Tag: Electronics

The 3D printing projects we’ve seen are usually made of plastic material. We’ve also seen ones made from chocolate, sandstone and even living cells, but we haven’t seen a 3D printed electronic gadget. Until now. Researchers at the University of Warwick have invented a plastic composite that can be used to do just that.

Scientists at the Tufts School of Engineering and at the University of Illinois have created simple electronic devices that harmlessly dissolve after a set period of time. The scientists call their invention transient electronics, devices which could have a huge impact on medical devices and on the environment in general.

Despite the abundance of cables and wires in the gadget world, there is still an underwhelming number of devices associated with tentacled animals. The figures should at least be whelming. That’s why we should all welcome the PowerSquid Surge Protector: Calamari Edition.

It’s a science fiction staple – a character gets blasted, sliced or run over, but instead of dying it just stares at its wound while its body repairs itself as everyone watches in disbelief. Here’s a development that brings us just that much closer to that: circuitry that can heal itself, developed by a team of engineers at the University of Illinois.

Is this the death of the light switch? French design firm Quarks has designed a special paint that can be used in conjunction with electronics in order to control appliances. So for example you can turn a lamp on or off just by touching the surface coated with the special paint.

Those crazy cats over at iFixit are always tearing stuff up. If I break stuff, I tend to get in trouble, but when they do it, seems all of geekdom pays attention. I like getting to see what is inside the controllers and there is surprisingly less stuff inside than I expected.

Do you get pumped up at the thought of assembling your own PC? Do you regularly find yourself surrounded by circuit boards and the smell of solder? Do you adore Arduino? Then you’ll love Atelier Kurth’s Happy Covers, awesome pillow covers with electronic parts printed on them.

Sander Mulder made a Pong Clock way back in 2005, but Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries ups the ante with the Monochron, a Pong-themed clock for tinkerers. If you want to have one you better know how to solder, because the Monochron will be delivered to you unassembled, and by that I mean you’ll have to install all the resistors and capacitors yourself.

Are you the type of person who’s curious about what makes gadgets work? Love tearing stuff down? Would you like to build your own gadgets? Then you might want to get yourself one of Make’s Electronics Components packs, the perfect complement to their Electronics Book, which lets you dive into the world of tinkering with its lessons, experiments and projects.

Who says there’s not a way to make Thanksgiving just as geeky as every other day of the year? The guys over at Sparkle Labs have made a simple PDF template you can download to turn your table into a festival of technological bounty.

So you’ve got an old Xbox lying around the house and you don’t know what to do with it? Why not do like this guy did and float it in your fish tank? Yep, thanks to the non-conductive cooling properties of mineral oil, this submerged Xbox system still works as well as it did the day it shipped from Microsoft.

Sure, you might have just gone off and bought yourself a brand new 27-Inch iMac this week, but if that system seems like overkill for your needs, you could can always go to the opposite extreme.

There are certainly a ton of different ways to tell time, but this retro-modern digital clock is definitely one of the cooler designs I’ve seen in a while. The Ice Tube clock ($70 USD) gets its brilliant blue display thanks to an old-school Russian-issued VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) tube.

If you’re a tinkerer like me, you’ve probably cracked the case open on at least a few of your electronic gadgets to see what they look like on the inside. But I bet you’ve never seen the guts of your video game console quite like this.

Modder-friendly electronics company SparkFun Electronics recently held what they hope will be an annual event called the Autonomous Vehicle Competition, which is basically a race of proto-Autobots around one of SparkFun’s buildings. The contest was initially employees-only, but SparkFun realized it would be much more fun to have their customers join so that was what they did.

One of the most popular computers from the 1980s, the Commodore 64, is having a minor renaissance as an electronic musical instrument. The C64’s audio chip is famous for producing an array of warm, familiar 8-bit beats and blips.