SteamSHIFT

Wed 26 Apr 2006

Electric Paint

Graffiti Research Lab brought their portable lab (AKA matte black school bus). They used conductive paint to create traces to power LEDs mounted in strategic locations. Pictured is one of their programmable controllers for cycling the LEDs.

I have known that you could buy conductive paint for a long time, but I think this is the first time I’ve see it and begun to see some possibilities for it. Perhaps in an interactive installation where the viewers are invited to create their own circuits?

Thanks to: Maker Faire (Part 2) - Engadget

Wed 19 Apr 2006

Color Changing Concrete

Posted by SteamSHIFT under Architecture , Inspiration , Sustainability , Technology
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For those few of you who have been with me for any length of time, you will know that I have been intrigued by the possibilities of concrete for some time now. I have blogged about staining concrete, heating concrete and see through concrete and bendable concrete.

You will probably also know that concrete is really bad environmentally and I have blogged about alternatives like papercrete (concrete made using paper) and Earthskin, a mix of 80% earth and concrete.

So in the vein of the former, if not currently the latter of these possibly incompatible interests, I present: Color Changing Concrete. This is a new innovation that uses heat conduction to enable the display of patterns in the concrete.

SteamSHIFT out.

(Via Gizmodo.)

Wed 19 Apr 2006

Robot Labs!

Posted by SteamSHIFT under Geek , Inspiration , Stuff
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You may remember from my blog entry about being in Harajuku earlier this year, that I was talking about having been in a designer goods store. Well, I have stumbled across it. The site is in Japanese, with the requisite amount of English words to make it cool, but the best thing is that I also found this site - I Bee, Inc. I Bee, K.K./Robot Labs. Check out the awesome videos of Pirkus R Type-01. This is the robot we saw in KDDI; it’s even cooler in real life.

SteamSHIFT out.

Technorati Tags:
hardware, design, japan, robot

Wed 12 Apr 2006

Gratuitous Image Post

Posted by SteamSHIFT under Art , Inspiration
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Just looked at the front page of this blog and saw lots of TEXT. So here’s a couple of images! Also here because I liked them and haven’t quite known what to do with them. They are both screen grabs from a coolhunting video.