Hasta La Gadget!

I guess that balloons and airships are in, because they are popping up everywhere. I remember one year, there was even a personal balloon with a rotor available for $10,000 in the American Express rewards catalog. This project takes personal ballooning a step further because it’s solar-powered and you can make it yourself.

This balloon is the brainchild of Argentinian artist Tomàs Saraceno. It’s called 59 Steps to Be on Air by Sun Power and is an exploration of architecture, art, and physics. The project is presented as a set of instructions that are supposed to be used as a sequence for creating a hot-air balloon-style flying device, which uses solar power.

The materials used to build your own are garbage bags, transparent tape, rope, bicycle wheels, and various bits of “flotsam and jetsam” to make the structure. You can download the steps here [PDF]. It takes about 24 hours to complete the project, if two people are working on it. You’ll probably want to have a friend around anyhow to make sure that you don’t float away.

[via designboom]

At the 2013 Tokyo Gift Show, Takara Tomy unveiled a toy that’s at the cusp of being practical. The company calls it the Automee S, a tiny disk-shaped robot designed to clean the touchscreens on mobile devices. iRobot has nothing to worry about for now.

While the Roomba has brushes and a vacuum motor, the AutoMee S does its job using tiny cleaning pads. It also has sensors that detect edges and help it clean a screen evenly. According to Newlaunches, the Automee S can clean a tablet’s screen in about 8 minutes, which is depressingly long for a cleaning robot, but is just an endearing affectation for a toy. Here’s a short video about the Automee S uploaded by Robots Dreams:

The Automee S will go on sale in Japan on March for ¥1,575 (~$17 USD). It’s so stupid. I want one.

[via Newlaunches via The Verge]

The U.S. government said ‘no’ to a petition signed by thousands of people asking for the construction of an actual Death Star. Not to be deterred, another group of concerned citizens have taken to the internet to raise funds to build the massive structure themselves.

It’s called the Open Source Death Star project and it’s currently up for funding on Kickstarter. The goal? A massive £20,000,000 (~$31.4 million USD). But that money won’t go toward building the actual thing; rather, it’s going to be used to come up with “more detailed plans and enough chicken wire to protect reactor exhaust ports.”

Yeah, okay.

The stretch goal is $850,000,000,000,000,000, which is the amount required to build the Death Star, as per the estimates of the U.S. government.

That circle above? That’s no ordinary circle, since that’s the “initial design” posted on the Kickstarter page for everyone’s reference.

Funnily enough, the project has raised over £191,000 (~$300,000 USD) so far. It’s clearly a joke, as the project’s creators have indicated on their project page under ‘Risks and Challenges’: “The main challenge is assuring Kickstarter that this is a joke and not a serious project. As proof, the goal has been set high enough to make successful funding almost impossible.”

Of course, if the project should reach actually its goal, they’re gonna have a whopper of a challenge on their hands.

[via Bit Rebels]

There are plenty of ways to secure your ahem naughty files, from using hidden folders and strange names, but if you’re really paranoid, you might have to do even more. The PE Secure Hard Drive takes securing your files to the next level, going beyond password and encryption technologies.

Jae-Hoon Lee designed this hard drive enclosure and it was designed to protect the hardware itself from getting into the wrong hands. It was inspired by “old school” security like padlocks and combination locks. The PE External Hard Drive will secure your data by toughening the hardware itself. The device would add a physical combination lock, partnered with an app, that will increase the security of your data.

For now, this hard drive is just a concept, but I could definitely see something like this being made.

[via Yanko Design]

A while back we saw some innovative bandages which could be adjusted to fit a variety of wounds and skin colors. While these were great for carrying around in your bag, they might not fit each and every injury with precision. That’s where the Band-Aid Printer comes in.

This conceptual gadget is designed for use in hospitals and first aid rooms, and would automatically print custom bandages based on the specific needs of the patient. It’s designers Han Like, Liu Peng, Ren Mingjun, Wei Chenjie, Yang Xiao and Liu Peng of EVENdesign say that it would be a “quasi-3D printer”, but to me it looks more like some sort of custom vinyl cutter.

Another innovation of the Band-Aid printer would be the ability to alter the pigment of the bandages to blend in with the skin tone of the patient. The concept model shown here would print small bandages, but there’s no reason the concept couldn’t be applied to a larger format printer as well.

Like many cool inventions, the Band-Aid printer is still just an idea at this point, but it was a recent recipient of the reddot design award, which should give it some publicity in front of potential manufacturers and licensees.