sleepy? Then take a nap whenever and wherever you want to with NapAnywhere. It’s not the first take-anywhere pillow in the market (remember the Ostrich pillow?), but it’s more user-friendly and portable compared to some alternatives.

So what is NapAnywhere? It’s a head-support pillow that gives you the right amount of support when you’re sleeping in an upright position. It was created by a physician, combining engineering, architecture, and even a little bit of origami into the final design. Most people use U-shaped pillows as their headrest when they’re sleeping on the go, but if you’ve tried taking a half-hour nap on those things, then you probably already know how uncomfortable they can be.

The NapAnywhere flattens into a disc for easy storage when it’s not in use. When you want to take a nap, just unfold and it’s ready to use. NapAnywhere just hit its goal on Kickstarter, so it will be going into production.

Would you drink your sweat? Obviously, we’d all choose to drink water if we had a choice. But if there’s no clean water, would you drink sweat instead?

The Sweat Machine was created by engineer Andreas Hammar upon the request of Unicef.

It essentially purifies human sweat to turn it into drinking water. It’s not being used as a tool to tackle water shortages, but as a means to raise awareness on the issue.

Unicef recently brought out the machine to offer a glass of fresh sweat to visitors and footballers at last week’s Gothia Cup soccer tournament.

The Sweat Machine uses water filtration technology called Membrane Distillation that was developed by HVR and The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It uses a plastic cassette where the sweat to be filtered is heated into vapor and made to circulate between two membranes. This separates non-volatile substances effectively.

Hammar explained that a sweaty t-shirt can provide about 10ml of water, or just about a mouthful. Just think of how many sweaty shirts you’d need for a full glass of water.

[via Gizmag]

PopCap’s tower defense game Plants vs. Zombies is available on pretty much every modern gaming device, from PCs to smartphones. And it’s also on at least one classic console: the Sega Genesis aka the Mega Drive. The Penny-Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera stumbled upon this 16-bit curio at PAX Australia.

Image by Ben Kuchera

Unsurprisingly, the port is an unofficial and illegal game. Dave Cudrev of Retrospekt bought a copy of the game on eBay for around $30 (USD) from a Russian coder. YouTuber Stepan V, whose video of the game appears below, was also able to snag one from an “underground retro video game market” in Russia. The game’s graphics have taken a considerable hit, plus it’s in Russian, but otherwise it seems to be the same as the original game.

It would be hilarious if it got DLC via the Mega-CD.

[via The PA Report]