This ordinary looking hard drive when plugged into a USB port will mount 4 USB thumbdrives onto your computer. Cool idea to make some use of some old computer parts. It would have been cool if the drive would spin up when one of the drives were being accessed. "Using a dead Hard Drive, a 4-port USB hub, and a few Flash Drives, we will kill some time and
Book automated systems have a similar look but this Automated Book Scanning Robot called ScanBot seems like the scanning system it uses may be one of the best. It appears to use a vacuum to hold the page firmly against the moving scanning head. I wonder if it ever flips two pages at once? "The book scanner ScanRobot® has been developed for the digitization of huge book inventories. The
This RFID Poker Table one hell of a cool project. You can now play your Sunday night poker game and invite spectators to watch on a big screen. While the cost of the system would surly place it out of reach of the casual poker player I can see this being a hit in bars and clubs. Is this the next standard in game play? What the system needs
At first I thought this system may have used a camera that watched the movement of an object and sent mouse like coordinates based on the movement. Turns out that after having a look at the patent the NaviSense system uses ultrasonic technology to track your finger. It looks very impressive but I would have to use it to be convinced. "The iPoint™ is a small motion sensing mouse
DIY Lab has put up some plans that will allow you to use your webcam as a rangefinder. I wonder if the technique used is similar to the golf green distance estimators? "Convert your webcam into a modern range estimation tool without any hardware. The math is very simple, so this new technique works very well for vision applications that need to run quickly. With a simple height estimation,
Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters built a huge paintball gun that can shoot 1100 paintballs in an blink of an eye. When the balls crash on the canvas you can see a picture of the Mona Lisa. This was an attraction at an Nvidia event, I wonder how much the unit cost! I guess when you have a huge budget your mind can do wild. Via: Hack a Day
Miltron has made a cool Airsoft gun that can be manually or computer controlled. It is a good example of what can be done when you take some off the shelf items and mash them up with some electrical smarts. "The turret can be toggled between Manual Mode, where a Human interfaces with it using an Xbox 360 Controller, or Automatic Detect and Fire Mode, where the turret springs
