I can’t say it looks any easier to ship than your standard blue BIC ballpoint model, but I like designer Fraser Ross’ IKEA-inspired take on those fancy large format writing instruments. The pen arrives as a single sheet of pre-cut plywood which fits inside an A6-sized postcard envelope, making it easy to send through the mail. Assembly looks easier than a LEGO Duplo set, though the last step which involves heating the outer rubber shrinkwrap sleeve with a hairdryer, or in an oven, should probably be left to a pseudo-adult.
A day doesn’t go buy when I don’t find some random gadget, device or contraption that I want. I guess it’s the nature of writing about this stuff for a living. But today’s ‘WANT’ is probably even more intense because it’s something I can’t actually buy anywhere. This impressively detailed miniature Space Invaders arcade cabinet was created by YouTube user ‘vcoleiro1‘ who posted a clip of his creation online. If you’re like me, you’ll be wishing you’d taken up soldering years ago so you could pull off a mod like this yourself.
The 7-inch tall cabinet was built with 6mm MDF, painted and then decorated with official SI arcade machine graphics which were printed on glossy decal paper. The best part of the mod however has to be the tiny joystick and arcade-like buttons which were purchased from Digikey.com and eBay, and wired onto the GBA SP’s mainboard. Providing a more authentic gaming experience than previous mods that just used the GBA’s standard button layout. The back of the cabinet also opens allowing you to easily swap in other game carts, or let’s be honest here, a supercard so you can load it up with thousands of easily accessible titles.
As its creator Nathan Bergey points out: “The International Space Station (ISS) is a marvel of current technology and humanity. It’s a continuously inhabited orbital outpost, floating in space just over our heads. But often we forget it’s there.” So as a constant reminder, and a great way to know when you might actually have a chance of seeing it pass overhead, he created this ISS Notify lamp which lights up and remains glowing as long as the station is more than 10 degrees above the horizon.
The actual data for when the ISS passes overhead (for wherever on Earth you may be) is gleaned from a website called Heavens-Above which already does all of the calculations for the station’s orbit, which can occasionally change unpredictably. And because the ISS is designed to benefit all of mankind, Nathan was also kind enough to post everything you’d need to build your own ISS Notify lamp (minus the hardware) on GitHub.
The business card is in desperate need of a digital makeover (as long as Flash and/or animations aren’t part of it) but until then the art of paper 3 1/2 x 2-inch cards with contact details printed on them will continue to evolve. And if you’re a photographer, or a developer of portal technology, you might want to consider these clever functional iris cards from Cardnetics. Using a lever on the side you can open and close the 3-blade mechanical iris, revealing a 1-inch hole on the inside.
If you’re handy with a hobby knife or have access to a laser cutter you can download the patterns for the card from Thingiverse and make your own. But Cardnetics also offers a full color printing service if you order the cards pre-made from them, but they start at $6.50 a piece (2-sided color printing) with a sliding price scale the more you buy.
It was one of the crudest digital cameras ever to hit the market, but here’s to hoping the Game Boy Camera accessory never dies. It’s hard to deny the B&W lo-res imagery it produced had a certain unique charm, and it turns out it’s even more charming when those images are in motion. I can remember spending Saturday afternoons making stop-motion videos with the Game Boy Camera, but a modder known as ‘kraettz’ on the 8bitcollective community has taken things one step further. He took a Game Boy Camera attached to an original GBA, added a GBA TV converter and a portable media player with 40GB of storage and came up with this amazing Game Boy camcorder.
It can run for about 50 minutes on a 9-volt battery and captures videos at a resolution of 320×240. And as you can see in the video below, as they make their way through the Game Boy Camera’s menus, the setup just basically records everything on screen. But that doesn’t make it any less awesome. And when you mix the video with a chiptune soundtrack you’ve got the makings of a DIY Gondry music video.
J.J. Abrams’ Summer blockbuster Super 8 is just around the corner, but as far as I can tell LEGO builder Friedemann Wachsmuth was in no way paid or reimbursed by the film’s marketing team for building this impressive Super-8 film projector. All of the important mechanical bits like the shutter are all built from LEGO Technics, and the only non-LEGO pieces used are the flashlight, lens and film reels. I’m pretty sure the 8mm film isn’t made of LEGO either, that would be really impressive though. And if you feel you haven’t gotten enough of the Hawaii 5-0 theme song this morning, check out the video I’ve included below to see the projector in action.
Proving they seemingly have access to an unlimited supply of original Game Boys, modder ‘goteking‘ has found yet another use for the console that sparked a revolution in handheld gaming. Ironically this time around it’s been gutted of all its electronicy bits and used as a case for it’s descendant, the Nintendo 3DS. I guess it’s kind of like turning your great great great grandfather into a coat, but, you know, not as horribly creepy a concept… It’s nice to see this original Game Boy is still useful though, even if it will never provide anyone with monochrome gaming goodness ever again.
Even though the original TRON came out when video games were in their infancy, this is the first TRON board game I’ve ever encountered. Made from laser-etched & cut smoked acrylic and die-cast light cycles all enhanced with blacklight-reactive paint, the game’s rules are still being worked out, but just like the digital version, the goal is to strategically leave behind light cycle trails for your opponents to run into. Maybe not as exciting or fast paced as the original, but I’m sure the smug satisfaction of cutting someone off is still there.
You can say what you want about cartridge-based consoles, but I’d like to see someone cram an Xbox 360 or a PS3 into a DVD one day. Inspired by Ben Heck’s creations and a modder named Kotomi, Instructables contributor dany32412 used an ‘NES on a chip’ (NOAC) harvested from a Chinese Famicom knockoff to create his own retro homage to 80′s gaming. And what’s an electronic homebrew creation these days without an Arduino mixed in there somewhere, so here one is used to interface the standard NES controllers with the NOAC. It doesn’t look like the easiest mod for a novice, but his Instructable provides enough steps and instructions for an experienced modder to build their own.
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