Electronics & Gadgets

Over on Current TV, there is a great pod about the Handmade Music Nights held at Etsy Labs every month. The events invite people to come play and show off their handmade music instruments and meet other like-minded tinkerers. The video highlights some of the more creative instruments from the event.

Core77 guides us to the latest in hoodie-technology – mp3-speaker integration. Apparently designed to free ears of awareness-reducing earbuds, the embedded speakers and cable provide a hassle-free listening experience. Washable? No idea. But does it really matter when you (and everybody around you) has instant access to the Best of Wham! via your hood?

hood.e

[via core77]

Multitouch Environment Research Barcelona points us to a lovely new touchscreen application - “Multitouch Crayon Physics”, a table which users can ‘draw’ on with their fingers, creating multi-colored, movable objects. MERB reports that an open-source beta version will be released on May 18. Watch the video below to get a sense of how it works.

Multitouch Crayon Physics from multitouch-barcelona on Vimeo.

[via Multitouch Environment Research Barcelona]

Social networking in physical products is an idea that we’re watching; and Schulze & Webb’s Olinda is an interesting example of how it could be implemented in everyday product design. Olinda is a digital radio that displays not only the music the listener is playing, but what his/her friends are listening to, too. Using wifi and Radio Pop, the BBC website that displays ‘now playing’ information, the Olinda registers what the listener’s set of friends are listening to. The site explains:

Each light is a button: you can tune in to listen along with them, discovering new stations via your social network. A friend will always appear at the same light, so you can write or draw on the radio to label it, and the lights are bright so you’ll know a friend has started listening from across the room. Olinda includes a connector on the side to allow for all kinds of extra modules adding functionality to the base radio, and – because the interface is simple – home adaptation too…

[Olinda’s] hardware interface joins the base unit with the friends module. By buying extra modules – or by making their own using the open interface – listeners can adapt their product over time, perhaps adding a remote control or recording.

Modular, open-interface, and social - Olinda is a reflection of the future of product design; we’re excited to see other devices (DVD players, gaming consocontinueles, MP3 players?) continue going in this direction as well.

Olinda (Shulze & Webb)

Engadget say that we’re going to see folks creating their own multi-touch tables with DIY kits. One kit called Cubit uses an “inexpensive” video camera, a projector and a few other bits and pieces.

Technology Review says that this is part of an emerging trend of Open Source Hardware:

Projects like these illustrate two important trends in technology, says Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, the publishing company whose Make and Craft magazines put on the Maker Faire. First, the falling cost of hardware enables people to play with high technology without taking a large financial risk. Second, people are forming online communities, such as Instructables.com and wikiHow.com, to share their ideas, solve problems, and start collaborative projects.

Traditionally, O’Reilly says, the open-source community has focused on software, but in recent years, there’s been a push to share more information about hardware.

Open Source Hardware

Festo, a leading industrial automation developer, has produced a beautifully designed electric drive jelly fish – only it floats in the air. The fully-automated ship is electrically powered by battery and is controlled by an intelligent, fully adaptable mechanical system.

We’re positive that this will benefit mankind in some extraordinary way, but for the moment it’s just very pretty to watch.

[via Engadget]

This great photo taken by Dave Bullock for Wired of a gig at Coachella got us thinking. Quite a party - but when you look deeper, there appears to be a lot of people taking photos in the audience. It’s not hard to be reminded of camera-wielding tourists who arrive at an attraction and spend more time looking through a lens at the attraction than looking at it directly and taking it.

In similar ways, these music fans seem to be recording a memory that they never really experience. They’re too busy taking that shot to actually be there in the moment.

And the reason? Like the tourist, they want to share. But today they share that memory instantly via email and MMS to their friends on Facebook or readers of their blog. They share so that other people can see the photo of a moment that they actually didn’t see. And the motivation? For social status: to bolster the image their friends and network have of them.

So in summary: these folks are taking photos of moments in order to share those moments with others in order to gain status for having experienced a moment they never really had.

Usually found in areas with scarce resources, the practice of “Urban Mining” is growing around the world. The idea behind urban mining is to extract all of the precious metals hidden within old electronics to re-use or recycle into new products. The rising price of gold, silver, copper and iridium are driving this practice into the mainstream.

Reuters reports:

The materials recovered are reused in new electronics parts and the gold and other precious metals are melted down and sold as ingots to jewellers and investors as well as back to manufacturers who use gold in the circuit boards of mobile phones because gold conducts electricity even better than copper.

“It can be precious or minor metals, we want to recycle whatever we can,” said Tadahiko Sekigawa, president of Eco-System Recycling Co which is owned by Dowa Holdings Co Ltd.

A tonne of ore from a gold mine produces just 5 grams (0.18 ounce) of gold on average, whereas a tonne of discarded mobile phones can yield 150 grams (5.3 ounce) or more, according to a study by Yokohama Metal Co Ltd, another recycling firm.

[via Cryptogon]

Sega has developed a unique version of it’s “Super Monkey Ball” game for the iPhone. The action is controlled solely by the built in motion sensors. You tilt the device back and forth to move a ball through a series of obstacles. The beauty of this interface is in it’s simplicity. The use of physical motions as opposed to buttons, makes it so natural that anyone could pick up the game and know right away how to play it.