3D sphere display and controller

May 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Nirav] has been working on a spherical display for about a year now, and he just came up with a great way of interacting with this screen: an adjacent reality tracker that rotates the display to match the current orientation of the controller.

Earlier, [Nirav] built an 8-inch sphere display using a few 3D printed parts and a Showwx laser pico projector. The display looked great, but [Nirav] had no way to interact with it. To solve that problem, he put an inertial measurement unit inside a 3d printed model of the globe. The IMU communicates with a computer to read the rotation and orientation of [Nirav]’s controller and adjust the spherical display accordingly.

It’s a very nice build that gets very close to futuristic sci-fi displays. At least now, [Nirav] can interact with the awesome satellite tracking app and continental drift simulation he created.

There’s a bunch of videos [Nirav] put up demoing what his display can do. You can check those out after the break.

via MAKE

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Filed Under: hardware, portable video hacks Tagged With: , ,

Building giant temperature displays from Gottlieb display wheels

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

On Saturday, we found a cool article where pinball machine display wheels were being used as a display. In that article, one of the listed inspirations was this giant Gottlieb wheel being used to display the water temperature of a pool.  Before we go further, we’d like to mention that this project is hosted on a magazine’s website that requires you to register to get 1 free download. We did, and no financial information was required.

[Ludovic], they author of the project, was looking for an efficient and highly visible way to display the temperature in his pool. He wanted something he could see from 30 yards away, that had minimal power usage. These pinball reels were perfect, being easy to read and having virtually zero power draw when not updating.

Keep reading for a video and some more information.

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Filed Under: hardware Tagged With:

A 3D printed, electromechanical computer

May 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you had a machine that could print complex mechanical parts in an hour or so, what would you do? [Chris] is doing the coolest thing we can imagine and is building an electromechanical computer from 3D printed parts.

You may remember [Chris] from his efforts to getting his tiny, 1/10th scale Cray-1 supercomputer up and running. Even though he has the OS on a disk, actually booting the machine is a bit of a problem; much the same as his electromechanical computer project. Late last year we saw [Chris] building a few gears for his computer, but now he’s got a punch card reader that looks very much like a Jacquard loom.

Even though the computer doesn’t actually do anything yet, it’s amazing to think that [Chris] is building out of plastic that will run computer programs. You can check out the video of [Chris]’ video of his punch card reader after the break.

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Filed Under: hardware Tagged With: , ,

Watch a rocket engine test live this afternoon

April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you want to see something awesome this afternoon, watch SpaceX’s live broadcast of an engine test today at 3:00 pm EDT/12:00 pm PDT/7:00 pm GMT. You’ll see nine Merlin rocket engines power up to full thrust during a test for the upcoming launch of a Dragon space capsule to the ISS.

This is just a static test – hopefully the nine Merlin engines won’t go anywhere. To get an idea of the power behind these engines this is a test of just  Merlin engine being fired at the SpaceX open house in Texas a year or so ago. Today, nine engines will be fired at once.

Check out the videos after the break to see just how awesome the Falcon 9 is going to be.

via boingboing

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Filed Under: Engine Hacks, hardware Tagged With: , ,

Getting a textured 3D scan from just a webcam

April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here’s an oldie but a goodie that passed us up the first time it went around the Internet. [Qi Pan], (former) PhD student at Cambridge, made a 3D modeling program using only a simple webcam. Not only does this make very fast work of building 3D models, the real texture is also rendered on the virtual object.

The project is called ProFORMA, and to get some idea of exactly how fast it is, the model of a church seen above was captured and rendered in a little over a minute. To get the incredible speed of ProFORMA, [Qi] had his webcam take a series of keyframes. When the model is rotated about 10°, another keyframe is taken and the corners are triangulated with some very fancy math.

Even though [Qi]’s project is from 2009, it seems like it would be better than the ReconstructMe, the Kinect-able 3D scanning we saw a while ago. There’s a great video of [Qi] modeling a papercraft church after the break, but check out the actual paper for a better idea of how ProFORMA works.

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Filed Under: hardware, Software Development Tagged With: ,

Gigantic liquid crystal display is like a giant calculator

April 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Some say he turns on his soldering iron by saying, “Flame on!.” He deadbug solders – QFP packages. All we know is he’s called [stig] and he sent in an awesome an awesome video of a new display at the Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s a 10 foot by 90 foot LCD display that uses 6 inch square glass panels containing the same liquid crystals you’d find in a calculator.

The display/installation is called Patterned by Nature and is built using 3600 pieces of LCD privacy glass. When a voltage is applied to the glass it changes from clear to opaque. While this technology has been around for decades (just look at your calculator), only in the last few years has LCD privacy glass come down in price to make a project like this economical.

The gigantic display was created in part by Sosolimited, an art studio who has made a similar project before. The display hanging in the atrium of the Raleigh Nature Research Center is amazingly efficient for its size  drawing only 75 watts.

If you’d like to try your hand at a similar build, we wish you luck; this LCD glass is still somewhat expensive but perhaps in a few years the price will come down enough that we can play Tetris on the side of a building.

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Filed Under: hardware Tagged With: ,
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