This Beamz Laser Music Performance System looks very interesting. I am not exactly sure how the beams are playing the notes in the video since all the beam should be able to detect is when it’s broken. It seems that more information than just a broken beam is needed could play those tunes. Based on what I see (if it is just broken beams) 6 buttons could reproduce the
David Bue Pedersen from Volunteer Lab Rat has come up with a great way to see at a glance who is online. No need to walk up to your computer and turn off the screen saver anymore! His Online Notification Picture Frame will light up an LED behind the person who is online. The model he built has 5 pictures in it but it can handle up to 22
MAME cabinets can be lots of fun. Check out this one by Stuart, the creative use of some old computer joysticks allow him to interface the authentic buttons and joystick to the computer with ease. You can purchase new arcade housings that are made just for MAME systems but Stuart decided to dig into an older system and bring it back to life with some elbow grease. "I put
Paysonbadboy has put together a system to watch his home TV on his Treo 700 by using a capture card and the internet. I love the ability for some cheap hardware and a bit on inventive thinking to do something this cool! "I am using a cheap $15 program I actually bought to capture my outdoor security camera that captures pictures when it senses motion. It saves pictures to
The Doktor has hacked together a cool way of controlling something on your computer via USB. Looks to be a USB joystick that has been re-purposed to interface with new buttons. This looks to be the ‘new parallel port’. In the days when computers had parallel ports interfacing with the real world usually meant connecting inputs and outputs directly to the IO lines of the port. They were
If you are lucky enough to have an iPhone you can now use it as a cool new computer interface! Have a look at TouchpadPro for more details. "Touchpad Pro lets you control your PC or Mac through your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s got multi-touch capabilities just like the new MacBooks, though without the cost 🙂 It’s got all the features you asked for, including landscape mode, multi-touch
FPGA chips are very powerful, have a look at this FPGA video game implementation that used to require a custom board and complex circuitry to make work. "The original Pac-man arcade game, implemented inside a single Xilinx Spartan-3E chip on a Spartan-3E Starter Kit. None of the extra hardware on the board is used, the chip in the middle implements the complete arcade board of the original game!"
