Mace wowed crowds at the Maker Faire with his dope glasses, sick rhymes and tycoon showers. Perhaps the last two were exaggerated but these glasses really are cool. The 20 x 6 matrix of LEDs are “driven by SPI from an integrated Arduino-compatible” board mounted on the right temple and powered by a Lithium-polymer battery mounted on the left temple. Charging and code downloading are done via USB. Swag is attained by wearing the glasses.

You can see more pictures of the shades on Mace’s Lytro profile. Mace said he’s planning to sell a kit of the glasses on his website once he’s polished the device; he seems to be having trouble with the hinges. He also said that if he can’t find a low cost solution he might turn to Kickstarter. It would be funny if Mr. West backed and filled up the fundraiser on his own.

[via Hack A Day & Reddit via MAKE]

Well, John Edgar Park, writer for MAKE magazine, has just what you need. You can now make a huge Arduino, six times the size of traditional microcontrollers. It’s called the Arduino GRANDE. No you can’t order one at Starbucks, but it will put old timey hair on your lip.

It is more macrocontroller than microcontroller, but it is fully functional. This large and in charge Arduino will be shown off at the upcoming Bay Area edition of Maker Faire. If you happen to be there, you can see how it was designed with 3D modeling software and then brought to life through laser-cutting.

It won’t be long before we see this beast in some crazy creations, I’m sure.

[via The Verge via Geekosystem]

Using an Arduino UNO, a WiFly Shield, a GoPro Hero 2, a three-axis accelerometer and lots of other bits and bobs that do important stuff, Kelly was able to turn a Tamiya Mini M05 R/C car into an analog arcade racer. The toy car connects to its base station via Wi-Fi, allowing it to be controlled wirelessly via a variety of controllers (including a steering wheel) and in return send a live first-person – first-toy car? – view as well as force feedback. He can even set it so that the camera pans in sync with the steering.

Want to know how to make your own Arduino WiFly Mini? You’re in luck: Kelly has a staggeringly comprehensive how-to on his website that is longer than the entire Harry Potter series. It was a compelling read. I couldn’t put it down. I like the part where Kelly realized he should be putting a series of instructions into one packet instead of sending packets with each instruction so the method more greatly resembles a PPM stream.

[via Make:]

reaDIYmates are described as “fun Wi-fi paper companions that move and play digital sounds depending on what’s happening in your digital life.” Basically you select the behavior of the reaDIYmate. You could animate them or have them play a special sound whenever you receive an email, get a Facebook message, a tweet, or other stuff like that. Inside the body of each toy or sculpture is a small box with a mini servo motor and a speaker. This is connected to a “brain” which has an MP3 decoder, 2GB of memory, Wi-fi connectivity, and a push-button on top.

These cute companions come in a bunch of cool designs and colors, or if you are more creative, they come in plain white so that you can customize them yourself.  They are also Arduino compatible, so that you can implement your own ideas. They can even interact with one another as shown in the demo video below:

Check out the reaDIYmate’s Kickstarter page for more details. A pledge of $130(USD) or more will get you a complete reaDIYmate brain, along with a paper toy or kinetic sculpture of your choice. $100 will get you the Barebones edition which includes the hardware, but you’ll have to make your own paper sculpture.

[via Ubergizmo]

It was built using an Arduino and a bunch of other spare parts. The robot is controlled via a web interface. It’s easier to just let them explain how it works. This is a robot playing drums, and that’s good enough for me.

“The Arduino receives the string, unpacks it back to a pattern and simple loops over the steps controlling each servo.” It also has “Horns” which are 2 small fans with a servo that push a piece of plastic against the blades. This little bot is fun to watch and seems like he would be a good jamming partner too. For more about how this bot was made check out Steffest’s blog.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

This project comes from the folks over at Waterloo Labs. The system lets you control the Etch-a-Sketch by standing in front of the Kinect. You just use a huge pencil or your hand to control the Etch-a-Sketch and draw what you want.

The video explains it much better than I can. The main thing is that you can draw onto the Etch-a-Sketch by drawing in thin air! How long will it be until Microsoft teams up with the toy company and offers us a retail version? I would buy that in a heartbeat.

[via Geeky-Gadgets]

To achieve the effect, Thecnocrat glued one LED each into eight ping pong balls, hooked the setup to an Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller board and wrote a code to recreate the light trail effect. He attached the whole thing to a black shirt with a YouTube logo and he was ready to load.

A lot of Hack A Day commenters are saying that the use of Arduino is overkill in this case and offered several simpler solutions. I only understood the ones that didn’t involve electronics. Still, it’s a free world. If a Vimeo user wants to be a YouTube window, I say let him.

[via Hack A Day]

This tiny stand-alone robot provides an open-source platform for digital fabrication, on a small scale. Piccolo is powered by an Arduino board, and supports movement along X, Y or Z axes. Simply attach a pen, pencil, brush or possibly even an X-Acto knife as its drawing medium. Piccolo can then access uploaded libraries which allow it to create drawings. Multiple small ‘bots can even be synchronized together to create larger illustrations or paintings.

It’s pretty interesting to see the little robot drawing stuff for you – I’m especially impressed by it’s ability to use the Z-axis to control pressure.

The team is currently working on turning Piccolo into a kit you can buy, along with accompanying software libraries to get you going.

There’s no word yet on when you’ll be able to purchase the Piccolo for yourself, but you can keep an eye out on for their website to go live soon.

[via designboom]

This radio-like device, dubbed the “Dymaxion Auto-Matic Buckminster Fuller” was made by Autuin from Free Geek Vancouver. The case is from an old dead radio. He bought an old Coleman multifunctional TV lantern and ripped the CRT out and put it in the case, then hooked it up to an Arduino board and programmed it to display images.

It is using a Markov algorithm to project theoretical and garbled quotes from R. Buckminster Fuller of geodesic dome fame. It doesn’t play anything, but it looks awesome and would totally be at home in the Fallout universe.

You can check out Autuin’s full build log and a little video snippet of the Dymaxion radio in action here.

[Hack a Day via Geekosystem via Neatorama]

Namely, it would keep me from the daily morning conversation with my seven-year-old about the weather outside. She rolls out of bed each morning and comes in my office and wants to know how hot or cold it is outside. Her little brain doesn’t work in absolutes, so telling her it’s going to be 65° out means nothing to her. She’s also got a lot that fiery Italian in her thanks to her mom, so she gets pretty upset if I tell her she needs long sleeves and a jacket in the morning, and then she gets hot on the playground.

What she needs is this Cryoscope gadget, which lets you feel what the temperature outside is like without leaving the house. An LED glows to give you an indication at a glance if it’s hot or cold outside. The current build actually lets you feel what tomorrow’s temperature will be like, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be used for current weather too.

To build the Cryoscope, Godshaw took a Peltier element and placed it on top of a heat sink with a cooling fan, and a RGB LED on the bottom. The system gets its temperature information from a web-based application, relaying it to an Arduino controller. The controller and the Peltier element then heat or cool an aluminum cover to the appropriate temperature, with a range of 0 to 100°F. Then you simply lay a hand on it and know exactly what it will feel like when you go outside tomorrow. It even compensates the temperature to account for wind chill, humidity and the properties of the aluminum cube itself.

I wonder how hard it would be to build one of these for myself.

[via CNET]

Check out the video. I love the way this thing moves and lights up. This is a hack that any Invaders nerd will want to do, but only a few of us will ever answer the call. Grant Gibson, we salute you.

[via Make:]

Designed by Benjamin Redford and the OllyFactory (get it?). Olly and Molly are USB-connected, Arduino-powered gadgets which notify you when you have a new message by letting you follow your nose or taste buds. Olly is the smelly one of the pair – and can be filled with a scented oil of your choice – and then emit an aroma as a notification. You can even stack up multiple Ollies so you can have different digital events trigger different smells.

Molly isn’t stinky at all. This little bot holds onto some little candies, and drops one into its little bin whenever your tweets gets retweeted a pre-set number of times. Though it doesn’t look like it can hold too many candies – which is good if you get a lot of retweets. You wouldn’t want to start gaining weight from Twitter now? That’s all we need now.

Both Olly and Molly are raising funds now over on Kickstarter – and they still have a ways to go if you’d like one. The fundraising ends on Feb. 10, and still needs to raise another $27,000 of its $35,000 goal. A pledge of $50 or more gets you an Olly, and $55 or more gets you a Molly. Higher pledges will result in various combos of Ollies and Mollies, as well as the ability to customize the look of yours.

Ladyada is showing off a new project called Adalight, which uses an Arduino board and a strip of RGB LEDs around the back of your display to create an ambient color backdrop for your computer monitor. The system automatically detects the average colors around the perimeter of your display, and immediately responds with the appropriate LED color in the proper section of the LED strip. Since it works as a high-speed screen capture utility in the background, it works with pretty much any application on your computer.

Open source software using the Processing library runs on your PC, Mac or Linux and interfaces with the Arduino over USB, and sends the correct light colors to each of the LEDs pixels. See the Adalight in action in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Pretty cool, no? I suppose it could get to be a little annoying after a while, but it still might be pretty cool for 3D games and action movies. While you can build the Adalight from scratch, you can also purchase a project kit over at the MakerSHED for $49.95 (USD) to help you get started. The kit includes a strand of 25 RGB LED pixels and a 5VDC power adapter, but you will still need to purchase the Arduino and USB cable, and follow the rest of the build instructions to finish the project.

He wired up an Arduino board, connected some motors to drive the dials and attached a controller. You can watch modder alpinedelta32 use it in the video. I know, I know, you’ve seen people draw with an Etch-A-Sketch before, but when is the last time you’ve them use one with an NES controller?

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

What would have been really cool is if he had modded the screen of the Etch-A-Sketch to mimic and draw a game while it is being played. Yeah, hit me up when you accomplish that one. So there.

[via NowhereElse (FR) via Engadget]

The central component of the device is a set of resonator bells for kids – similar to a xylophone, but with plastic parts instead of wood – but putting the whole thing together was anything but elementary for Watson. He had to improvise a lot, although he was also able to take notes from similar projects. In the end, he had a pair of Arduino clones controlling eight pager motors, one for each note. Watson made the wooden mallets himself, and also designed the plastic hinges and had them 3d printed. So was it worth all the trouble?

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I think this is one of the best DIY projects I’ve ever seen in a while. Watson should probably paint or decorate the board to make it look better, but it looks neat as it is. I also love the fact that you can program it to play songs. I wonder if it’s possible to enhance it so that it will play a different tune depending on who’s at the door. I already have a great tune for door-to-door salesmen.

[David Watson via Hack A Day]

There are five levels available: mild, regular, hot, extra hot, and flaming. I usually go for regular, but I do want to try out the flaming one someday – and maybe wear the Nuclear Taco Sensor Helmet while doing so.

This colorful helmet is actually a discomfort meter that measures just how uncomfortable you are while you chomp down that taco by taking note of how much you’re sweating, notes your temperature, and measures how much of that water + yogurt liquid you’re drinking to soothe your tastebuds.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The sensors that measure all this stuff are connected to an Arduino board and a meter that displays if the taco you’re eating is “no sweat” or if it’s a “hot volcano.” Aside from that, the helmet’s front has been installed with a camera that records every moment of your taco discomfort.

The helmet was developed by a team from altLab in Lisbon and won first place in the 2011 CodeBits 48-hour hacking competition.

[via Verge via Geeky Gadgets]

This real-world version of OutRun was built by a guy named Gustavo. It has little cars which speed down an endless-loop racetrack as the driver steers to avoid obstacles. The controller has a steering wheel from an R/C car, and miniature gas and brake pedals you can control with your fingertips. A scrolling backdrop contains the obstacle cars, while your vehicle is on a motorized track that moves it side to side. LEDs and photosensors are used to detect when your car reaches the edges, and magnetic sensors detect when you’ve collided with another vehicle. Here’s a video showing Gustavo’s analog OutRun game in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The funny thing about this is that SEGA’s 1960s arcade game Grand Prix was actually analog, and used similar mechanical principles, as you can see in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via Microsiervos (ES) via FaseExtra (ES)]

Made by the folks at redpepper, the whole set-up may look like part of a Rube Goldberg machine, but it’s actually pretty simple. But not so simple that I’d be able to make my own Beeri, even if all the materials were given to me and the instructions were relayed to me in the form of a children’s song. The first part of Beeri is a Twitter account. That’s the link between the robot and Siri. The real world link is Beeri’s monster truck. Powered by an Arduino Uno equipped with a WiFly Shield, the truck scans the Twitter account for a tweet with the word “pour” on it, upon which it will deliver the beer in a very monster trucky way:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

It’s not practical, convenient or safe, but I’m sure the redpepper folks had a lot of fun building it. I’d like to see someone combine Siri with the breakfast-making machine and Beeri’s monster truck delivery service. Straight into the person’s mouth.

[via TechCrunch]

As you can see, the refrigerator has a large touchscreen for a door. It seems that the concept will only work if the contents are given RFID tags, but once they are, the fridge becomes really useful. With Kreuzer and Schilling’s future fridge, not only will you be able to see what’s inside without actually opening the door, you’ll also be able to see a variety of information, like expiration dates, and recipes which use the ingredients you have. The fridge will of course be connected to the Internet, providing price and location guides of nearby stores for replenishing supplies. But as you’ll see in the video below, the prototype version can’t do any of that fancy stuff – yet.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

If this particular concept seems familiar to you, it’s because a designer named Ashley Legg came up with an eerily similar idea which made its rounds on the Internet last year, and LG showed something similar, but much more basic at this year’s CES show. I’m sure Kreuzer and Schilling came up with this on their own though. I hope they continue to build on their prototype – their idea might be cool, but a real fridge would be cooler.

But if you happen to have really fat fingers and are a pretty huge person overall, then you might appreciate having a larger of the gaming console. Pictured above is the wall-mounted gaming portable(?), although its case , which looks and plays just one of those old Game & Watch handheld video games.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I mean, if we’ve got giant iPhones (although limited in functionality) and giant bathing ladies, then why not a giant Game & Watch?

The giant Nintendo Game & Watch was made by Tobie Nortje for the reception area of 21tanks. It was built using a computer monitor embedded in the oversize case, while the buttons are connected to an Arduino control board. Signals are sent back and forth from the controls to a PC, allowing users to play games from the classic platform, in this case, powered by PicaPic.

[via PC World via Dvice]