Hasta La Gadget!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned when I travel, it’s that my iPhone 5 will run out of battery before I finish the day. When I’m at home, it’s fine, but out and about, I find that searching for networks, GPS, and other everyday usage burns through battery like it’s nobody’s business.  These days, it’s almost a requirement that you travel with a spare battery or backup power source of some kind.

I’ve been using a Mophie Juice Pack Air for a while now, but I’ve had various problems with mine, so I’ve been looking for alternatives. So when I had a chance to check out the new Jackery Leaf battery case for the iPhone 5/5S, my curiosity was piqued for sure.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Jackery Leaf is that it’s a very different design from other battery packs on the market. Its true innovation is that when the battery is removed, your phone is still protected by a case.

In fact, the cases are interchangeable, and the Leaf comes with both a black and an orange iPhone case for you to swap around.

Once you’ve slipped your iPhone into the case of your choice, simply slide the case onto the keyhole hook on the Leaf’s battery back, ensuring the Lightning connector is docked and you can use the battery to juice up your phone. But if you want to travel light, you can just as easily slip the phone off the back, and it remains in its case. While the look isn’t quite as seamless as other battery cases, the convenience far outweighs that minor tradeoff.

With both battery and case snapped together, its total dimensions are 5.4″(L) x 2.4″(W) x 0.7″(H), providing the sometimes too lithe iPhone 5/5S with some much needed substance. The case itself only adds 0.625 ounce to your phone, while the battery and case combo adds 3.375 ounces. This is a tad more than the 2.75 ounce weight of the Mophie Juice Pack Air, but I didn’t notice it in everyday use. Plus, the Leaf has a larger capacity battery. Keep in mind that with the battery on, you may have to use the included headphone extension cable depending on how long and narrow your headset plug is.

Charging the Jackery Leaf is easy – just plug the included microUSB to USB cable between the case and a spare USB port or charger, and it’ll fill up in about four to five hours. Like the Mophie, I’d rather see a Lightning charging jack, but I’m assuming that using one for charging would drive the price up. The case also offers pass-through charging of your iPhone, so you can leave the case on all the time even if you are only using the internal battery of your iPhone most of the time. The iPhone charges first, then the case.

Turning the battery on or off is achieved by pressing the flat button on the back of the case for two seconds. Tapping that button will illuminate to indicate how much power the pack has using a multi-color LED. The 2400 mAh battery inside was enough to juice up my iPhone fully, and then give it another 35% or so after that. A full charge of the iPhone takes about three hours, but you can keep using your phone right away if it’s low on battery and you enable the Leaf, which I did on several occasions when my iPhone dropped down into the nerve-wracking 10% zone.

I really have nothing bad to say about the Jackery Leaf. It offers an innovative interchangeable case design, carrying flexibility, enough battery to charge your iPhone fully (and a little more) and is an all around good deal when compared with its biggest competitor.

In addition to the black and orange combo pack, Jackery is also offering a version with a white and an orange case. Hopefully, they’ll offer more interchangeable cases down the road, in case your case gets damaged, or if you just want a change of color. Regardless, the very fact that you can keep your phone in a case and then dock it with the battery is a big advantage over other battery cases.

The Jackery Leaf lists for $99.95(USD), but is currently on sale for just $79.95 over on Amazon. I’m not sure how long that price will hold, so you should take advantage of it sooner rather than later.

There are several 3D printers on the market today that are designed to be used on your desktop. There are also a bunch of 3D printers that are designed for … Continue reading

Many of the distant planets researchers want to know more about aren’t really great for wheeled probes. In order to pore over the surface of thes worlds, scientists have to get a little creative. Take researchers in London, for example, who just developed a robot based on the superhero Spider-Man.

I’m sure you’ve seen videos of floppy disk drives rigged to play music. Simon Schoar took the hack to the next level with RumbleRail, a modular floppy jukebox that plays MIDI files loaded to its SD card slot. It’s run by an ATMega microcontroller, has a 128 x 64 LCD display and two RGB LEDs for each drive that light up in sync with the music. All of its parts are neatly arranged on a machined aluminum rail.

According to Simon, depending on the file extension of the selected MIDI files, RumbleRail will either map MIDI tracks to the drives, map MIDI channels to the drives or just play as many notes as possible at once. Here’s the RumbleRail playing the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song:

And here it is playing the Ghostbusters theme song in the dark, because it ain’t afraid of no ghost:

They sound like highly organized mosquitoes. Fire up Lynx and head to Simon’s website to find out how you can build your own RumbleRail.

[via DamnGeeky]

Disney’s Touché concept can turn many ordinary objects into touch sensors. But what if you could buy materials such as wood, foil or paper that were already touch-sensitive off the shelf? That’s one of the dreams of a group called Embodied Interaction. To prove that the idea is applicable, the group made sheets of flexible and cuttable multi-touch sensors.

According to researchers Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Dr. Jürgen Steimle, their multi-touch sensor works even when parts of it are cut because of two main factors: how the electrodes – the points that sense touch – are wired to their connectors and where the connectors are located.

As the group claimed in their research paper (pdf), in conventional touch sensors electrodes are arranged in a flat grid and are wired to the connectors and to each other, as seen above. This presents two problems. First, several electrodes are dependent on one wire. Also, because the connectors are located at the edges of the sensor, you can’t damage or cut out those edges or you’ll leave the whole sheet useless. That won’t cut it for a cuttable sensor. In addition, conventional touch sensors are not made of materials that are hard to cut using ordinary tools.

What the research team did is to come up used circuit printing technology to make flexible multi-touch sensor sheets, in which the connectors are at the center of each sheet and the wires connect to as few electrodes as possible. In what they call the star topology, each electrode has its own wire to the connector. A second arrangement called the tree topology there are a few central wires that branch out and handle their own batch of electrodes.

The end result is a multi-touch sensor that can be cut into a variety of shapes, although obviously they couldn’t cut a hole in the middle of the sheet.

Of course, the challenge of wiring these touch-sensing sheets to a microcomputer is another matter altogether. Still, it would be nice if you could build your own touch-sensitive furniture, gadget or tools. Haed to Embodied Interaction’s website for more information on the concept.

[via PSFK]