When Joshua Lifton of Crowd Supply approached his mate Kurt Mottweiler to help design a variant case for hardware designer Bunnie Huang’s Novena open-source computer, it was hard for him to resist the opportunity. As a veteran, bespoke camera designer, Kurt was delighted to venture into a new area, where a non-touchscreen computer with a removable keyboard was to be housed in his exclusive creation, The Novena Heirloom Case.
When running from a bear whilst out on a hike, there’s but one concern–getting clear, shake-free footage. There are various gimbals and stabalizer systems for the GoPro, but a new motorized option is making all the other options look weak. SLICK is a motorized GoPro stabilizer that allows you to record video hands-free, to let you focus on the activity, ahem, fleeing that bear, while ensuring clear, shake-free footage.
Meet Lily, a small drone you can toss in the air, to track and record your every move. This is what I imagine a more practical use of drones to be like in the future–Everyone with their own little drone assistant to film them… open doors, fend off would-be assailants, etc.
When it comes to upcycling, old bicycle tires and discarded biscuit tins often come to mind – yet one of modern society’s most commonly disposed of objects just might be living in your back pocket right now. With an average lifespan of 18 months, bank notes around the world are decommissioned and destroyed about as frequently as banks can introduce new ones. But as we continue to depend on digital currencies and mobile apps as our wallets, how can we make use of our old notes? In her latest project ‘Value’, Rotterdam-based designer Angela Mathis repurposes a number of different notes from around the world based on their color schemes…
This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist brings an entirely new playlist of face-melting great music to help propel you through those laborious, tedious design tasks for the next few days. So whether you find yourself inking markers until they’re dry, grinding material through a bandsaw or flying through a CAD model, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week we’ll start off with “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” from Arcade Fire and work our way through everything from The Dirty Projectors and Elephant to Stereolab, The Flaming Lips, Phantogram and others before wrapping up with “Phase Craze” from Israel Medina. As always – do you have any…
Between delivering packages and even successfully catching fish, it seems as though there is little that drones – or quadrocopters – can’t do these days. But what about building a bridge that can support two humans…autonomously? In a new video YouTube video uploaded by programmer Federico Augugliaro, two drones use a high-precision motion capture system, a wireless communication network, and custom software executing sophisticated algorithms for estimation and control to build a rope footbridge without the aide of humans. The experiment, which is just one of many performed by Augugliaro and a team of researchers at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich…