thimble
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'Monopoly' is killing the thimble and it's all your fault
Monopoly's venerable thimble is not passing Go and it won't collect $200. The sewing accessory has been part of the board game since 1935, but voters decided to ditch it during a recent contest for a more modern replacement.
12 gifts for tireless tinkerers
They say the best gifts are the ones you make yourself. But that doesn't necessarily mean you, the gifter, needs to be doing the assembly. Sometimes the giftee will enjoy building their own present. Over the last several years the maker movement has really taken off. And whether you're shopping for an accomplished builder or someone just looking to get their toes wet, we've got a few suggestions. If there's someone in your life that's super into making everything themselves (and you love them enough to drop $1,000 on a gift for them) consider a 3D printer like the Replicator Mini+ from MakerBot. If a grand is a little extreme for you, consider a simple driver set, like 64-piece one from iFixIt. They'll be able to open up and (hopefully) put anything back together with it. If the creator in your life is more into coding than building, consider a tool like RPG Maker, or for the wee one in your life Ozobot's Evo is an excellent place to start teaching programming skills. For our full list of recommendations in all categories, don't forget to stop by our main Holiday Gift Guide hub.
Kickstarter celebrates STEM with a slate of kid-focused projects
This week, Kickstarter hosted a special STEM event at its headquarters in Brooklyn, showing off a variety of products intended to teach kids programming skills. If the prevailing wisdom is "hook 'em while they're young," that ethos was certainly on display here: The projects were fun and colorful, and one was even meant for children as young as three.
Thimble wants to ship you tinkering kits every month
A Kickstarter project aims to be the perfect solution for the DIY crowd. Thimble, which has already beat its pledged goal of $25,000, says it wants to deliver different electronic kits to tinkerers every month, with the first of the series being a WiFi robot. Those of you who are interested can use these do-it-yourself care packages to learn to code, build and hack, helped by guided tutorials and a community Thimble hopes to grow over time.
Thimble concept translates real-world input into real-time Braille (video)
From the great tomorrowland of concept videos comes yet another potentially life-changing product: a thimble (looks more like a one-finger glove to us) that takes ambient input and relays it in via an electro-tactile grid to the wearer's finger in Braille. It gets text input from an embedded camera, like in the picture above, or pulls RSS feeds, books, or presumably any other text via a Bluetooth-paired smartphone. We are, of course, addicted to the flow of info our mobile devices feed us throughout the day, and this little guy seems like the perfect tool to bring that flow more easily to the visually impaired. Now, venture capitalists, work your magic -- we'll be expecting to see this thing on shelves just in time for holidays season 2012. Video after the jump.
Smart Finger measuring thimbles are both conceptually and practically unreal
Time to pause today's stream of real news and breathe a deep wistful sigh. If only. That's our reaction to this Smart Finger "distance measuring device," which combines the natural human urge to measure things by eyeballing them with the ruthless precision of electronics. Data is obtained by beaming a signal from one of these thimble-shaped finger straddlers to the other and calculating how long it takes to traverse the gap between the two. Then you can get fancy by storing distances inside these silicone shells' built-in memory and using them to work out the volume of a given three-dimensional space. Top marks are also earned for the integrated design that means the two parts fit into one curvy little device. If only, indeed.
GRAB proves haptics research is in for a bumpy ride
One of the first times that we encountered haptics, or the study of force feedback, was while playing StarFox 64 back in 1997 (was it really that long ago?), with its Rumble Pak -- that little motor that shook the whole controller every time you sustained a laser hit. Today, haptics has gone from the realm of stellar video games to simulating the edge of a knife. A team of Mexican and Italian scientists announced last week that they've created virtual surfaces to fool the brain into thinking that a flat surface is actually bumpy or pointed. The researchers created a system called GRAB, which consists of a mechanized thimble, connected to the end of a motorized arm. Once the subject puts a finger inside the thimble, various motors create force feedback, and limit motion along a left-right axis, all of which could be used in medical robotics and training, so that surgeon hopefuls can better simulate operations without actually cutting any flesh. Better yet, if these scientists continue along this route, by the time the next version of Call of Duty comes out, receiving a bayonet jab may feel really close to actually drawing blood.[Via Futurismic]
