Technology post 3/27

Leap Motion and Razer's OSVR took the latest step in that virtual reality game today. Leap announced today that the OSVR Hacker Dev Kit will soon include a faceplate with the Leap Motion controller attached. Having a hands-free motion control sensor on the front of your VR headset allows you to use your hands as controllers. The OSVR/Leap partnership won't do anything for walking, but it does at least let you use your hands. The big limitation was that you couldn't move your hands outside of a certain range. We tried a rigged-up version of this during our OSVR hands-on at CES, as Razer had strapped Leap Motion to the front of its demo units. The companies say that the OSVR beta kit will support multiple forms of motion control, so we could have a situation where Leap Motion tracks hand gestures, a TV-mounted sensor tracks body movement, while something like the Virtuix VR treadmill sensing walking and running.

Technology Post 3/21

Vimal Patel built an extruder using Lego, attached it to an ordinary hot glue gun and ended up with a 3D printing pen. The gun double act stemmed from a project aimed at looking into making products from just one 3D printing filament, to make recycling a relatively simple matter. Before embarking on his Lego adventure, Patel did some preliminary work using the university's UP 3D printers to find out if he could incorporate zones of different stiffness into his single material objects. The layer by layer approach was found limiting and programming robotic assistance for extrusion along a path in multiple axes looked complicated. The extruder is made up of 112 Lego parts including an electric 9 V battery box and a 9 V motor, five toothed gear wheels, and numerous beams, connectors, axles, bricks and bushes. Once assembled and attached to the hot glue gun, it feeds the filament through to the nozzle at a steady rate. Then the artist can work on the creation of objects.

Technology post 3/13

      Miguel Valenzuela had a dream in which any man, woman, or child can simply print pancakes in any two-dimensional shape they can think of. He turned to Kickstarter in the hope of turning that dream into reality. PancakeBot came about when Valenzuela read about another pancake pioneer's quest to make a pancake-stamping machine.  PancakeBot is not a 3D printer as such but you can still get pretty creative and print out shapes. It includes an SD card with example pancake shapes, and is also bundled with Mac and PC-compatible tracing software that enables you to design your own. You copy your design onto the SD card, then insert that card into the PancakeBot to get started. The device uses a combination of compressed air and a vacuum to print out batter to a maximum pancake size of roughly 43 x 21 cm, and features controls to alter the rate. You'll need to be a tad careful with your choice of batter, as lumpy  mixed with chocolate or berries might clog the device. PancakeBot also won't flip the pancake for you, so it's not a completely hands-off process. As of now, the cheapest remaining pledge point to hopefully secure yourself a PancakeBot is $179. Valenzuela aims to ship the completed product in July 2015.