TC_Chu's Point

Catch the Sun (Book with NFC)

Catch the Sun is the world’s first book with NFC semiconductor technology integrated inside, while the content of this high-tech book is about the beautiful magic of low-tech ballooning. The book has multiple NFC chips inside that allow the book to connect to the internet, simply by touching an NFC-hotspot in the book with your NFC-enabled smartphone or tablet.

 

Use NFC technology in this book to:

• download the title song Catch the Sun

• watch video clips

• learn more about NFC

• share your experience via social media

• program an NFC-chip yourself with the help of your smartphone and the right app

 

via elektor

Sensu Portable Artist Brush & Stylus for Touchscreen Devices

It looks and feels like a traditional artist’s paint brush, but — unlike the real thing — this one uses conductive, synthetic hair that makes it perfect for use on touchscreen devices. I used it with ArtRage on an iPad (don’t worry, it will work on touchscreen Android devices as well) and the Sensu Artist Brush is the missing piece that makes the experience. Finger painting is one thing, and using your imagination with a stylus is another, but there’s a real visceral appeal to wielding an actual brush when painting with a digital brush onscreen. Even better, there is no artificial-feeling drag that would make it feel as though you are dragging rubber across the display and with the ArtRage/iPad combo I tested on; the software was completely responsive to the brush. GadgetLab named the Sensu Artist Brush as one of its Nine Items That’ll Take You to Tomorrow last year, and I can confirm that it does live up to the hype. At $39.99, you pay only a modest premium compared to a standard stylus.

via Wired

Globalfoundries unveils 14nm-XM chip architecture

via engadget

好神奇的MOS架構！

Pattern for crocheted Panzer tank slippers

via boingboing

好酷的編織拖鞋！

No Place Like Home GPS Shoes

"Dominic Wilcox has created a fully functional prototype pair of shoes that will guide you home no matter where you are in the world."

via bookofjoe

Kinect Physics Tutorial for Processing

via creativeapplications

美麗的地球夜景

via wire.jp

Testing 30 brands of batteries

Batteries come packaged in bright blister packs emblazoned with vague guarantees such as “45% more pictures” and “five times longer lasting.” During his internship at BitBox this summer, [Thomas] decided to put those statements to the test. He tested thirty brands of batteries on a homebrew rig to find the batteries with the most power and the most bang for your buck.

The hardware [Thomas] used an STM32 microcontroller to perform two different tests: a high drain and a low drain condition. For the high drain, 1000 mA were sucked out of the batteries until the voltage reached 0.8 V. For the low drain, 200 mA were used. Data including milliwatt-hours, milliamp-hours, joules, voltage, current, power, and effective load resistance were all logged for both conditions for all 30 batteries.

Generalizing the results for both low and high drain conditions, lithium batteries were better than alkaline, which were both better than zinc AA cells. Perhaps unsurprisingly, batteries marketed as ‘long life’ and ‘extended power’ were the worst batteries for the money, but a brand-name battery – the Kodak Xtralife cells – were actually the best value for the money.

via Hackaday

Beautiful, simple vector illustrations by Javier Arce

via blog.drawn

Rethink book as computer interface

http://phys.org/news/2012-09-rethink-interface-video.html

Claire Lomas Becomes the First Person to Take a ReWalk Bionic Exoskeleton Home for Daily Use

via inhabitat

Portable Microbiology Laboratory

vis aolarcooking.wikia.com

Low-cost water tests - mWater

Our Android App currently supports several other inexpensive water tests, including thePortable Microbiology Laboratory, which is available from Professor Robert Metcalf. One of the components in this kit, 3M Petrifilms, can detect E. coli and other bacteria in water. The tests can be incubated at room temperature in many locations or they can be worn in a pouch to make use of body heat for incubation. The mWater Android app can use the onboard camera to automatically count the bacteria on a Petrifilm and calculate the risk to the user.

In the near future, we will add simple test strips for Free Chlorine (important in piped water systems), Nitrate (commonly found in contaminated wells), and pH. We envision a complete low-cost laboratory suite for communities, health workers, utilities and emergency workers, that is connected to our cloud-based reporting system for instant sharing and mapping of data.

via mWater

The World's Only Natural Nuclear Reactor

the Oklo Reactor consists of 16 uranium-rich sites where self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions took place billions of years ago. The reactors ran for a few hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW of power output during that time.

Read more: The Oklo Reactor: The World's Only Natural Nuclear Reactor | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building 

40年的鑄劍師傅

Handmade Portraits: The Sword Maker from Etsy on Vimeo.

佩服！

尼爾．蓋曼為2012年藝術大學畢業生演講

via 丁凡

Youtube Link

Water Light Graffiti LED Wall in France

via inhabitat

TshirtOS: The First Wearable and Programmable T

Meet the TshirtOS. It's essentially it's a wearable platform with a flexible LED display that connects to your iphone, opening up a whole host of fun and expressive opportunities.

via fashioningtech

Lego Birds

via bookofjoe (more works)

3D printed exoskeletal support (Magic Arm for Child)

n the realm of science fiction (Aliens, Halo, Iron Man, etc) exo-skeletal suits have long enabled humans to exert super human force and endure arduous conditions. But for Emma Lavelle, a young girl that was born with a condition called arthrogryposis – wearing a 3D printed external support structure is a reality to enable her to carry out everyday tasks that able bodied people would perhaps take for granted.

Emma’s condition means she has stiff joints and under developed muscles, so much so that without support, she is unable to hold her arms up. Patients with this condition can overcome it with a Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX), but at 2 years of age, when first considered for the WREX, Emma was too small for the existing models available.

http://blog.ponoko.com/2012/08/05/3d-printed-exoskeletal-support

 

Protocell

Protocell <- something worth study

Tag:  Ideas
Via : TED Books

Via iPod touch 64g

http://exploringorigins.org/protocells.html

http://protocellcircus.com/

http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/06-09-033.pdf

http://iedro.com/blog/featured/protocell-tech-limestone-and-the-future-of-architecture

最棒的兒童玩具

via Core77

OpenWRT router interfaced to an Arduino

So far the nicest solution I have found is one of the world’s smallest pocket routers TP Link WR703N.
Cheapest in price 25 USD, nice looking 5x5x2 cm plastic box, internal Wifi. Can be ordered on Ebay, shipping is free and it arrives from HongKong in a month.  This router has a 400 MHz CPU, 4 MB flash (quite small),  32 MB RAM, 1 Ethernet, Wifi, 1 USB, 0.5 W power consumption. Powered via USB cable. Included power supply can be plugged in 110V or 220V.

It must be reflashed with OpenWRT Linux, where most necessary program modules exist, however not everything is compatible with Debian Linux. Can add USB hub, USB stick, USB sound card, bluetooth, webcam, 3G modem, 1-wire USB or serial module, connect to Arduino, set up Wifi client, place home webserver on router.

via Dangerous Prototype

 

1 Liter of Light Project Illuminates Thousands of Filipino Homes With Recycled Bottles Read more: 1 Liter of Light Project Illuminates Thousands of Filipino Homes With Recycled Bottles

What if something as simple as an old plastic bottle filled with water could mean the difference between light and darkness? Rudimentary as it may sound, the almost no-cost solution is uplifting the quality of life of thousands of impoverished families in the Philippines who have no access to electricity and use dangerous kerosene lamps indoors. These makeshift solar lamps basically act as skylights, and reflect and amplify the rays of the sun during daylight hours – effectively performing the work of indoor lightbulbs – but without using any electricity at all. The organization behind the installation of the bottle lights, Isang Litrong Liwanag or 1 Liter of Light, was started by Filipino student Illac Diaz just a few years ago but their cause has inspired so many that now they’ve committed to a goal of placing 1,000,000 bottle lights in Filipino households. Read on to see how 1 Liter of Light has energized the people of its country to participate in lighting the way for their own future through this fascinating initiative.

Read more: 1 Liter of Light Project Illuminates Thousands of Filipino Homes With Recycled Bottles | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building 

curetogether (purchase by 23andme)

http://curetogether.com/

病友分享網站＋Data Mining -> Better information!

Nagai Hideyuki's clever 3D drawings

via boingboing

more works

Good design is :

• is honest

• is aesthetic

• is innovative

• is unobtrusive

• is long-lasting

• makes a product useful

• is environmentally-friendly

• is as little design as possible

• makes a product understandable

• is thorough, down to the last detail

via bookofjoe

 

Computational Origami is Paper Art That Folds Itself!

會自己折的摺紙！

via http://inhabitat.com/computational-origami-is-paper-art-that-folds-itself/

Steve Job at All Things Digital

http://itunes.apple.com/tw/podcast/steve-jobs-at-d-all-things/id529997900

 

Explore the world

一個有趣的網站 可以查詢世界各國的各項指標資訊 並以圖形畫出來 上圖是台灣與日本的出生率 

Sending data to Google Spreadsheets with PICmicro Doc: FTPMicro temperature monitor

Monitor the temperature (or any other quantity) from anywhere in the world and share data on the cloud Google Spreadsheet is possible and quite simple thanks to FTPMicro and some implementations the TCP / IP stack Microchip.

Would you like to monitor the temperature of your refrigerators or any other devices scattered around the world and send data in real time on a document type Spreadsheets? And if this document was always online and accessible from anywhere in the world?Everything is possible if you have an internet connection, a Google Account and a PICmicro handy :)

via it.emcelettronica.com

 

Touché: Touch and Gesture Sensing for the Real World.

Touché is a new sensing technology that proposes a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique that can not only detect a touch event, but simultaneously recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body during touch interaction. This allows to significantly enhances touch interaction in a broad range of applications, from enhancing conventional touchscreens to designing interaction scenarios for unique use contexts and materials. For example, in our explorations we added complex touch and gesture sensitivity not only to computing devices and everyday objects, but also to the human body and liquids. Importantly, instrumenting objects and material with touch sensitivity is easy and straightforward: a single wire is sufficient to make objects and environments touch and gesture sensitive.

http://www.disneyresearch.com/research/projects/hci_touche_drp.htm

Germany Sets New Solar Record By Meeting Nearly Half of Country’s Weekend Power Demand Read more: Germany Sets New Solar Record By Meeting Nearly Half of Country's Weekend Power Demand | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Gree

Germany’s solar power industry has always been a world leader, but since the the country closed eight nuclear power plants after the Japanese disaster and announced they would be shutting down the remaining nine by 2022, pressure to find alternative energy has mounted. Other sources such as wind and biomass are expected to pick up the slack, but solar power has never been more important.

Read more: Germany Sets New Solar Record By Meeting Nearly Half of Country's Weekend Power Demand | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building 

我就是喜歡德國人的理性思考 “有風險無法管理那就關閉” 沒啥好在那邊機機車車的！

Photographic Collages Suspended in Plexiglas

Auckland-based artist Peter Madden gleans found images from old encyclopedias, back issues of National Geographic, and nature books to create his dense and nearly psychedelic collages suspended in perspex, also known as ‘safety glass’. Of his work Madden says “I consider myself a ‘Sculptographer’; a ‘post-conceptual photographer’. A mediator between genres and dimensions, between you, the other and I. I suppose I am an altogether different collagist, maybe a collagist of difference.” To see much more of his three dimensional work, check out this gallery. Images above courtesy Ryan Renshaw and EyeContact. (via junk culture)

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/05/photographic-collages-suspended-in-plexiglas/

Electric imp

http://www.electricimp.com/

In essence, the Imp provides an easy, integrated way to connect almost any hardware device both to other devices and to internet services. It's more than just a WiFi card, or even a WiFi module with processing built in - it's an integrated platform that deals with the drudgery of connectivity, allowing you to concentrate on the application instead of the mechanics.

The Imp itself is very small - 32mm x 24mm x 2.1mm - but packs a lot inside.

For starters, there's industry standard 802.11b/g/n WiFi, complete with WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption, along with a great antenna.

Next, there's the processor. A Cortex-M3 core gives great performance combined with low power consumption, allowing the Imp to deal with both maintaining a secure connection to the service and also executing the developer's code in a stable environment.

Finally, there's the I/O. Though there are only six pins available for application use, they're six very capable pins. UARTs, I2C, SPI, analog in and out, PWMs, GPIOs... all selectable under software control.

 

 

Hartverdrahtet – Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

Check the Video

'TeleHuman' uses Kinect for 3D holographic chat

via Engadget (check the video)

National Geographic Vision of Earth 2012 (美麗的照片)

更多照片

Touchy: The Human Camera

http://www.fashioningtech.com/profiles/blogs/touchy-the-human-camera

3D Printing as an Art Form

The world of Chicago based digital artist Sophie Kahn is firmly embedded in 3D. Originally from Australia, Sophie trained as a photographer and came to perceive 3D scanning and 3D printing as post-photographic processes. Much of her work over the last eight years has revolved around these digital processes, either in the course of project progression or form of project resolution.

http://blog.ponoko.com/2012/04/19/3d-printing-as-an-art-form/

Happy 35th birthday Apple II

哇 Apple II 已經35歲了 

我的第一台Apple II (不是真的Apple II 是Clone 盜版的）

應該是我去念工專時買的吧 

http://macdailynews.com/2012/04/17/happy-35th-birthday-apple-ii/

Not-quite-so elementary, my dear electron

Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning them the designation of a fundamental particle. But in the 1980s, physicists predicted that electrons in a one-dimensional chain of atoms could be split into three quasiparticles: a ‘holon’ carrying the electron’s charge, a ‘spinon’ carrying its spin (an intrinsic quantum property related to magnetism) and an ‘orbiton’ carrying its orbital location¹.

“These quasiparticles can move with different speeds and even in different directions in the material,” says Jeroen van den Brink, a condensed-matter physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Solid State Physics in Dresden, Germany. Atomic electrons have this ability because they behave like waves when confined within a material. “When excited, that wave splits into multiple waves, each carrying different characteristics of the electron; but they cannot exist independently outside the material,” he explains.

http://www.nature.com/news/not-quite-so-elementary-my-dear-electron-1.10471

太厲害了 原來電子還不是基本粒子ㄚ 

 

Curious iPhones by InteractiveLab – Arduino, Processing, CIDetector iOS

Fun little experiment by the InteractiveLab group utilising a pair of iPhones, four servos controlled by Processing which receives openCV CIDetector face detection information via OSC from a custom iPhone app created in openFrameworks using iOS5 SDK. In other words, 2 iPhones observe and follow the face of the viewer.

via creativeapplications.net

Cell Phone Spectrophotometer

Include all data and software to build it.

http://www.asdlib.org/onlineArticles/elabware/Scheeline_Kelly_Spectrophotometer/index.html

http://www.news.illinois.edu/news/10/1007scheeline_spectrophotometry.html

Cool Cafe , FabCafe in Japan

http://www.fabcafe.com/blog/

Ocean Optics (Miniature Spectrometer)

http://www.oceanoptics.com/

How Does a Spectrometer Work?

更方便的輪椅

http://tekrmd.com/

via core77

超棒的設計 一定會有市場 （只要不要太貴）

Animated LED Necklace

http://www.fashioningtech.com/profiles/blogs/animated-led-necklace

Warehouse Robots Get Smarter With Ant Intelligence

What Fraunhofer is trying to do is mimic the ant swarm system with robots. For example, instead of having one central computer control the movements every robot (as with Kiva), Fraunhofer's system utilizes robots that make their own decisions with onboard computers. Each robot communicates with all the other robots in the swarm simultaneously using WLAN, and they use algorithms based on a model for how ants forage for food to cooperatively decide which of them should go where and do what. 

The robots don't need fixed localization points, but instead rely on "integrated localization and navigation technology" (including signal-based location capability, distance and acceleration sensors and laser scanners) to find the most direct routes to their destination without crashing into anything or each other. This makes them very efficient, and it also makes the system easily scalable, since you can introduce new things and the robots won't freak out.

via IEEE Spectrum

 

QuadCopters – How to get started (很棒的教材）

via http://blog.tkjelectronics.dk/2012/03/quadcopters-how-to-get-started/

This blog post is divided into 3 parts

1. What is a QuadCopter
   1. Brushless motors
   2. Propellers
   3. Roll, Pitch and Yaw
   4. ESC – Electronic Speed Controller
   5. Battery
   6. The frame
   7. Frame configuration
   8. Inertial Measurement Unit
   9. Controller electronics
2. Initial decisions
   1. Theoretical calculator
3. Conclusion

via http://blog.tkjelectronics.dk/2012/03/quadcopters-how-to-get-started/