We have all seen the ATM scams where a card skimmer is placed in front of the ATM card slot so that some crooks can capture your card magnetic stripe data. Once they have the electronic data they are now able to duplicate your card. The only other thing that they need is your PIN, this is easy to get from someone looking over your shoulder or a covert
We have seen lots of self balancing robots ever since the Segway was released but this is the first robot that builds on the self balancing principle. This robot is still a work in progress but what they have so far is amazing. Check out the iLean development page for more info about this cool robot from the team over at UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab. "iLean pops up and
If you are building a system that needs to dynamically make decisions about items around it have a look at this Vision Object Detection and Ranging project. I think making this would be an excellent start to building your own Sentry gun! "This particular setup consists of 2 X 3Com Homeconnect Webcams I bought off of Ebay about 4 years ago. They are fairly good cameras for the price
David Merrill demos some very interesting Interactive Computerized Blocks called Siftables. The above video is from the latest TED conference. "Imagine overturning a container of nuts and bolts, then looking through the resulting pile for a particular item. Or spreading photographs out on a tabletop and then beginning to sort them into piles. During these activities we interact with large numbers of small objects at the same time, and they
The title lies a bit, this clock can keep track of all sorts of time zones and events. Sometimes having some extra hardware around looking for a purpose leads to cool gadgets. Have a look at how the Mars Clock was made. Code, schematics and everything else you need to make your own is provided. "You are probably thinking "There are hundreds of PIC clocks on the Net –
Next time you see someone looking down at their cell phone you’ll have to ask yourself who sent the message. Was it a simple text message from their friend, an automated spam email or could be a break in alert sent from their home monitoring system via Twitter! "My alarm panel is somewhat isolated in the house with no nearby Ethernet connection, so I added an Xbee wireless module
Next time you have a great idea for the next big iPhone game you might be able to have Ding Wen develop it in his free time between homework and bedtime. This is a great story of a father and some team who wrote Doodle Kids, a free artistic app for children. If you are thinking that the father is just looking for publicity you may think again when
