Hasta La Gadget!

Ever get the feeling that those TV talking heads are caught in an endless loop of mind-assaulting rhetoric? Now you can prove it with the aid of a trusty Arduino and an instantly updating word cloud. Nootropic Design rigged up a homebrew hack that connects your TV tuner’s composite feed to a Video Experimenter shield that decodes the closed captioned NTSC broadcast. A Processing sketch then takes over and builds an alphabetized, dynamic metadata cloud you can view on your computer’s screen. The program enlarges words according to frequency and omits those shorter than three letters. As you can see in the pic above, commerical time during NBC’s Nightly News skews slightly… older. Check out the video after the break for a Big Bang Theory version of this word-building project.

Continue reading Word cloud hack connects to your TV, closed captioning provided by Arduino (video)

Word cloud hack connects to your TV, closed captioning provided by Arduino (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the mood for some homebrew iOS app-building fun? Well, Make’s got a kit just for you that bundles the Redpark Serial Cable for iOS with an RS232-to-TTL board and the 60 plus component Minitronics Survival pack for $80. Hailing it as “the first general-purpose serial cable that Apple has approved,” this limited supply pack will let you get your Arduino-tinkering hands all sorts of iPhone dirty — jailbreak not required. And if you’re the uninitiated type, the DIY magazine’s also put together a helpful, hand-holding guide to walk you through some basic first-timer projects. Hit the source to order your own Jobs-certified cable.

[Thanks, Marc]

Make’s Redpark Breakout Pack lets you build iOS apps with Arduino assistance originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jul 2011 17:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not satisfied with a Sony Ericsson LiveView as a secondary display for your Android phone, or a dual-screen device like the Kyocera Echo? Then you might want to consider something like this decidedly more homebrew approach from modder “follower,” which uses the Android Open Accessory protocol to connect the Frankenpager-type contraption you see above to an otherwise ordinary Nexus One. Of course, that two-line display does limit things somewhat, but it will at least let you see the time and any incoming text messages without forcing you to leave your game. Hit the source link below for all the details and software you need to build your own.

Modder outfits Nexus One with an Arduino-powered, pager-style display — of course originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 06:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft just earned itself a boatload of geek-cred and made Apple and Sony look pretty bad in the process. We knew the Windows Phone team was playing nice with the jailbreakers from ChevronWP7, but we didn’t realize just how cozy the two were going to get. Today the devs announced that ChevronWP7 Labs would open up soon, with the approval of Redmond, allowing users to load homebrew apps on their handsets. Unlike tools from the iPhone Dev Team, this service won’t be free. Instead, customers will have to cough up a small fee via PayPal — but we’re sure many of you are more than willing to pay a reasonable price to avoid the sort of cat and mouse game Apple has been playing with hackers since 2007.

ChevronWP7 Labs will jailbreak your Windows Phone with Microsoft’s approval originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DIYer builds his own CNC mill, fabricates a Weighted Companion Cube to show off originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 May 2011 13:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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