Awesome Stuff: Tech At Home

from the no-place-like... dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we're looking at some crowdfunded technology that stays put in your house and makes life a little easier.

SnapPower Charger

In-wall USB power outlets are one of those little details that everyone would love to have but rarely seem worth the effort to actually make happen. The SnapPower Charger aims to make them a little more accessible by taking the "hard" out of hard-wired: rather than requiring the installation of a whole new specialized outlet, the SnapPower is simply a faceplate with a clever USB extension that draws its power from the screws on a regular wall outlet. Unfortunately, it's currently limited to a 1A current for charging regular smartphones but not high-power tablets, phablets and the like — but the creators are looking into creating a 2.1A model in the future.

Wakē

There have been lots of attempts to redesign the alarm clock over the years, with any number of products promising the most peaceful and/or un-ignorable wakeup call possible. I can't speak to the success of those, or of this, but the Wakē does offer something novel: a solution for the problem, in shared beds, of being woken up by your partner's alarm. Mounted to the wall above the bed and controlled by smartphone, this two-person alarm clock uses an infrared body heat sensor and a parametric speaker to locate one of two users and direct its stream of music and lights towards them and them alone.

Neobase

One thing that bothers me about a lot of cool modern tech, including a lot of fledgling projects on Kickstarter, is a near-total reliance on remote servers and web services for storage, processing and control, even when it's not clear that this approach is at all necessary for the task at hand. So it's nice to see something like the Neobase, which is all about doing the exact opposite. It's a compact, all-in-one server and network drive that runs its own custom-built Facebook-like software, so you can set up your own completely private social network. It's entirely self-contained and doesn't store anything on any third-party servers, but you can access it from anywhere via encrypted connections. There are some limitations to this, certainly, both by design and by virtue (or curse) of reliable broadband availability, but I'm excited to see such devices move beyond the generic "personal cloud" offerings and into more specialized and powerful out-of-the-box solutions like this.

Filed Under: alarm clock, awesome stuff, social media, usb

Awesome Stuff: Headphones & Helpers

from the listen-up dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we've got some technology focused on improving your mobile music listening experience in a variety of ways.

MAGZET

For people with Apple laptops, the days of destroying your power cable by tripping on it are over thanks to the MagSafe connector. Unfortunately, the days of destroying your audio jacks and headphone connectors persist, and everyone knows the pain of having to jostle a broken plug around to get its weak connection to kick in. MAGZET aims to fix that by letting you turn any audio jack into a magnetic connector by connecting the small, two-piece device. As they point out, the standard audio jack hasn't been updated in a long time, and this could be just the smart revolution it needs.

UAMP

There have been many attempts to create products that will stymie the ascendance of lower-quality audio in the mobile device era, but most are overwrought and place too high a bet on the assumption that people truly care. The UAMP, however, is a nice and simple solution that can be easily adopted by those who want better sound without needing to go buy whole new specialty players: a small inline amplifier that lets you get more amplification at higher fidelity than those built into most consumer devices. It's USB-chargeable and about the size of an iPod Shuffle, and aims to retail for around $100.

Aivvy Q

The Aivvy Q is an interesting idea. Not only is it a pair of headphones with a built-in music player, controlled by touch gestures on the side — it actually aims to be a whole music solution for busy people. It grabs songs automatically from its own service while charging, then builds custom playlists and rotations based on your decisions to skip, listen, replay, etc. Of course, the big question is: where exactly is it pulling these songs from, will it require a subscription, and how confident are the makers that they can keep it licensed and robust? Though some of these things remain to be seen, the tech itself looks very cool. They do lose some points for the nonsensical claim that they are about "streaming music without internet", though (that appears to be their odd way of saying it downloads tracks while connected, then automatically plays or "streams" Pandora-style generated playlists from its internal storage later).

Filed Under: audio, awesome stuff, headphones, music

Awesome Stuff: Tinkerer Tech

For this week's awesome stuff, we've got an assortment of technological tidbits for folks who like the customizable, the utilitarian, and the scientific.

Trickey: Any Key, Anwhere

For all the huge variety of input devices on the market, there is a surprising dearth of truly customizable ones. Some gamer's keyboards have settings and configurations and maybe a few modular pieces, but Trickey takes things to new level with a very simple idea: building the function for each key into the key itself, rather than into the board it connects to. This way, rearranging your input is as simple as popping out keys and plugging them in where you want them. It's a great idea that definitely has applications for gaming and a wide variety of design and creative tasks that use special software, but its one big drawback is the expense: unless the relatively small modular units can be brought down in price, building anything more than a simple four- or five-key custom interface is probably more than most people will want to shell out for.

The PocketLab

Smartphones have put a wide variety of advanced sensors into everyone's pocket, but as useful as this is, there are limits based on the fact that you usually want to keep your phone close and not put it in a great deal of danger. The PocketLab offloads these sensors — a barometer, accelerometer, thermometer, magnetometer and gyroscope — into a rugged standalone unit that communicates with your phone and the cloud. Now the readings-curious can strap it to a rocket, toss it off a cliff or subject it to whatever other abuse seems likely to produce some interesting data.

VIS: Useful Power

USB power banks are everywhere these days, with little to distinguish them other than price and capacity. But the creators of VIS realized that a portable battery can have all sorts of additional uses beyond charging your devices, and built them into a slick-looking unit. The VIS serves as a flashlight, and emergency lantern and — in an inspired bit of design that suddenly feels obvious — a jumpstarter for your car with the included jumper-cable attachment.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, keyboard, power, sensors, usb

Awesome Stuff: On Display

from the look-and-see dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we're talking all about monitors, projectors and display technology.

Beam

My first thought about Beam — a compact projector that plugs into any light socket and is controlled by your smartphone — was that it's a great idea. My second thought was that it can't possibly be bright enough. But, refreshingly, the video and pictures of the device in action don't make any attempt to deceive on this front: the projections are shown to be rather dim, but still visible, which is the best you could expect from 100 lumens. It's limiting, but it doesn't make it useless, and in the right circumstances for the right applications, Beam could be a very cool solution.

Displio

In a world of rapid device convergence, there's still something very attractive about the idea of dedicated single-purpose units like Displio: a small, configurable wi-fi display that can monitor anything from the weather to an eBay auction. Sure, you could get a smartphone widget or a desktop screensaver to do that job, but would it really feel the same? Some people already do this, at a high cost — I recently visited an office where every conference room was managed by a separate wall-mounted iPad with the sole purpose of scheduling meetings. The Displio looks like it can do that job for $100 a pop.

ScreenStick

This one's not a display, but a display accessory. The rise of mobile gaming has brought with it a revolutionary wave of innovative game design tailored for touch screens, but it's also brought a slew of games that struggle to force traditional control schemes onto these radically different devices. The most common and frustrating of these is the simulated on-screen joystick, which never feels natural and puts a huge cognitive barrier between the player and total immersion. The ScreenStick is not the first attempt to solve that problem by attaching a true joystick right to your touchscreen, but it is one of the nicest designs and best prices I've seen, perhaps capable of becoming a mainstream accessory among the mobile gamers of the world.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, display, gaming, projector

Awesome Stuff: Auds & Ends

from the hear,-hear! dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we've got some assorted pieces of new crowdfunded audio gear.

waveBlend

The folks behind the waveBlend make a pretty good point: rigging up a house-wide wireless audio system is still a lot more annoying than it needs to be. The best systems out there are expensive, proprietary and always centralized around some sort of master unit. The waveBlend system does away with that: each modular cubic speaker connect to existing WiFi network and teams up with all the others (up to a dozen — however many you need, wherever you need them) to create a no-hassle home audio setup.

gMIX

On the one hand, the gMIX isn't as big a deal as the creator might want to make it sound — a four-channel audio mixer that runs "without batteries" is just a passive line mixer and not a technological breakthrough. That said, the best products aren't always revolutionary, and gMIX does appear to be filling a gap: pro audio gear is expensive, there aren't that many choices of passive mixers around compared to active (powered) ones, and most such gear includes lots of additional features that aren't needed for a lot of applications. The gMIX, on the other hand, is cheap and simple and gets the job done.

Gigcaster

A lot of the innovation around live streaming focuses on video, while audio is often left to languish in "good enough" territory. That's fine for meetings and conferences and speeches, but not so great for music. Enter the Gigcaster: a compact, standalone unit with the sole purpose of making it easy to broadcast quality live music online. This initial model is built using Raspberry Pi, and there are plans to move towards a more fully-featured production model — but there's also a huge focus on hackability, with the device running open source software and allowing for user-made firmware pushes.

Filed Under: audio, awesome stuff, broadcast, mixer, music

Awesome Stuff: Maker's Paradise

from the if-you-build-it dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we're looking at some new tools and/or toys for anyone who likes to design, build and tinker with their own technology.

Piezo Film Technology

Polyvinylidene fluoride piezoelectric film is a thin, transparent material that can be used to generate sound. Yes: that means you can make speakers out of it. This Kickstarter project is all about getting this interesting material into the hands of makers and developers, so they can start exploring the possibilities of what it can do. Two of the suggestions — paper headphones, and business cards that play sound — are pretty cool by themselves, but the creator is betting (correctly, I suspect) that people can come up with all sorts of cool ideas of their own.

The Element

The significance of 3D printing has been clear for some time now, but the sea change it promises to usher in has always felt "on the horizon". Everyone's waiting for that tipping point that will make it one of the most disruptive, revolutionary technologies in modern history — and The Element is one more step in that direction. It's a small, go-between USB device that promises to take a lot of the technical hassle out of 3D printing. It makes it easier to find and create designs, and (critically) easier to get them properly formatted and sliced for printing without the huge hassle of trial-and-error, plus it adds handy features like queuing and remote monitoring. If it brings 3D printing a step closer to "it just works" status, then it's done its job.

DuinoKit Jr.

When I was a kid, my parents bought me one of those electronic "labs" from Radio Shack. It was a massive board covered in resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, switches and other components, each with little protruding springs allowing you to quickly connect them with lengths of wire. Well, the DuinoKit Jr. is that lab on steroids for the modern age. It's the same basic idea, but with components I only dreamed of like a backlit LCD display, an RGB LED and, critically, an Arduino-compatible processor at the core.

Filed Under: 3d printing, arduino, awesome stuff, maker

Awesome Stuff: Virtual & Augmented Reality Headsets

from the shifting-reality dept

• SEER First up is SEER, which its developers insist is an augmented reality solution inspired by Iron Man. It has a wide field of view, works off of your existing smartphone and is a very open platform. I'm guessing the guys behind this weren't thrilled with the timing of the HoloLens announcement, but it still looks pretty cool, and the price tag doesn't seem crazy.
• VISR The VISR looks like Google Cardboard made much nicer. It's using laminated corrugate, so while still corrugated material, it's much nicer and more durable. Plus it comes with a strap to attach it to your head (unlike the basic Google Cardboard setup). Despite all that, VISR is priced at about the same price as you'll find various folks selling their own variations on Google Cardboard, so this seems like a fairly nice alternative. XG Virtual Reality Headset Taking it up a notch is the XG Virtual Reality headset, which could be seen as sort of somewhere between Google Cardboard and the Oculus Rift. It's made by I AM Cardboard, which was one of the more well known makers of pre-fabbed Google Cardboard offerings, but they decided to take it up a notch and build a much nicer overall headset at a still reasonable fee.

Filed Under: augmented reality, awesome stuff, headsets, virtual reality

Awesome Stuff: Where's My Personal Robot?

from the calling-rosie dept

• Personal Robot Someone here at work suggested this looks like an iPad stuck to a pole on top of a Roomba, but the Personal Robot from Robotbase seems to be claiming a fairly astounding set of artificial intelligence capabilities -- stuff straight out of the movies, that I'm not sure it can live up to. And, frankly, the video struck me as incredibly creepy. Not in the uncanny valley sort of way, but so much about the video just had me sense that it was foreshadowing for when the robot does something truly messed up. Reading the bedtime story to the kid was the part that put me over the edge. If this actually works the way it's presented in the video, then it does sound fairly amazing, but I have to admit that I'm skeptical. The video is too good to be true.
• Luna The Luna appears to be targeting a very similar market as the Personal Robot above, but with more realistic seeming claims about its capabilities. It also appears to be much more focused on building an open system with open hardware and software designed to build up a developer community and to allow you to hack your robot directly. The video doesn't have the dystopian feel of the Personal Robot (even though it uses a ton of movie robot clips) and just feels like a much more realistic project.
• Quirkbot Okay, maybe you're not ready for a dystopian personal servant roomba-ing its way through your house. Instead, you just want to have a bit of fun and build some cool robots using straws. Then the Quirkbot may be more your speed. Built by the same folks who built Strawbees (an Awesome Stuff alum), they've now built little robotic devices that you can use to build all different kinds of robotic toys out of drinking straws. It might not wake you up in the morning and tell you what to wear, or read stories to your kids at night, but it sure looks like fun to play with.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, personal robots, robots