Hasta La Gadget!

We don’t really know where to begin. LaserPup involves shooting a laser at a dog over the internet, nothing more, nothing less, but somehow it transcends traditionally pointless moddery and becomes something so much greater. Maybe it’s because you shoot a dog with a laser over the internet. LaserPup is a ceiling-mounted laser and webcam whose beam can be directed around the floor with an iPhone-friendly browser-based interface. There’s switch for turning on and off the lights, and when the laser is activated or deactivated it makes a sound to alert the dog that it’s time to get shot at by lasers. In the future, there was a nuclear war… video is after the break.

Continue reading LaserPup trains for battle with Laser Cats

Filed under: Household

LaserPup trains for battle with Laser Cats originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Our anonymous engineer friend over in Ageo, Japan sure loves to make him some gadgets — among his many projects he’s already built a couple other MP3 players, and now he’s back with a tiny, motion controlled device that plays tunes from an SD card. Housed in a set of speakers (switching from stereo to mono when the satellite is unplugged) this thing uses an accelerometer for its interface: the user can skip ahead, skip back, change albums, pause, loop, turn down or crank up the sound by tilting, tapping, or setting the thing down. This is a strictly D.I.Y. affair, so if you want to get your hands on one you’ll have to hit the read link for the parts list, schematics and firmware. Captured on video after the break.

[Via Slashgear]

Continue reading D.I.Y. motion-controlled MP3 player doesn’t need your fancy touch screen

Filed under: Portable Audio

D.I.Y. motion-controlled MP3 player doesn’t need your fancy touch screen originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This clunky little workaround will let you shoot video with the Nikon D700. In fact, it will work for any camera which can pump a live video stream into a computer. It has nothing to do with the rather nice, and rather higher definition hack we covered earlier today, but it will let you at least play with the great lenses and shallow depth of field afforded by DSLR videography.

This hack uses three ingredients. First, a camera with a live view function, which lets you see a real-time stream on the camera’s screen. Every single compact camera does this, and more and more DSLRs provide the feature. Second, a way to get the feed from the camera to the computer. I used a trial version of Nikon’s Camera Control 2, a truly awful piece of non-intuitive software that just manages to get the job done. Third is a way to capture the video displayed on the screen. For this I used iShowU HD Pro, a screencasting application for the Mac.

First, connect the camera via USB cable and fire up Nikon Capture (or software of choice). At bottom right you see the button marked "Lv", or Live View. Click this and the camera will start sending a low quality video feed to the computer (you can click to make the picture bigger):

Next, fire up your video capture application, in this case iShowU. If you can, set it to capture only the part of the screen you actually want, otherwise you’ll have to take the video file into an editor to crop it later:

Once done, hit return and start the recording. Anything you now do with the camera is being recorded. Here’s the result. It’s pretty poor, and because I’m using the trial version there’s an overlay watermark from iShowU. But you get the idea.

The quality is severely limited by the refresh rate of the incoming video feed, although the D700 has an HDMI out port, so this could be used to get a much better stream. What is interesting is that you can see just how useless live view is even for still capture — the focusing takes forever in any mode.

As an exercise, this is fun, but ultimately the quality is too poor for anything — on a Mac it would be better to just use the iSight camera to shoot. Still, if you have the camera, the trial software is free so go and try it out.

Product page [iShowU]

Product page [Nikon Capture]

This amazing Scrabble keyboard comes to us by way of BoingBoing Gadgets’ John Brownlee who, in the course of describing Doc Datamancer’s steampunk hack, makes some startling admissions.

Those of you familiar with his work might expect a smattering of references to wet bodily functions, or at least some show-off allusions to the works of Vladimir Nabokov. You would, just this once, be disappointed. Instead, Mr. Brownlee gives us a revealing insight into his writing process, something which turns out to be far more complex than just letting dolphins push balls printed with random words to the top of their tank and copying the result — our previous assumption:

[W]riting is not about randomly shaking up a tray of letters in one’s head and plucking words from the alphabetical mnemonic slurry… if it was, my posts would make more sense. [emphasis added]

As somebody who has spent time with Brownlee in his Berlin bachelor pad, this is thick with irony. He actually owns a Scrabble set which he keeps at his desk. And while he doesn’t shake the letters "in his head", he invites his neglected parakeet to peck at the tiles, thus outlining post after post. It’s a testament to the bird’s uncanny language skills that we understand the man at all.

Product page [Doc Datamancer via Humbert Humbird]

Um, can you say “sell like hotcakes?” Datamancer‘s incredibly amazing Scrabble keyboard is one of the slickest, most ready-for-market DIY projects we’ve ever had the pleasure of eying, with each letter key being constructed from an actual pre-owned Scrabble game piece. The USB keyboard itself was built with an aluminum casing for an “industrialized twist,” but obviously it’s the top that keeps us drooling. Oh, and there are even LEDs hidden beneath the Num Lock, Caps Lock and Scroll Lock keys, suggesting that a completely backlit iteration isn’t too far out of the realm of possibility. A few more images are tucked away in the read link — you owe it to yourself to check ’em out.

[Via SlipperyBrick]

Filed under: Peripherals

Handcrafted Scrabble keyboard could stand to be commercialized originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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