Hasta La Gadget!

Unless you’re suicidal, when you ride a fixed-gear bike, you’ll want to strap your feet in. Traditionally, this has been done by leather or fabric toe-straps, held open by metal cages, or more recently clip-less pedals, which (paradoxically) clip on to a special cleat in the sole of a cycling shoe.

Recently, another option has started to show up. It’s a wide strap which uses Velcro to secure it to itself, and is stiff enough to remain open even when empty, allowing your feet to slide in. Advantages: lightweight, a good tight fit and works well with any regular shoes. Disadvantages: Very limited availability and therefore relatively high cost. One commercial example is the Brooklyn-made Hold Fast.

And what do we do here on Gadget Lab when we can’t find or afford a piece of kit? We make our own. I paid a visit to the hardware store, spent less than €2, and maybe an hours worth of work (and several hours of laying in bed this morning planning). The result? FootBelts! (FeetBelts is already taken). Follow along and make your own.

First, the hardware. You’ll need some kind of strap or webbing. I used strapping for ratchets. I figured that if it’s strong enough to tighten down a load on a truck, it’s good enough for my feet. It was also cheap, came in a bunch of bright colors and was available in the right size. As ever, don’t worry too much about what I’m using. I headed to the hardware store and poked around to see what looked good. You should do the same. I bought two meters for €1.80 (around $2.50).

The second ingredient is Velcro, and I have a lot left over from various projects. Buy it by the roll (it’s cheaper in bulk) and pick something the same width or narrower than your strapping. Finally, a needle and thread. A sewing machine is quicker, but I don’t have one.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Put a shoe on the pedal and measure how much strap you’ll need. There should be a good foot-width of overlap on the top, as this is where the Velcro will go. Mark, measure again and cut. At this stage I found out that my strapping likes to fray, but happily it’s made of plastic. A quick trip through a lighter flame sealed the ends.

Add Velcro

Part of the strip will be split to thread through the holes in the pedal. I stuck the (self-adhesive) Velcro first and cut through both together. You can do this, or cut separately. The idea is to make a Velcro sandwich, with hooks and loops that clamp onto each other. It’s easier to see than to explain:

The second part of the sandwich is sewn on. This is fairly important for strength, as the seam will take a fair amount of stress. I’m a messy but effective sewer when I’m in a hurry, but this should hold, at least until I make it to a sewing machine.

That’s it. The sizes will depend on the size of your feet and pedals, as well as your material, but the actual setup is straightforward enough. Thread the “forked” part through the pedals from the outside and then up and over your foot. Stick them to the top of the wide strap and then fold the sewn flap over the top to secure.

Ride

I took them for a quick spin and they feel great. I’ll need to do a longer trip to be sure, but I like them so far, and they’ll work with softer summer shoes. Two weak points may be where the strap is split, and the sewn seam. Also, you should really sew the Velcro into place, not just leave it glued. Again, a sewing machine will help.

Good luck, and let us know if you make any of your own. Bonus points for innovations and outlandish colors.

Hacking your iPhone to run unofficial, third-party apps may seem unnecessary since Apple hosts its own App Store. But the corporation’s recently enforced prohibitions on some apps, such as the banning of Google Voice, are reviving the incentive for customers to jailbreak their iPhones once again.

Thanks to Cydia, an unauthorized app store open to jailbroken iPhones, consumers can still access some software that Apple won’t allow. Think free text-messaging and cheap international calls thanks to a Google Voice app that Apple banned. Or features that we can’t have yet, such as multimedia messaging and tethering. Here, we round up a list of the most compelling reasons to jailbreak your iPhone.

1. Google Voice

Apple recently rejected and banned Google Voice apps from its App Store. The apps would have augmented the search giant’s new voice service, which enables users to rely on a single phone number to ring all their phones, while also delivering the gift of free text messages, voicemail service and cheap international calls. The move stirred so much controversy that even the Federal Communications Commission is inquiring about the prohibition.

Thankfully in the Cydia store there’s GV Mobile, an unofficial Google Voice app. In light of Apple’s blanket ban of Google Voice apps, GV Mobile is the no. 1 reason to jailbreak your iPhone (if you weren’t one of the lucky few to grab a copy before Apple banned it). Overall the app is really sweet, despite having room to improve in terms of performance (connecting to Google’s server each time you launch the app can be a drag). Your contacts list is nicely integrated into the phone dialer and SMS sender; the overall UI is slick and cool. After a few minutes you’ll be sending free text messages, and maybe even dialing your relatives in Taiwan for once with cheap international VOIP calls. The best part? The app’s free.

2. Unrestricted 3G Privileges

AT&T iPhone owners pay $30 per month for “unlimited” 3G data access. But your access isn’t truly unlimited, thanks to restrictions that Apple imposed on some apps. SlingPlayer, an app that streams television from a Slingbox device, was crippled to work only on a Wi-Fi connection at the request of Apple and AT&T. And the Skype VOIP app only works on Wi-Fi, too, rendering it impractical.

This is where 3G Unrestrictor comes in handy. The $2 app enables jailbroken iPhone users to select any app that they wish to use over 3G, including Skype and SlingPlayer. Also, by default the App Store won’t let you download files larger than 10MB on the 3G network, and 3G Unrestrictor will remove that regulation, too. Free your apps and download away!

3. Tethering

Apple promised the new iPhone 3.0 OS would deliver tethering, but AT&T customers have yet to see that promise fulfilled. AT&T promised tethering would arrive “late summer.” Well, we’re waiting, and it’s not here yet. Some iPhone 3.0 users have figured out a roundabout way to turn on tethering without hacking, but that solution is only temporary.

Guess what? There’s a tethering app in Cydia, too. It’s a $5 app called Tether. The steps on setting up tethering aren’t as simple as Apple’s, but hey, you don’t even have to pay a monthly fee to use the service. The app even includes a feature to set a data cap in case you’re worried about extra charges incurred on your account if AT&T catches you tethering. It’s a little rough around the edges thanks to the network setup taking a few minutes, but we still love it.

4. Overseas Travel

Need to travel? Your iPhone can only go so far thanks to its carrier-tied SIM card, unless you wish to receive bills up the nostril thanks to international roaming costs. Jailbreaking will actually enable you to follow a process to unlock your iPhone to work with other carriers’ SIM cards overseas.

5. Pissing off Apple

Whether you’re a developer who has a beef with Apple, or if you’re a consumer who’s pissed at Apple, or if you’re a kid whose puppy was run over by an employee of Apple, then you may want to exact revenge by jailbreaking your iPhone. That’s because Apple clearly doesn’t like it when users jailbreak their iPhones. The company claims the process is illegal, and goes as far as to say jailbreaking will crash cellphone towers. So far these are empty threats, although buyer beware: Future court decisions, laws or FCC regulations may put teeth into Apple’s claims.

6. Pissing off AT&T

Frustrated with AT&T’s brainless customer service, spotty network reception and passive-aggressive totalitarian rule over the App Store? Jailbreaking for any of the reasons above will piss off AT&T, mostly by enabling your applications to use its 3G network without restriction. Or, if you like, you can take your protest a step further and unlock your jailbroken phone, enabling it to work with with T-Mobile or any other GSM-based carrier. It’s not a tea party, it’s an AT&T party!

So what are you waiting for? We won’t tell you how to jailbreak your phone, but you can find the necessary tools and instructions on iPhone Dev-Team’s blog. We also found YouTube user Rizzo893’s video really helpful, too.

Photo: William Hook/Flickr, Jason-Morrison/Flickr, jorgeq/Flickr

Pimpy3wash just finished doing a round of laundry. Hacklab.toilet just flushed and mattsoffice tweeted that the temperature is 83.3° F.

It might seem like just another day in the Twitterverse, where prosaic, personal updates stream throughout the day. Except @Pimpy3wash, @hacklab.toilet and @mattsoffice are not real people: They are a washing machine, a toilet and an array of home light and temperature sensors. Each of them, with help from some microcontrollers, wires and Arduino boards, have been rigged to answer Twitter’s basic question: “What are you doing?”

“It started as a joke,” says Seth Hardy, a researcher for an anti-virus company who modified his toilet to tweet. “I don’t like Twitter much and think everyone puts up very mundane stuff on Twitter. I thought, ‘Why not have my toilet in there, too?’ Now it’s turned into a fun way to test out the Arduino boards.” His twittering toilet, @hacklab.toilet, now has more than 580 followers.

As Twitter’s use has exploded, the service has seen a twittering cat (the British kitty, Sockington, is fast approaching a million followers), a duck, an R2D2 and even a kegerator that tweets from Wired.com’s office. But unlike these profiles, where humans are merely pretending to be the cat or robot on whose behalf they post, tweets from appliances are the real thing.

Hooking up home appliances is part geek bravado, part insider joke and part open-source hardware experiment. And it illustrates the larger trend of home automation that is catching on among do-it-yourselfers.

“Tweeting appliances speaks to this whole ‘internet of things’ idea,” says Hans Scharler, a tech consultant who also writes comedy material. “If your appliances were outputting information, it can always go to a database. But we love to share information. So why not find a way to do that?” Scharler found online fame for his twittering toaster, whose tweets alternate between “toasting” and “toast is done.” @mytoaster has about 200 twitter followers.

Among the first kits to help DIYers get their appliances tweeting was the Tweet-a-watt. The $90 open source hardware kit from Adafruit Industries let users post the daily energy consumption of their refrigerator or TV set to a Twitter account. The Tweet-a-watt also lets receivers log and graph the power consumption information.

“We feel there is a social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH (kilowatts per hour),” says the company 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.”

But to go beyond that, DIYers have devised their own homebrew solution. And driving their interest are modules available for hobbyists from companies such as Adafruit and ioBridge.

Scharler says the off-the-shelf IO-204 monitor and control module allowed him to bring his toaster online without having to run a home server. All it took was a few hours on Thanksgiving Day to get his BagelMaster tweeting. Scharler glued a switch to the toaster’s exterior that is triggered by the slider’s movement. The switch hooks up to the control module’s digital input.

“Using a terminal board, a pull-up resistor (1k), and some alligator clips, I hooked up the resistor from the digital input to the +5v source from the module, and clipped my clips on the resistor and the ground,” Scharler explains on his blog.

The real gem in this hack is the control module from ioBridge, which is available for $88. It can bring most devices online and you don’t need to be a programming or electronics whiz to hook it up, says the company.

“There was all this excitement around twitter last year,” says Scharler. “But at the same time I had been playing with the ioBridge controller so I decided to get them both together.”

Scharler posted a guide to creating the twittering toaster on Instructables, a website with lots of instructions on how to complete various DIY projects. “It’s not very difficult for someone with no programming experience to do. That’s the whole purpose of the ioBridge module. You don’t have to touch a line of code, you don’t need too many resistors or any weird things like that.”

The twittering toaster went on to inspire Matthew Morey, an engineer at Texas Instruments, to create his own twittering appliances. In less than a month, Morey found a way to get the temperature and lighting of his single-family home in Houston on Twitter. A typical post from those sensors reads: Temperature = 82.5°F / Ambient Light = 901. Morey can also send commands to his appliances via Twitter. Doing that is as easy as sending a reply with words such ‘@MattsOffice light on’ or ‘@MattsOffice light off’ to turn on or off the light at his desk.

“I can adjust the air conditioning or the wireless security camera to take a picture of a particular spot in the backyard through Twitter,” he says.

The output from the light and temperature sensors could have well gone into a e-mail alert or even a database, says Morey, but tweeting is a lot more fun.

Though Morey doesn’t have a step-by-step guide on how you can do this yourself, he says he hopes to publish that on his site soon. Right now, his website offers the code that he is using to auto-update the Twitter account.

But keeping your followers on twitter is no easy task, as Hardy’s toilet discovered. A broken switch in the middle of the night led to a malfunction that had the toilet twittering more updates about flushing than its followers could handle. The toilet lost a few hundred followers the next day.

See also:

• Wired.com wiki on how to make your gadgets twitter
• Scratch Lowers Resistance to Programming

Photo: Twittering toilet/Seth Hardy

Like an aspiring indie band, the Cybraphon has many instruments, plays them on an irregular schedule, likes to have an audience around it — and obsesses over comments on its blog, the number of friends it has on Facebook and how many fans follow it on MySpace.

The difference is that it is a handcrafted musical robot and one whose emotion meter swings from delirium to desolation based on its online popularity at any given moment.

“The Cybraphon has an almost egotistical desire for fame,” says Simon Kirby, one of the creators of the robot.

When the needle hits rapture, the Cybraphon’s built-in orchestra of mechanized acoustic instruments clang in harmony to belt out an upbeat tune. But without online attention it slips into dejection and spews out a sad melody.

Three U.K. based artists — Kirby, Ziggy Campbell and Tommy Pheron — built the robot over eight months using a £5,000 grant. It’s a mechanical marvel that stuns with its attention to detail and construction. An antique wardrobe houses more than 60 robotic components including musical instruments such as cymbals and an organ as well as electronic parts including a PC and a controller. Kirby and his colleagues first created a sketch of what they wanted and then sourced the parts from antique stores, junk shops and donations.

The Cybraphon’s emotions are accessible via a Twitter feed but also appear on a on a 100 year-old galvanometer housed in the wardrobe (pictured above).

Kirby says the Cybraphon is devised as a “tongue-in-cheek comment on people’s obsession with online celebrity.”  And it is almost Julia Allison-esque in its quest for atttention. The device scours the web all day looking for mentions of itself and tracking how many friends it has on Facebook and MySpace.

“It is happy when it feels its popularity increases but is miserable if it is being ignored,” says Kirby.

The musical instruments inside the wardrobe include an Indian classical instrument called a Shruti box, an organ and cymbals. But they had to be tweaked to play on their own. The team attached a motor-driven crank to the drives of the Shruti box and modified it with 13 robotic servos.  The organ was retro-fitted with robotic keys while a fan pumps air through it. Cybraphon includes 12 chimes that are struck by suspended solenoids and percussion instruments that are hit by beaters attached to motors. A custom made vinyl record is cued to play through antique brass gramophone horns.

The Cybraphon also has infra-red based motion detectors to sense when there are people around it. It then comes alive, playing the music that is driven by its current mood.

“The Cybraphon is switched on all the time but it really wakes up when someone walks up to it,” says Kirby.

The brain of the system is a Macbook Pro notebook hidden inside one of the drawers of the wardrobe. “That, a few Arduino boards and lots of wire,” says Kirby.

The computer runs software written in Python and MAX/MSP to monitor the web and update Cybraphon’s emotions according to its rate at which its popularity is changing. “The software takes email alerts from Facebook, Google and so on, processes them and compares the current activity to that in the last 24 or 48 hours to calculate the rate of change,” explains Kirby.

But no matter how much attention the Cybraphon gets, it always eventually slips into depression, says Kirby. That means online attention could cheer up the Cybraphon in the short term but once the initial excitement dies down, the robot is disillusioned. “We modeled it on an insecure, egotistical band,” he says.

Though the Cybraphon’s current mood is accessible via Twitter, and you can follow it on Facebook or MySpace, its music is not available online. However, you can watch a demo video of it below.

“A streaming feed, although perhaps a nice idea, is possibly too literal,” says Ziggy Campbell, one of the creators of the Cybraphon. Regular bands don’t stream live performances all day long and neither does Cybraphon.  It keeps things more exclusive.”

The Cybraphon will be shown at the Inspace gallery in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Art Festival in August.

Campbell says the Cybraphon’s continued existence amuses him. “Bands by their very nature tend to be volatile and prone to implosion,” he says. “I’m surprised that the Cybraphon, a highly neurotic beast with some questionable electrical wiring, hasn’t hit self destruct yet. ”

Cybraphon Demo Song from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

See more photos of the Cybraphon

A closer look at the Cybrphon galvanometer

Artist’s sketch of the Cybraphon

The Cybraphon on display at the Inspace Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland where it will have its first showing from Aug. 5 to Sept. 5

Additional photos of the Cybraphon on Flickr. (Remember just visiting the page affects Cybraphon’s mood!)

Photos: Cybraphon

Sadly, DIYer Iwan Roberts has posted very few details on the making of these wonderful coconut headphones (or coco-cans, as we like to call them), but we can infer plenty from the picture.

Iwan made these custom headphones for a friend (“Do not want to see them go”, he says) from a couple of coconut halves, a pair of what looks like Panasonic’s already excellent RP-HTX7 retro-monitors, and a whole lot of twine. We’re sure they sound great, but better, they’re probably the best smelling pair of headphones ever.

Product page [Dau Gi Bach via Make]