DIY Guitar Tuner

HackaDay has a fun little project up for those of you who play the guitar and have a do-it-yourself mentality. This little device can be used like a guitar pick. Using the buttons to select your note will cause the LEDs to flash at that frequency. The light will only be visible on the string when it’s in tune.

Glowing Liqour Pour Spout

This LED lit pour spout for your liquor is more than just a flashlight on top of a bottle. It uses the same physics as a fiber optic cable. The total internal reflection of the light in a fluid with a higher refractive index than air will keep the light inside of the liquor lighting up the curving stream and the liquid in the cup rather than lighting up the table. They make a great gift for anyone with a bar. Chances are they don’t already have one, and amazon has them cheap enough that you can afford to give away a bottle of liquor with it. Video of a green one below:

Security Camera Light

This lamp by A2591 is made to look like a security camera and can be used either as a desk lamp or wall mounted.

I’m not at all sure I’d like this as an indoor lamp, although it looks nicely adjustable, but I do like the concept as outdoor lighting. If I find an old broken down security camera somewhere, I’m tempted to tear out the guts, replace them with a light, and wire it up via a wireless motion sensor kit, and use it outside to make criminals think twice, day or night.

It would be the opposite concept of this security light with hidden digital video camera. They might even work well in concert, serving to obsfucate the true nature of the security.

(via the always awesome geekologie)

Steampunk Lamps | Frank Buchwald

The artist who created these lights , Frank Buchwald, has a design trait I commonly see among the greatest of machine oriented designers: He doesn’t so much see himself as an artist creating art, but as  evolving the design of an object to the point where the form becomes inseparable from the the function without becoming a slave to it; a state morre often seen in nature than machine.

Persistence of vision app for the iphone

Light Writer is an iphone app that displays flashing lights in order to create a persistence of vision effect. It allows you to write messages or images in the air with a wave of the hand. It sounds like a great way to quietly send a message to anyone in sight. I imagine it would only be effective in pretty dark conditions ,but I’m betting we haven’t seen the end of this app. It could be big. Available here via itunes.

(via crunchgear)

How to Make a 3-D Hologram With Stuff You Have Around the House

This is a way to make three dimensional holograms without lasers or special equipment. It uses stuff you already own, and the results are astounding. Bill Beaty shows us some examples in the video above. Here is a great page with pictures about how he stumbled upon the phenomenon one day out on a walk and pioneered the technique, and another page with detailed instructions. The technique relies upon the effect you see in very fine circular scratches on a shiny material (like car paint), where the reflection appears to form a straight line. By varying the location of the circles, you set the locations of the lines, and by varying their diameter, you vary their apparent depth.

Update: Reader Lali has noted that the above links aren’t working, so I’ll post a summary of the process:

1. Start with a material that can be scratched in a way that will create shiny scratches. A CD jewel case is a good first project.
2. Down at the very bottom of the material (or on something below and attached) do a small sketch of the object you want to make a hologram of. Something simple. I started with a cube and it was a bit tough for a first try, but it taught me what I needed to know. I’ll use it as an example.
3. using an adjustable circle drawing compass or something similar, put one point at the top point of your cube sketch and drag the other across near the top of the CD case to create a scratch arc. When you turn it near a point source of light, you should see a reflected point of light in the scratch that moves when you tilt the jewel case.
4. The 3D depth of the final hologram corresponds to the spacing between the compass points. repeat the above scratch process for the other points of the cube, setting the compass spacing closer for the closer portions of the cube, and farther for the more distant.
5. Set the bottom point at regular intervals along any lines that are going to be at the same 3D depth in the final hologram and continue making scratch arcs. For lines angling into the distance, you can just set your lower compass point at the midway point of the line in the sketch and set the spacing to fall between the lines you scratched for the endpoints. Continue this at regular intervals down the line. Your reflected points will now become reflected lines, complete with depth.

Honorable Mentions for Jan 09

A few things that caught my eye but didn’t merit a post to themselves:

How to use butane and fire to mount a tire that has come off its rim

The Ibex has now set two huge scientific records. It was the first animal to be cloned after extinction, and subsequently the first animal to ever become extinct twice. Better luck next time guys, this has great promise.

USB drive that masquerades as a floppy drive for those annoying things like bios updates that still tend to require them.

Salad Sunrise: Oil and vinegar container that takes advantage of their relative weights to serve them from a single container.

Flashlight hose nozzle. Why you would garden in the dark is beyond me. Most people have lights in their yard. This thing needs to be water powered at least.

Barbie digital fingernail printer. Pick your pattern, stick your finger in the printer. Instant manicure.

Washing machine built to take the whole basket. It looks great, but the more I think about it the less impressed I am.

Toaster Trebuchet catapults your toast with great accuracy.

Please consider this to be an open post as well. Feel free to post a link to your blog, throw up a link to something you think should be featured on this site, or talk about what is on your mind. All comments will be moderated, so don’t be spammy.

Laser Communicator

The coherent nature of laser light, combined with its low-divergence beam, makes it perfect for all sorts of fun projects. This is one you can do at home with simple, cheap parts. When you speak, the microphone picks up your voice and converts it into a signal that is used to vary the output of a  laser pointer.  The receiver is a solar cell attached to a piezoelectric speaker. With a pair of each, you can stay in communication as long as you have line of sight. It has the benefit of being hard to eavesdrop on as well. Pdf with instructions here. (Via crunchGear)

a similar project could be made to use the reflected light of a laser pointer off of a window to pick up vibrations and transmit sounds from distant buildings.

Candle Powered LED

I know this seems about as useful as the first time you heard about solar powered flashlights, but like the solar flashlight there is more to the story.

The problem with fire is that it puts out far more energy as heat than as light. By using thermoelectrics to generate electricity from the heat, ane use the electricity to power an efficient LED, you can produce far more light from a single candle. I think it would be fun to make a fire powered steampunk lantern, no batteries required; just toss in something burnable to power the bulbs.

The experiment serves to highlight the amount of energy we waste. The inefficiencies of our various devices are mostly expended as heat, which we use additional power to try and blow away. Research into simple, effective ways of turning heat into energy have the potential to be extremely rewarding. I intend to highlight more of them as I come across them.

(Via Tech-On)

HUD for Billiards

These are some top notch geeks. They built a setup to compute and project the trajectories of pool shots directly onto their table. It doesn’t work terribly well, but I think it is mostly a problem of low end hardware and strange setup. Why didn’t they put the webcam by the projector, pointed at the mirror?  By having it in the corner they make things immensely more difficult to compute. For more info and the code, go here.

I think once Surface goes mainstream, innovations like this will come in a flood.

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