Hasta La Gadget!

Over at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering near Boston, Massachusetts, the students know what makes a worthwhile project. The AutoFrost is a robot which has one delicious purpose: frosting cakes.

The human operator enters some basic cake-stats, like size and color, and then hits the splendidly-worded go-button: “I’m ready to design an amazing cake”. He is then dropped into a paint program with a circa-1990 interface, where the designing is done. This custom-coded app then controls the AutoFrost ‘bot itself.

A pair of stepper motors and threaded rods move both the icing nozzle and the cake. They are controlled by two Arduinos and stepper motors. The frosting plunger is manually positioned at the right height over the tasty cake and the frosting is squeezed out using a servo motor on a rack and pinion system.

There’s still a little work to be done (apart from slicing and eating the cake) – to change colors, a human has to swap on the new frosting before the AutoFrost can resume – but so what? It’s a frikkin’ robot that decorates cakes. If you watch the video all the way through you’ll see that the icing on the cake, as it were, is when the ‘bot finishes up its task by crossing the “t” and dotting the “i”, just like the operator did when when designing the cake.

Future plans include different nozzle sizes, auto cake-size sensing, and more than a few brisk walks to combat calories gained in the name of research.

AutoFrost Cake Decorator [Olin via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• Nikon D700 Birthday Cake
• Hilarious Thumb-Drive Cake Mistake
• MacBook Cake is Lighter Than Air
• Katamari Wedding Cake Is a Great Ball of Geekery

The future of auto isn’t flying cars. It’s puny, slow, electric-powered pods that can drive themselves.

That’s what General Motors thinks, at least. The EN-V (pronounced “envy” and short for Electric Network Vehicle) line of cars is GM’s concept vehicle that’s energized by electricity and hydrogen. It has a maximum speed of 25 mph, and it’s controlled with a touchscreen steering wheel and wireless technologies.

GM predicts that in roughly 20 years, 80 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas, which means congestion, parking and environmental issues will become major problems.

So, future drivers might consider the EN-V. Each EN-V vehicle measures about one-sixth the size of a traditional car; it’s powered by a battery so you won’t be polluting with gas. The pod is also equipped with a wireless antenna and GPS sensors communicating with a network to enable autonomous driving.

Tap a button and the EN-V will use its geoawareness to automatically park in a spot. Six of these EN-Vs can squeeze into one parking space.

Or if you’re feeling especially lazy (or drunk), you can also choose to automatically follow another EN-V — the sensors ensure you move in the same direction and constantly retain a safe distance from the EN-V in front of you.

The steering-wheel touchscreen even includes a videophone to chat with other EN-V drivers, since you don’t have to pay attention to the road when the car is driving itself.

“We call it virtual ballet,” said Dr. Chris Borroni-Bird, program director for GM’s AUTOnomy group. “Clearly you can see benefits for this in terms of your daily life and saving energy.”

While it’s difficult to imagine an EN-V in your neighborhood in the near future, these cars will likely be very affordable thanks to their small body size and light weight, Borroni-Bird said.

You won’t want one of these, however, in a city with lots of hills like San Francisco: The EN-V is a self-balancing vehicle, and company officials told me it’s not good at handling steep inclines just yet.

Check out the video above for a driving demonstration of the EN-V in a Las Vegas parking lot at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show.

The Eco Printer seems to be based on an invention I came up with around 15 years ago, although as I never told anyone or did anything about it (and my invention used completely different technology), I”ll let it slide. The printer prints onto paper using a special disappearing ink that can be erased by zapping it with UV light. The idea is that you can print things for temporary use and then re-use the paper, over and over again.

It’s a nice idea, promising the advantages of paper but without the environmental costs – even recycling uses resources. But it misses the exact same thing when I was dreaming up re-printable paper back in the 1990s: Paper is useful because of what you do to it after the ink has been laid down. You can scribble and annotate, fold it or tear strips off and rearrange them. These are the things paper does that an LCD screen can’t, and these are precisely the things that will render the paper useless for this particular printer/wiper. It won’t remove your pencil marks for example, or repair creases and tears.

If you’re forced to keep the paper in pristine condition, then you may as well use an iPad.

And what about this magical UV-sensitive ink? Going on the already dizzying prices of regular printer ink, the cost is sure to be terrifying.

Reprinting on One Paper Only [Yanko. Thanks, Radhika!]

See Also:

• Printer Ink Now $8000 A Gallon: Boston Man Sues
• Printer Ink Gouging Runs to $6 Billion a Year
• A New Way to Force You to Buy Overpriced Printer Ink
• For Printers, 'All-In-One' Really Means 'Way-Too-Much'

LAS VEGAS — Put this tubular object in your backpack, and you can generate juice for your cellphone — just by walking around.

The nPower PEG (short for “personal energy generator”) contains a weight, a spring, some inductive coils and a battery. Put it in your pocket or your backpack, and it wiggles around with your body’s natural movements. As the internal weight moves, it generates electricity in the coils, which gradually charges up the battery. You can then transfer that power to your phone or iPod via a mini USB port and an adapter cable.

It’s a brilliant idea, and anyone who has ever watched their battery indicator dwindle to nothing will surely love the idea of getting energy from nothing more than walking and fidgeting. However, for power-hungry smartphones, you’ll only get about a minute of talk time for every 15 to 30 minutes of walking, the company says. That’s hardly enough to keep your phone alive all day.

It might make more sense for smaller gadgets like the iPod nano, for which it’ll deliver a minute of use for every minute you walk.

Of course, you can always grab the nPower PEG and shake it, Shake Weight-style, to generate energy on demand. But you’ll feel kind of silly doing it.

The $160 nPower PEG debuted a year ago, and just started shipping this fall. Tremont Electric, which makes the gizmo in Cleveland, Ohio, says it had some difficulty meeting demand but is ramping up production and will begin shipping new orders in February.

nPower PEG (Tremont Electric)

The Bottoms Up beer dispenser can pour up to 44 pints a minute, with just one person using it. Add a few helpers and it can reach 56 pints per minute, not far off one per second. That’s impressive enough, but take a look at how the glasses are “poured.” The machine fills them from the bottom:

This would be a fantastic addition to English pubs, where the 19 and 20-year old bartenders lack motivation and brains to the extent that one pint a minute is a miracle, and then the glass will be half-filled with foam. And that’s if you can get their attention to begin with.

But how does this magical machine work? Obviously, the cups have holes, but how do they reseal? Magnets. The plastic glasses have a floppy fridge-magnet inside, a circle which sticks itself to a corresponding donut-shape strip around the filling-hole. Here’s a birds-eye view, grabbed from a video on the product site.

So, the Bottoms Up pumps are fast, can hook up to any keg and – provided you have the rest of your gear clean and properly adjusted – you won’t waste beer via foam. But there is an obvious problem: waste of those glasses. Instead of a glass glass, which can be re-used over and over, these are designed to be disposable, to the extent that the little magnetic discs are pushed as an advertising opportunity:

A magnet on the fridge of the American household gets 20 impressions per day per person in the household, making this ad space the most viewed souvenir taken home from a venue. That also means it is taken home from the venue!

Still, who cares about that, right? After all, with beer coming at you at nine-times the normal speed, it’s hard to care about anything else.

Bottoms Up [Grinon Industries. Thanks, Mr. Abell!]

See Also:

• It's Beer O'Clock! Watch Has Built-In Bottle Opener
• How Wired.com Built Beer Robot, Our DIY Kegerator
• Beer Meets Bike in Limited Edition Pabst Blue Ribbon Fixie …