Grandpa’s Magical toys Customer Review: Grandpa’s Magical toys
This movie is wonderful for children of any age. They will learn songs, hand games, and also about friendship. They will also learn that you are never to old to have a childlike heart.

-

iPhone hacker extraordinaire Erica Sadun made an application for the iPhone that will listen to music and identify it! She writes - Download a copy of the Listen beta. It s still *very* beta. Install it on your iPhone, get near music and run it. It will sample the music for 5 seconds and then attempt to contact the id server. If it succeeds, great, you ll see the song, artist and album. If it fails, nothing happens. You just wait 30 seconds and if you haven t gotten an ID, quit and restart the program.iPhone audio recognition [via] - Link. [Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Interview with Johnny Lee
Adam Parekh, of HackedGadgets, has a short interview with Johnny Lee, the computer engineer whose Wii remote hacks we (and everybody else on the InterTubes) have blogged about. Johnny also created the popular $14 Video Camera Stabilizer project featured in the premier issue of MAKE. AP: Your Wii projects have been taking the Web by storm! What attracted you to the Wiimote as your interaction device of choice? JL: Well, I was excited by the Wii Remote ever since the original press release about its capabilities was public. Ironically, I was an intern at Microsoft the summer before the Xbox 360 was launched. Several internal people, including me, were still trying to convince the Xbox group they should put an accelerometer into the controller. That, of course, didn’t happen. The Wii remote is one of the most sophisticated input devices available today and an amazing piece of engineering containing an accelerometer, camera, and wireless communication. Combined with the ease in which you can connect it to a computer made it an obvious choice for experimentation. AP: Have you had any discussions with Nintendo? Do you think they could use some of your techniques to enhance their console? JL: I have not formally had any contact with Nintendo about this. I speculate that the Nintendo engineers who developed the controller probably knew of this technique, but probably passed on the idea or were saving it for a later product launch. But, these ideas can definitely be used in a Wii title assuming they would be willing to bundle a little bit of new hardware with it. I know several game developers are starting to look at the idea. Hopefully, the game concepts will make it all the way to market. Interview with Johnny Lee - Link Related: Head tracking with the Wiimote - LinkTrack fingers with the Wiimote - LinkImproved Steadicam for under $40 - Link$14 Video Camera Stabilizer by Johnny Lee. You don’t have $10,000 to spend on a Steadicam? Make this ultra-low-cost video camera stabilizer and see how much better your video shots turn out. MAKE 01 - Page 84. [Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Pedal powered tennis ball launcher
Andrea sent in this awesome pedal powered tennis ball launcher! This is a chimera tennis ball cannon made from a bike that you can pedal. It is both cleanly powered and built from recycled bicycles. It allows players varying in skill levels to practice to be better at both tennis and cycling. The launcher is towed to the court on its built-in bicycle trailer. A bike is secured to it and functions to drive the device. Pedaling the cycle as one would on a trainer drives the two launcher wheels. The cyclist then aims and pulls the lever to launch balls to the hitter. Pedal powered tennis ball launcher - Link. [Read this article] [Comment on this article]

OMNIBOT fan book
Frankie writes - I found this new book in a bookstore in Shibuya. Omnibot Fan Book, published by Mycom, has been written by Techn’o'taku (a famous Japanese otaku who loves design, techno and toys). The book covers the history of toy robots from the early sixties to the just released i-Sobot (that’s the natural evolution of the Omnibots produced by Takara Tomy more than 20 years ago). In the next few day will try to take some photos of the beautiful designed pages of this book.OMNIBOT fan book - Link. [Read this article] [Comment on this article]

The stribe - touch-sensitive mixers with a LED matrix
Interesting touch-sensitive mixers with a LED matrix under the faders, Soundwidgets writes - The Stribe’s original name was “xenome” - a nod to Brian Crabtree’s amazing monome 40h project, which inspired me to build the first Stribe in the summer of ‘07. For many years, I’d been thinking about and experimenting with alternative interfaces, but it was Brian’s monome 40h that made me realize such a project could be successful without needing to be “discovered”, then manufactured and marketed by some huge conglomerate. Along the way I changed the name to avoid confusion and to more accurately describe the Stribe’s function. Stribe means “stripe” or “striped cloth” in Danish. Because Brian’s monome is an open project, monome.org contains tons of great information including schematics for their circuits, the firmware source, the Max/MSP applications… everything is there to study and learn. By poking through their designs, circuits and code, and the freely provided “how this works” Max/MSP examples, I was able to understand the basic ingredients that would be needed for my own project.The stribe - touch-sensitive mixers with a LED matrix, thanks Felixe! - Link. [Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Uber tracker and GPS eval boards…
Some new GPS action over @ SparkFun - It’s not quite small enough to track your cat, but the Uber Tracker is a beast of a product. This device may seem simple enough: get GPS coordinates and broadcast those coordinates over the cellular network - but it’s so much more! The Uber Tracker has open firmware and hackability. It’s also completely PTCRB and FCC certified meaning it is fully licensed to operate on any GSM network in North America. Configure the unit, power it up, and you’ll get an update every few minutes of the device’s position to your phone, your website, or your SQL database. Could you track your car? Sure. Ever wonder where your donated clothing goes? What about biological samples? It’s ‘big brother’ - but you get to play the older sibling’s role. The evaluation board using the ET312 SiRF III GPS receiver is finally done! This board will allow you to play with this very small but powerful GPS receiver.SparkFun Electronics - Link. [Read this article] [Comment on this article]

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 1:59 am and is filed under Toys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.