Video: ultrasonic water level dish pings owner when kitty needs a drink

Given that most cats aren’t really the talkative type, we can definitely understand scoopmycatbox’s desire to rig up a water dish (vid’s after the break) that does the yapping for his dearest kitty. Put as simply as possible, the ultrasonic water level cat dish combines an Arduino, Parallax range finder, some scrap wood and a good deal of wires in order to measure when the water bowl needs to be refilled. He’s still working to get the contraption to send him a Tweet when the level gets below a certain point, and we can only assume that part II will see an automatic refilling tool hooked in to said alerting system. And you thought pets had it good before the advent of technology…

[Via MAKE]

Continue reading Video: ultrasonic water level dish pings owner when kitty needs a drink

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Video: ultrasonic water level dish pings owner when kitty needs a drink originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony PSP hacked for use as PC status monitor

No money for a secondary display? No use for that worn-down PSP? There’s hope for the future, friend. Hacker avi has discovered that Sony’s handheld makes for a wonderful status monitor, providing a clean look at your PC’s CPU usage, memory allocation and system temperature levels. All you’ll need is a bit of training in Python, Lua for the PSP and a sister willing to stop watching UMD movies long enough for you to give this a go.

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Sony PSP hacked for use as PC status monitor originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OCZ gets official with 10.1-inch DIY Neutrino netbook

We know what you’re thinking — another day, another netbook, right? Not quite. OCZ Technology’s Neutrino, which we caught napping at CeBIT earlier this month, just got official. Weighing in at 2.86 pounds, the DIY netbook arrives with a 10.1-inch 1,024 x 600 LED-backlit display, Intel’s 945GSE chipset, a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, twin stereo speakers, VGA output, Ethernet, two USB 2.0 sockets, 1.3 megapixel camera, WiFi and a 4-cell 2,200mAh battery. Notably missing is a hard drive, RAM, multicard reader and an operating system, all of which OCZ allows the end user to purchase as they see fit. Said machine is shipping out now to channel partners, and it should be available to end users within a fortnight for $269.

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OCZ gets official with 10.1-inch DIY Neutrino netbook originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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8 bit computer now available for all your homebrewing needs

The above 8 bit computer — which is intended as an educational tool in emerging markets, and has been available in China and India for a while now — is finally for sale here in the good old US of A. This hackable little package boasts a 1Mhz 6502 chip, and comes with a keyboard, mouse, two game controllers, an OS cartridge, RCA cables and nine volt power supply. You’ll be jamming to your own, handheld version of “Personal Jesus” in no time at all. These bad boys are available now for the shockingly affordable price of $49.99.

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8 bit computer now available for all your homebrewing needs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DIY Freaks Flock to ‘Hacker Spaces’ Worldwide

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Noisebridge’s members have filled this small space with an enviable collection of shared tools, parts and works in progress.
Photo: Dylan Tweney / Wired.com

SAN FRANCISCO — R. Miloh Alexander and Seth Schoen are hunched over an old pay phone whose innards are being grafted onto the guts of a Walmart telephone and a voice-over-IP modem.

Right now, the Frankensteinish hybrid looks like a pile of tangled wires. Somewhere in the mess, an alligator clip has popped loose. Schoen frowns.

"We really need to solder these down," he says.

The two are working on a recent Monday evening at Noisebridge, a collectively operated hacker space in San Francisco. Across the table, Noisebridge member Molly Boynoff is typing on a sticker-covered MacBook, learning to program in Python. Next to her, Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman is showing two newcomers how to solder resistors and LEDs onto a circuit board.

"There are zillions of people around the world doing this," says Altman, referring to the swell of interest in do-it-yourself projects and hacking. "It’s a worldwide community."

At the center of this community are hacker spaces like Noisebridge, where like-minded geeks gather to work on personal projects, learn from each other and hang out in a nerd-friendly atmosphere. Like artist collectives in the ’60s and ’70s, hacker spaces are springing up all over.

There are now 96 known active hacker spaces worldwide, with 29 in the United States,  according to Hackerspaces.org. Another 27 U.S. spaces are in the planning or building stage.

Located in rented studios, lofts or semi-commercial spaces, hacker spaces tend to be loosely organized, governed by consensus, and infused with an almost utopian spirit of cooperation and sharing.

"It’s almost a Fight Club for nerds," says Nick Bilton of his hacker space, NYC Resistor in Brooklyn, New York. Bilton is an editor in The New York Times R&D lab and a board member of NYC Resistor. Bilton says NYC Resistor has attracted "a pretty wide variety of people, but definitely all geeks. Not Dungeons & Dragons–type geeks, but more professional, working-type geeks."

For many members, the spaces have become a major focus of their evening and weekend social lives.

Since it was formed last November, Noisebridge has attracted 56
members, who each pay $80 per month (or $40 per month on the "starving
hacker rate") to cover the space’s rent and insurance. In
return, they have a place to work on whatever they’re interested in,
from vests with embedded sonar proximity sensors to web-optimized
database software.

Altman wears a black Dorkbot T-shirt, a black zip-up hoody and olive khakis with large side pockets. His long gray hair features vibrant blue and red stripes, and he’s nearly always smiling. His enthusiasm for hacker spaces is infectious.

"In our society there’s a real dearth of community," Altman says. "The internet is a way for people to key in to that need, but it’s so inadequate. [At hacker spaces], people get a little taste of that community and they just want more."

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Noisebridge founder Mitch Altman shows first-time visitor Jay Thomas how to solder.
Photo: Dylan Tweney / Wired.com

Noisebridge is located behind a nondescript black door on a filthy alley in San Francisco’s Mission District. It is a small space, only about 1,000 square feet, consisting primarily of one big room and a loft. But members have crammed it with an impressive variety of tools, furniture and sub-spaces, including kitchen, darkroom, bike rack, bathroom (with shower), circuit-building and testing area, a small "chill space" with couches and  whiteboard, and machine shop.

The main part of the room is dominated by a battered work table. A pair of ethernet cables snakes down into the middle of the table, suspended overhead by a plastic track. Cheap metal shelves stand against the walls, crowded with spare parts and projects in progress.

The drawers of a parts cabinet carry labels reflecting the eclecticism of the space: Altoids Tins, Crapulence, Actuators, DVDs, Straps/Buckles, Anchors/Hoisting, and Fasteners.

Almost everything in the room has been donated or built by members — including a drill press, oscilloscopes, logic testers and a sack of stick-on googly eyes.

While many movements begin in obscurity, hackers are unanimous about the birth of U.S. hacker spaces: August, 2007 when U.S. hackers Bre Pettis, Nicholas Farr, Mitch Altman and others visited Germany on a geeky field trip called Hackers on a Plane.

German and Austrian hackers have been organizing into hacker collectives for years, including Metalab in Vienna, c-base in Berlin and the Chaos Computer Club in Hannover, Germany. Hackers on a Plane was a delegation of American hackers who visited the Chaos Communications Camp — "Burning Man for hackers," says Metalab founder Paul "Enki" Boehm — and their trip included a tour of these hacker spaces. They were immediately inspired, Altman says.

On returning to the United States, Pettis quickly recruited others to the idea and set up NYC Resistor in New York, while Farr instigated a hacker space called HacDC in Washington, D.C. Both were open by late 2007. Noisebridge followed some months later, opening its doors in fall 2008.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time. Make magazine, which started in January, 2005, had found an eager audience of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. (The magazine’s circulation now numbers 125,000.) Projects involving complex circuitry and microcontrollers were easier than ever for nonexperts to undertake, thanks to open source platforms like Arduino and the easy availability of how-to guides on the internet.

The idea spread quickly to other cities as visitors came to existing hacker spaces and saw how cool they were.

"People just have this wide-eyed look of, ‘I want this in my city.’ It’s almost primal," says Rose White, a sociology graduate student and NYC Resistor member.

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Soldering irons and LED-light projects crowd the main workbench at Noisebridge.
Photo: Dylan Tweney / Wired.com

In Noisebridge’s case, the community had a boost thanks to Altman’s geek cred (he’s the inventor of the TV-B-Gone) and his connections to existing geek societies, such as Dorkbot,
a monthly gathering of San Francisco techies. Other cooperative
arts-and-technology spaces in the San Francisco area — such as NIMBY, The Crucible and CELLspace
— also helped prepare the ground. And of course it helps that San
Francisco is already receptive to geeks, anarchists and other square
pegs.

The recent crop of hacker spaces has followed a rough blueprint prepared by Jens Ohlig called "Building a Hacker Space"
(.pdf). Ohlig’s presentation is a collection of design patterns, or
solutions to common problems, and outlines some of the best practices
used by German and Austrian hacker spaces.

Many are governed by consensus. Noisebridge and Vienna’s Metalab
have boards, but they are structured to keep board members accountable
to the desires of the members. NYC Resistor is similarly democratic.
Most of the space — and the tools — are shared by all members, with
small spaces set aside for each member to store items and projects for
their own use.

"The way hacker spaces are organized seems to be a reaction against
American individualism — the idea that we all need to be in our
separate single-family homes with a garage," says White. "Choosing to
organize collectives where you’re sharing a space and sharing tools
with people who are not your family and not your co-workers — that
feels different to me."

Noisebridge even welcomes non-members to come use the space, and
Altman says non-members can do everything that members can (except
block the consensus process). The community governs itself according to
the guiding principle expressed on a large poster of Keanu Reeves
hanging from the loft: "Be excellent to each other, dudes."

"It sounds hokey, but it works," says Altman.

Hacker spaces aren’t just growing up in isolation: They’re forming
networks and linking up with one another in a decentralized, worldwide
network. The hackerspaces.org
website collects information about current and emerging hacker spaces,
and provides information about creating and managing new spaces.
There’s also lots of information exchanged via IRC and a weekly
telephone conference. They even enable extramural exchanges.

"It’s like an embassy for hackers," says Metalab’s Boehm, who has
been spending a lot of time at Noisebridge lately while here on a
tourist visa. "If you are a member of a hacker space, you can go
anywhere in the world. It’s like instant family."

That welcoming attitude is proving powerfully attractive to many geeks.

"I can go to any hacker space anywhere in the world and be welcome there," says Altman. "You could too."

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Noisebridge board member Rachel McConnell holds a
sonar sensor, an infrared sensor and a sack of tiny pager vibration
motors that will be incorporated into a wearable proximity-sensing vest.
Photo: Dylan Tweney / Wired.com

Wireless Power Meters Tweet Energy Consumption

Tweetawatt

There are twittering celebs (hello Ashton!), twittering athletes (get well soon Lance) and even a twittering toaster.

For greener gadget enthusiasts there’s the new Tweet-a-watt kit from Adafruit Industries that lets users post the daily energy consumption of their refrigerator or TV set to a Twitter account. The idea won the Greener Gadgets Competition earlier this month and now the kits are on sale.

"We feel there is a
social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH (kilowatts per hour)," says Adafruit on its blog. "By
sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for
the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their
friends and followers."

Tweet-a-watt is an open source hardware project that builds on an off-the-shelf power monitor called Kill-a-Watt. Kill-a-Watt is a power meter with a large LCD display that connect to appliances. When connected, the device assesses how efficient they are and display consumption by the kilowatt-hour.

Tweet-a-Watt takes that gadget to the next level. With help from Xbee, open source networking receiver and transmitter modules that comes as part of the kit, users can transmit power usage information to a computer receiver. The receiver can log, graph and even tweet that information.

Each kit costs $90.

Photo: Tweet-a-Watt/Adafruit Industries

Musical bra is not as sexy as it sounds

The fine folks over at Instructables have posted some wild mods in their time, but the musical bra you see above inhabits its own realm in terms of weirdness and lack of usefulness… unless you really want a bra that makes music of course. The speaker is on the front, with a battery pack between the shoulder blades at the back, and each cup is equipped with eight different “sounds” culled from a small keyboard, which are triggered by custom-made buttons sewn into the bra. Hit the read link for the full rundown of how to make one of your very own, but fair warning: you’re going to have to be pretty adept with needle and thread to get this project done, but the final result should be fairly priceless. After all, who doesn’t want a clunky, hideous sports bra that makes noise? Exactly.

[Via Music Radar]

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Musical bra is not as sexy as it sounds originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Netbook-based robot takes popcorn orders via-Twitter


In the far-out, sci-fi future of 2009, robots are doing some pretty amazing things, like capturing prowlers, assembling communications networks, and playing Rock / Paper / Scissors. Now, with a little help from RoBe:Do and Twitter, robotics has achieved what may be its crowning achievement: couch-side popcorn delivery. Coppa is a $1,649 software-ready robot (you supply the machine’s netbook brain) that arrives with native support for a plethora of languages and tools (including C / C++ / C#, Flash AS3, Java,Microsoft Robotics Studio, .NET, and Visual Basic), and ships with a 12V rechargeable battery, autofocus webcam, and a sonar system. Optional accessories include motion, heat, and humidity sensors, and servo-driven grabbing actuators. The video below shows one such unit that’s been programmed to take popcorn orders via-Twitter, timed to deliver the goods when the operator arrives home from work. Couch surfing may never be the same.

[Via SlashGear]

Continue reading Netbook-based robot takes popcorn orders via-Twitter

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Netbook-based robot takes popcorn orders via-Twitter originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gadget Lab Reader Makes Stealth Camera and Netbook Bag

Dpp_0045

We love it when you guys take our how-to posts and make them better. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we started the Gadget Lab Flickr Pool, as a place for you to show off your gadgeteering. This time, though, Gadget Lab reader Wilfurd has posted the results of his home made stealth camera bag on a forum.

Not just any forum, but our beloved MSI Wind Forum, the place to learn all about installing Mac OS X on the netbook. Wilfurd’s bag, as you might guess from this, has a slight twist: it is designed to hold his camera gear and his MSI Wind.

It looks like Wilfur used some slightly stiffer foam than we did, and was therefore able to make a semi rigid box and then insert it into the bag. You don’t see the Wind in the picture — there is a gap down the side of the bag in which to slide it.

It’s worth taking a look at the forum thread — Wifur had the same trouble as I did when it came to measuring things out, and resorted to lots of sketches and cardboard templates. He also put the whole lot into a Timbukt2 bag, which are pretty kick-ass to start with.

We love this project. To begin with, it’s a big kick for us when somebody takes a project from the Lab and makes it themselves. And its even better when they improve on the original.

A good bag for a Wind and a SLR? [MSI Wind Forums]

Gadget Lab Flickr Group [Flickr]

See Also:

Aliens PS3 case mod is staggeringly ugly to non-fans

Adding even more credibility to the whole “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” mantra is this… masterpiece / abomination. Inspired by the iconic Aliens films, this completely over the top PlayStation 3 case mod is about as ridiculous as it gets. We’re not really told how the modder went about crafting this lovely interpretation, but we are given a few more snapshots to gawk at in the read link — which you won’t visit unless you too are an Aliens freak, but hey, that’s cool.

[Thanks, Jeremiah]

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Aliens PS3 case mod is staggeringly ugly to non-fans originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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