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Dear Aunt TUAW: $1.39 iPad holder
Dear Aunt TUAW: Behold the $1.39 iPad holder. It holds the iPad perfectly in both orientations. All of the iPad users in my office have one, and it's the best. It's very very stable, too. Love and kissies, Your nephew Joel
World of WarCrafts: Make your own leather blood elf ears
This World of WarCrafts has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. With the fabulous legion of blood elves dominating the Horde population, players are powerless to resist the appeal of the Sin'dorei. Even Alliance players find themselves watching their Orbs of the Sin'dorei, waiting impatiently for Fabulous Time to come off cooldown. My gift to you is your very own Orb of the Sin'dorei for personal use: leather blood elf ears. These babies are easily worn with a blonde wig -- for those of you who are not naturally fabulous -- or on a headband. Follow us after the break for a step-by-step how-to gallery that shows you how to create your own fabulous leather blood elf ears!
Cut-rate, webcam-based 3D scanner coming soon to a MakerBot store near you
3D scanning seems magical enough without bringing things like Lego Mindstorms contraptions into the mix. Now a cat named Andy Barry (a research engineer at NASA Ames Research Laboratory's Autodesk Innovations Lab) has gone and built one out of a webcam, a laser, and a whole lot of moxie. The premise is pretty straight-forward: a red laser sweeps across an object while the webcam keeps an eye on the beam's deflection (the more the beam shifts, the closer the object is to the camera). The computer uses this data to calculate the thickness of the object. Sounds like the perfect compliment to your Cupcake 3D printer, eh? With any luck, you should see it at the MakerBot store at around the $200 mark sometime this fall.
DIY Steadicam for the iPhone
This is really awesome. While there are rumors that an iPhone 4 Steadicam is in production, Spencer Watson didn't wait -- as you can see above, he went ahead and built a Steadicam-type rig for his own iPhone out of some parts he had sitting around. As you can see from the video it takes, it works pretty well. While you probably wouldn't want to use it in place of a professional rig (the iPhone isn't really meant for high-motion video, and it looks like he's applied some other stabilization filters), it definitely looks better than if the iPhone was on its own. You can pick up some of the parts he used in his online store, but it all looks pretty easy to put together. All together, he says it was about $40 of parts from Home Depot or a skate store, and I'm betting it's about a weekend of work. Very cool. [via Make]
World of WarCrafts: How to make your own WoW-inspired crafts
World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; email lisa@wow.com with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations. The pre-expansion lull is the perfect time to pour your enthusiasm for the World of Warcraft into more creative outlets. Your stable of characters may be perfectly outfitted to face the coming Cataclysm -- but what about the person behind the keyboard? Is the entrance to your lair clearly marked? Are your earrings up to snuff? Would Thrall approve of the place you lay your head at night? Check out our how-to gallery of do-it-yourself WoW crafts below; just follow the blue text links under each photo to find simple instructions for making your own version of each craft. %Gallery-96364% World of WarCrafts is always looking for more how-to's on WoW-themed arts and crafts of every stripe. Send photos, descriptions and instructions of your not-for-profit creations to lisa@wow.com. World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself by emailing lisa@wow.com with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.
DIY tablet kit is less than $400, more complicated than an iPad
Tired of The Man holding you down on the tablet front with his oppressive App Stores, his tyrannical carrier constraints, and other outrageous insults to your civil liberties? Well now you can break free of this stranglehold, thanks to a company called Liquidware and its open source, DIY tablet starter kit. The premise is simple: Liquidware provides a touchscreen OLED display (4.3-inch, 480 x 272, resistive touch), the BeagleBoard guts (a single-board computer driven by a 720MHz ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP3530 CPU, with 2GB of NAND and an SD card slot), and the BeagleJuice battery module, along with an SD card pre-loaded with Angstrom Linux. You put all the pieces together and then just basically go nuts, designing your own application marketplace, infrastructure for direct-to-consumer video and audio sales, and a revolutionary and magical user interface that blurs the lines between waking life and a hallucinatory dream-state where anything is possible, and the only limitation is yourself. Check the Moscone Center's booking information below to see scheduling availability for your developer conference, and hit the source link to offer up your $393.61 to Liquidware.
MakerBot prints another MakerBot, the circle is complete
MakerBot isn't the first self-replicating 3D printer -- that spectacular distinction went to the RepRap Darwin back in 2008 -- but that doesn't make it any less awesome that the $750 machine is now able to produce its own frame. With a month's labor, owner Webca was able to create the entire plastic chassis you see above, using a second MakerBot constructed of the traditional wooden parts. Without knowing how much goop went into the project, it's a touch difficult to say if the method is economical, but there's nothing to keep you from trying the same. Best of all, Webca decided to share his plans with the world -- you'll find instructions for all 150 pieces at the source link, a month off of work in your wildest dreams.
MSI X340 reborn as DIY carbon fiber tablet, watch it stream YouTube at 720p (video)
Tired of touchscreen tablets that lack speed, a usable UI, or support for a certain streaming video format that will go unnamed? As one of our favorite sayings goes, if you want it done right, do it yourself. One Engadget reader took that idea to heart in crafting the 13.4-inch carbon fiber contraption you see above, imbuing it with enough high-end netbook parts to run Windows 7 at a brisk pace and play 720p video on its large, resistive touchscreen. Starting with the guts of an MSI X320, adding an accelerometer and 40GB solid state drive and finally sandwiching a random Chinese digitizer on top, the whole 1.6GHz Atom Z530 machine cost him under $700 in parts. For that price, we're sure many of you would be happy to follow in his footsteps, but if not, by all means continue complaining to your tablet manufacturer of choice. We have another favorite saying: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Video after the break; Q&A with the creator at our more coverage link.
Maker Faire 2010, in pictures
What does it take to pique your curiosity? Would a building-sized, needle-nosed 50's space ship do the trick? Perhaps the female form, constructed entirely out of obsolete typewriter parts? How about a machine designed specifically to find out how many licks it takes to get to the center of that blasted Tootsie Roll pop? These were just a few of the many wonders present at the 2010 Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, and despite being a lifelong resident of the region, this weekend marked my very first attendance at the event. Needless to say, I've been kicking myself for not exploring my DIY side earlier. You don't have to do the same, however, because I brought home practically enough pictures to give you a virtual tour; you'll find robotic spiders, NES banjos, LEGO cities, automobile-sized bicycles, miniature nautical battles and much, much more in the gallery below. Now, go get lost in there. %Gallery-93609% Special Bonus: Rock band OK Go, performing under the influence of H2O. Quite literally, we might add. When was the last time you rocked out underwater?
Students accelerate cubicle arms race with PlayStation Eye-tracked, iPhone-guided coilgun (video)
DIY weaponry gets more lethal with each passing year; where once we were content with a simple foam missile launcher, technology has progressed such that our automated turrets now spew screwdriver bits, airsoft and paintballs. As progress forges ahead, two engineering students at the University of Arkansas have added injury to insult with this four-stage DIY coilgun. Using an Arduino microcontroller to actuate the firing mechanism and steer the monstrous wooden frame, they nimbly control the badass kit with an iDevice over WiFi, and line up targets using a repurposed PlayStation Eye webcam. While we'd of course prefer to have our phone SSH into the gun over 3G, we're not going to argue with success. We'd like to keep our lungs un-perforated, thank you very much. See it in action after the break.
Canon DSLR shutter remote hacked into Atari joystick
Just point and shoot. Video after the break.
Students program Human Tetris into 8-bit microcontroller, give away schematics for free (video)
Sure, Project Natal is the hotness and a little bird tells us PlayStation Move is pretty bodacious, but you don't have to buy a fancy game console to sooth your motion-tracking blues. When students at Cornell University wanted to play Human Tetris (and ace a final project to boot), they taught a 20Mhz, 8-bit microcontroller how to follow their moves. Combined with an NTSC camera, the resulting system can display a 39 x 60 pixel space at 24 frames per second, apparently enough to slot your body into some grooves -- and as you'll see in videos after the break, it plays a mean game of Breakout, too. Full codebase and plans to build your own at the source link. Eat your heart out, geeks.
Auto-dimming electrochromic panels reduce glare when driving (video)
It's rush hour, and you're headed due West on your evening commute -- the sun burning holes in your eyes. You could flip down a window visor, trading your field of view for visibility. Or, with a prototype shown off at Intel's 2010 International Science and Engineering Fair, you could simply let the windshield darken on its own. Two San Diego students (both accustomed to copious amounts of sunshine) rigged a Toyota Prius to do just that by stringing up electrochromic panels, which dim when voltage is applied. The trick is figuring out when and where to apply it, because when the sun is shining the panels themselves all receive the same amount of light. So instead of gauging it at the glass, Aaron Schild and Rafael Cosman found that an ultrasonic range finder could track the driver's position while a VGA webcam measured the light coming through, and darken the sections liable to cause the most eyestrain. We saw a prototype in person, and it most certainly works... albeit slowly. If you're rearing to roll your own, it seems raw materials are reasonably affordable -- Schild told us electrochromic segments cost $0.25 per square inch -- but you may not need to DIY. Having won $4,000 in prize money at the Fair, the teens say they intend to commercialize the technology, and envision it natively embedded in window glass in the not-too-distant future. Here's hoping GM gives them a call. See pics of the Prius below, or check out a video demo of their prototype right after the break. %Gallery-93034%
Student moves quadriplegics with Wiimote wheelchair control (video)
There were certainly a couple whiz kids at Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair this year, but high school senior John Hinckel's a regular MacGyver: he built a wheelchair remote control out of a couple sheets of transparent plastic, four sliding furniture rails and some string. A Nintendo Wiimote goes in your hat and tells the whole system what to do -- simply tilt your head in any direction, and accelerometer readings are sent over Bluetooth. The receiving laptop activates microcontrollers, directing servo motors to pull the strings, and acrylic gates push the joystick accordingly to steer your vehicle. We tried on the headset for ourselves and came away fairly impressed -- it's no mind control, but for $534 in parts, it just might do. Apparently, we weren't the only ones who thought so, as patents are pending, and a manufacturer of wheelchair control systems has already expressed interest in commercializing the idea. See the young inventor show it off after the break.
Cellbots get Nexus One upgrade, ad-hoc motion control (video)
Sprint and Verizon may have shunned the Nexus One, but that doesn't mean the handsets can't be put to good use: these Android-controlled, Arduino-powered Cellbots now feature the one true Googlephone as the CPU. At Intel's 2010 International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, we got our hot little hands on the DIY truckbots for the first time, and found to our surprise they'd been imbued with accelerometer-based motion control. Grabbing a Nexus One off a nearby table, we simply tilted the handset forward, back, left and right to make the Cellbot wheel about accordingly, bumping playfully into neighbors and streaming live video the whole time. We were told the first handset wirelessly relayed instructions to the second using Google Chat, after which point a Python script determined the bot's compass facing and activated Arduino-rigged motors via Bluetooth, but the real takeaway here is that robots never fail to amuse. Watch our phone-skewing, bot-driving antics in a video after the break, and see what we mean.
Homemade 16TB NAS dwarfs the competition with insane build quality (video)
From the man that brought you the OS Xbox Pro and the Cinematograph HD comes... a cockpit canopy filled with hard drives? Not quite. Meet the Black Dwarf, a custom network-attached-storage device from the mind of video editor Will Urbina, packing 16TB of RAID 5 magnetic media and a 1.66GHz Atom N270 CPU into a completely hand-built Lexan, aluminum and steel enclosure. Urbina says the Dwarf writes at 88MB per second and reads at a fantastic 266MB per second, making the shuttlecraft-shaped 12.7TB array nearly as speedy as an SSD but with massive capacity and some redundancy to boot. As usual, the DIY guru shot a professional time-lapse video of his entire build process, and this one's not to be missed -- it showcases some pretty spiffy camerawork as well as the man's welding skills. See sparks fly after the break.
iPad merges with kitchen cabinet, sacrificing portability for utility
From the moment we saw the so-called "magical device," we knew the lucrative digital cookbook market would never be quite the same, but it's one thing to imagine an iPad as the centerpiece of one's kitchen, and something else entirely to see to see it in the flesh. TUAW reader Alan Daly built his directly into the side of a kitchen cabinet, and set it to work doling out Epicurious recipes, streaming Jamie Oliver, and surfing some of the world's best websites (in our oh-so-humble opinion) well out of the way of troublesome meat splatter. In lieu of flying toasters, his screen displays a virtual aquarium when it's not in use, and the whole assembly seems to be a simple matter of cutting a hole and affixing a pair of wooden strips for support. It's not clear, however, how he keeps it charged. Maybe that's the magic Steve keeps talking about. Video after the break.
Bacteria's back with portable Nintendo 64, complete how-to guide
The quest to build the perfect portable Nintendo 64 continues, but we imagine we'll stop seeing so many disparate designs soon. That's not because Bacteria's latest bulbous handheld has achieved perfection -- far from it -- but rather because he's provided a 2.5-hour, step-by-step video guide to help you build it from the ground up. And hey, the system isn't too shabby, either. The "iNto64" portable features integrated Controller, Rumble and Expansion Paks for complete N64 functionality, built-in speakers and a headphone jack, rechargeable batteries for up to three hours of play, even a video-out port if you get tired of staring at the ubiquitous 5-inch Sony PSone LCD. The only obvious oversight is controller ports for more inputs -- seems our buddy Bacteria wasn't a big fan of GoldenEye. See it play some of N64's other best games after the break, while we dust off our gamebit screwdriver. Obvious though it may seem, know what you're getting into before you do likewise; ripping up classic cart-based consoles isn't for the faint of heart.
Winscape virtual window features Wiimote headtracking, absolutely made of win
We have not modified the above picture in any way -- Scout's Honor. That's a real baby, wearing a real IR necklace that interacts with a real Wiimote. What's not real, of course, is the view of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. That is generated by Ryan Hoagland's DIY virtual window, a brilliant pastiche of interior design, RED ONE footage and Johnny Chung Lee-style headtracking, all directed to your eyes by a Mac Pro feeding a pair of plasma screens. As the viewer moves around, dual 1080p images move the opposite direction, providing the convincing illusion of looking out a real pane of glass at the incredibly detailed scenery beyond. Exciting? Then you'll be giggling like Jr. when you hear it's for sale. After spending a year figuring out how to mount, drive and cool the whole shebang, Hoagland would like you to have one too; he plans to have basic kits ready by July for under $3000. Watch baby-powered plasma in motion after the break, as well as a sweet time-lapse video of the build process. [Thanks, Andy, ArjanD]
DIY coolness: a duct tape iPad sleeve and two clever docks
Ahhhh, the refreshing ingenuity of TUAW readers! Frank Hsueh might have been out of quid after buying his iPad, or he perhaps he just likes the texture of duct tape. As Frank noted in an email to TUAW this morning, he made an iPad sleeve out of nothing but a bubble envelope, duct tape, double-sided tape, and an Apple sticker from an iPod shuffle. Frank used up his roll of double-sided tape securing the inner bubble padding, so he used the tape core to make an iPad stand. As Frank said, it's "perfect for movie watching or notes typing (with wireless keyboard) in landscape mode." Another TUAW reader, Wilson Lam, had an even more green solution for an iPad stand -- while he's waiting for a stand from Quirky, Wilson found that a cardboard cup holder from a fast-food restaurant could be turned into a utilitarian iPad stand. Check out the gallery below for more photographic evidence of these fun DIY projects. %Gallery-90207%
