Tag: Cheap

High quality microscopes cost thousands of dollars and can be hard to operate and maintain. A group of researchers from Stanford University are close to changing that with a microscope that’s made mostly out of paper and costs less than a dollar to make.

We’ve featured a few skins for the PlayStation 4 and the DualShock 4 controller. But if you’re looking for an easier and more affordable way to personalize your system, check out Flaming Toast’s decals for the DualShock 4’s light bar.

The folks at PiFace – makers of hardware interfaces for the Raspberry Pi – wanted to make a camera rig that could create the bullet time effect popularized by The Matrix, but they didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on cameras.

Chinese company Coi+ recently released a portable battery that not only works with LEGO pieces, it comes with a few bricks too. It’s called the Power Brick. It has a 4200mAh battery inside and it charges gadgets via USB.

Mobile devices let us look up practically anything we want to know about anywhere and anytime, but there’s nothing like looking at the real deal. Relics and artifacts invoke a sense of wonder and fire up our imagination.

Oh, China. You’re such a great nation, but sometimes we’ve got to call you on your ridiculous reinterpretations of trademarked and copyrighted works from other parts of the world. This handheld gaming console is one such example.

Art Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards are elegantly customizable, but they’re very expensive and may not have enough keys for your needs. If you’re an avid user of Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, AutoCAD and other programs that have a ton of commands, check out the Shortcut-S keyboard.

Here’s another computer looking for a dumb terminal to mate with. Like the ICE xPC, Tango crams in the main components of a computer into a palm-sized case. It also uses a dock to connect to an HDMI display and other peripherals.

Heads up, Google Glass Explorers! Here’s a way to make your wearable computer draw even more attention to yourself. A company called GPOP is selling vinyl skins for your Glass. The skins are 3M vinyl cut to fit the various parts of Google’s tech.

A small robotics company called UFactory is working on the uArm, a small version of the industrial robot arms we often see tirelessly moving about in modern manufacturing assembly lines. The uArm is about the size of a desk lamp and is controlled through an Arduino-compatible board.

Go ahead Android users, roll your eyes. But this is new territory for iOS gamers. A jailbreak app called Controllers for All makes the PlayStation 3’s Dualshock 3 controller compatible with all games use the controller support introduced in iOS 7.

Etsy shop Chinook Crafts is a treasure trove of geeky trinkets. I was going to feature its Pokémon Kanto gym badges by way of GoNintendo when I spotted an unusual category in the shop’s list: tombstones.

Valve has a life-size model of the Sentry Gun from Team Fortress 2 to guard their office. Programmer and 3D artist Jeff Wong may not be a big shot like Gabe Newell and his employees, but he has a turret manning his house too.

3D printing shop Mixee Labs – makers of awesome geeky jewelry – will soon launch a custom bobblehead printing service called Mixee Bobblers. As with the jewelry, Mixee Bobblers will let you design your own bobblehead right from your browser.

The past couple of years saw the launch of tiny computers meant to replace the traditional desktop setup. We have Android mobile devices that dock into larger devices, Android-on-a-stick HDMI devices, Windows 8 and its hybrid army and Canonical’s vision of a smartphone that’s also an Ubuntu desktop computer.

Many of the so-called smart TVs today have built-in browsers, apps and other fancy features, but most of them can only be viewed one at a time, i.e. when you’re not watching TV. A new company called SeeSpace wants to make cable TV smarter with InAiR, a device that displays information without interrupting what you’re watching.