Rewind: 50 gizmos and gadgets that made us say ‘wow’

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2015 was quite the year. Here are just some of the awesome devices with mainstream appeal that caught our eye over the last 12 months. 

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Buddy

The first social robot that connects, protects and interacts with each member of your family.

Bistrobot

If you give this automated machine $2, it will craft a peanut butter sandwich on white bread with your choice of honey, blackberry jam, sweet chili or chocolate sauce.

Keyboardio

Finally, there’s an open source ergonomic keyboard that gives your overworked pinkies a break and puts your thumbs to work.

Voltera V-One

Tired of delays and unnecessary expenses? Then you’ll love this laptop-sized printer that can turn design files into prototype circuit boards in minutes.

PancakeBot

Design, print and eat your own pancakes.

PicoBrew Pico

Why head out to the package store when you can brew your own fresh, personalized craft beer right at home?

Forever 21 Thread Screen

The team of BREAKFAST and Forever 21 developed a massive, one-ton machine that turns your Instagram photos into thread artwork.

DrumPants

From hip-hop to dubstep, this wearable kit lets you play music right from your body using 100+ sounds and 300+ music applications.

Prometheus

While it may look like a 3D printer, this PCB milling machine enables you to prototype circuit boards right from your desk.

Tech Tats

Chaotic Moon Studios have devised a cutting-edge tattoo kit, which allows for the monitoring of your own body activity.

Layered Fabric 3D Printer

Who needs a toy store when you can 3D print your own soft and deformable stuffed animals from layers of off-the-shelf fabric?

BeachBot

Sand castles are so 2014. This turtlish autonomous robot can create large scale art on the beach.

OpenROV Trident

Whereas most drones are made for the sky, this remote-controlled, camera-equipped ROV is meant for underwater exploration.

Reality Editor

What if reprogramming your devices was as simple as drawing lines between them? Thanks to MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group, it may soon be.

ONAGOfly

Sorry selfie sticks, your days are numbered. This palm-sized drone features GPS auto-following and a high-res camera.

BeON Home

There are smart lights, then there are out-smart lights. This system will make having a safer, smarter home as simple as screwing in a bulb.

PowerUp FPV

Your old-school paper airplane just got a whole heck of a lot cooler with a live-streaming camera.

Phree

A revolutionary pen that turns the world around you into a notepad.

The Things Network

Make your city smart with this global, crowdsourced and decentralized IoT network.

Ripple Maker

A 3D printing-inspired device that can etch art on the foam of your coffee.

FarmBot

Grow my gosh! This 2015 Hackaday Prize entry is the world’s first open source CNC farming machine.

Alpha 2

Could this humanoid robot become the newest addition to your family?

LifeQ

By tapping into the human sensor, this intelligent technology can significantly improve decision-making for anyone’s health and well-being.

Sesame

Replace your keys with your smartphone in just seconds.

UnaliWear

Like OnStar for seniors, this all-in-one, voice-controlled wearable will help keep the elderly independent, active and safe.

ShiftWear

The most adaptable shoes you’ll ever own, customized straight from your smartphone.

Flic

A wireless button that can control your favorite smart functions.

C.H.I.P.

A $9 computer. ‘nuff said.

DrinkMate Mini

Have you had a couple of drinks? Don’t worry, this tiny iPhone breathalyzer has got your BAC!

Opal

Love nugget ice? Hate buying bags? This affordable gadget is for you.

Dobot

This high-precision, Arduino-based desktop robotic arm can do pretty much anything.

RePhone

BYOD: Build your own device! Piece together your own phone and give inanimate objects the power of cellular communication.

Mycroft

Based on the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, this open source A.I. system plays media, controls lights and more.

Spinn Coffee

This appliance can whip up anything from drip coffee to espresso, depending on how fast the brewer spins.

Tempescope

Who needs weather apps when you can recreate the forecast from right inside your living room?

Makerarm

A complete personal fabrication system crammed into a single, sleek robotic arm for your desk.

Fibonacci Clock

Think reading an analog clock is tough? Tell time using glowing lights and the Fibonacci sequence.

Electroloom

Design and create seamless, ready-to-wear garments based on custom 3D geometries.

Fleye

Could this soccer ball-shaped drone be the safest flying bot to date?

Naviator

A drone that can fly and swim.

RoboHon

Sharp unveiled a new smartphone in the form of an adorable robot.

Dancing Paper

Bet you’ve never seen a bunch of origami bust a move.

jamStik+

A portable guitar that teaches you to play and lets you jam on the go.

Nexpaq

This modular case for your smartphone gives you the ability to add and remove physical modules whenever necessary.

OWOW

A new breed of instruments that can drop the beat at home, in the studio or live on stage.

Oval

What if you could play a handpan like an electronic musical instrument?

SensorWake

The world’s first olfactory alarm clock wakes you up with your favorite scents instead of sound.

Ario

This smart lamp learns your habits, syncs to your body clock and keeps you healthy through natural lighting patterns.

CMYK 4.0

If you’re looking to make your commute from home to the office a bit more efficient, then this foldable electric bike may be for you.

Musio

The world’s first artificially intelligent companion bot, designed to engage and grow with you.

LineFORM

This shape-changing soft robot can be a phone, a wristwatch, a keyboard, a lamp and more.

Cord UIs

Imagine if you could control your gadgetry using cords and cables.

Bruno

There’s finally an automated smart trashcan that not only opens with a wave of a hand but vacuums up dust and restocks itself.

Netflix

These smart socks will pause your binge-watching session when you fall asleep.

Pixelio

Goodbye, shaky hands! Transform your smartphone into a 3D scanner.

 

DrinkMate is a mini breathalyzer that plugs into your iPhone

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Have you had a couple of drinks? Don’t worry, DrinkMate has got your BAC!

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According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly 30 people die every day in the U.S. as a result of drunk driving accidents. The most heartwrenching part of it all is that such instances can be prevented. Cognizant of this, the Edge Tech Labs team has set out to heavily reduce the number of drunk driving occurrences and corresponding fatalities with its latest innovation.

DrinkMate is a lipstick-sized breathalyzer — measuring 1.9″ x 0.6″ — that plugs directly into your iPhone’s lightning port. This prompts an accompanying app to launch, and seconds later, for you to blow into the end of the device. Your blood alcohol content (BAC) will then appear on the screen.

What’s more, the app enables you to easily connect with friends, partner apps and other programs currently in development. The idea behind DrinkMate is that, the more that the people around you are aware of your BAC and location, the better off he group will be as a whole. Peer pressure, either physically or digitally, can be used in positive way to make safer choices.

“DrinkMate and its app fundamentally change the image and goal of breathalyzers. Its design inherently draws in friends and people around you to see what you’re doing in a friendly manner. If your friend keeps blowing a high BAC number, can you really just sit there and let them make a mistake? You can’t — you’re forced to help them make the right choice,” its creators explain.

If the concept sounds familiar, that’s because Edge Tech Labs completed a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, for its proof-of-concept Android version, having garnered just shy of $100,000 from 2,800-plus backers. Since its debut, the team has significantly improved its circuitry, design and packaging for a retail-ready model that is compliant with Apple’s MFi program. Aside from that, the mobile app has been completely revamped with an enhanced user experience, interface and plenty of additional features.

With a tinyAVR MCU at its heart, the extremely portable and lightweight gadget (only 0.2 ounces) is powered entirely by your iPhone — no battery required. Not to mention, the specially-crafted air inlet on the end of DrinkMate is tasked with slowing down and directing air towards a built-in custom sensor to ensure accurate readings without any contact. In other words, this will be great news for germaphobes!

“Our sensor manufacturer has created a brand new high-quality sensor for us and utilizes specialized quality control measures of our design. This new sensor is more accurate, robust, and has a quicker recovery time in between readings,” the team reveals.

Impressively, DrinkMate can produce results within 0.01% at a BAC of 0.02%. While the sensor has a maximum BAC limit of 0.20%, chances are that if you’re past that threshold, you’ll probably need help standing anyways.

“We compute BAC in a fundamentally different way than pre-existing breathalyzers so that DrinkMate is minimally affected by sensor changes over time. Our proprietary algorithm has been developed over months of testing, thousands of DrinkMates (Android units from last year), and accounts for sensor age effects in its operation.”

Want a mini iPhone breathalyzer of your own? Head over to DrinkMate’s Kickstarter page, where Edge Tech Labs is currently seeking $35,000. Units are expected to begin shipping in October 2015. Those with an Android phone can still purchase one as well.

Rewind: 14 pocket-sized projects of 2014

And who said big things can’t come in small packages?

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A CD-sized printer you can take anywhere

Think printing is boring? Tedious? Annoying? You may want to check those thoughts at the door after checking out this portable, handheld printer from a team of students from Lev, the Jerusalem College of Technology. The young Makers — who together launched ZUta Labs — have debuted a revolutionary little gadget. The appropriately named Pocket Printer is an untethered robot comparable in size to a CD case that features a set of omni wheels and a printer cartridge tethered to an [Atmel based] Arduino board. Once placed down, the device begins to run along the paper, using its aforementioned wheels and a high-res optical sensor to move around, distributing ink wherever it’s needed. For multi-paged documents, simply pick up the printer and put it onto the the next blank sheet of paper.

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A drone that can fold up into your front pocket

Developed by Maker Jason Lam along with his team at San-Francisco based AeriCam, the Anura is a flying quadcopter that can be folded into approximately the size of an iPhone 6. The portable drone connects with iOS and Android smartphones via Wi-Fi. Equipped with a built-in microcamera, Anura offers a live aerial view on the screen of the connected smartphone, which also serves as its remote control. In addition, the flying apparatus can soar within a range of 80-feet with a flight time of around 10 minutes per charge and a top speed of 25 MPH. The pocket-sized UAV hopes to pack some other functionalities as well, including auto take-off, auto land, return home and follow phone.

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An entire band in your pants

Ever catch yourself drumming on your thighs? Your table? Your desk? Your steering wheel? Now, starting a one-man band is as simple as wearing this musical kit. As seen on Kickstarter and ABC’s Shark Tank, DrumPants transform one’s trousers into a full ensemble with 100+ built-in high-quality sounds. Though the DrumPants were designed with music in mind, the sensors do provide additional uses — they can reprogrammed to trigger actions within a wide variety of apps, ranging from answering their phone, to playing a streaming video, to controlling a game. In addition, its control box is powered by an Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-M3-based MCU and features an ultra-low latency Bluetooth 4.0 chip, an embedded sound engine for 1/8-inch headphone jack, 128 instrument sample banks and a Micro-USB for connection to a laptop or PC.

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A Tetris-playing business card



Safe to say, you’ve never seen a business card like this before. Created by Maker Kevin Bates, Arduboy is an uber-mini handheld game console powered by an ATmega328P. The device, which is roughly a millimeter and a half thick and apparently packs nearly 10 hours of battery life, is equipped with a 1.3″ OLED display, capacitive touch buttons and a piezo-electric speaker. In essence, it is a digital business card which features a built-in Tetris (and Pokemon) game and several control buttons.

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An open-source offline password keeper

In the wake of recent breaches, the need for two-factor authentication is more apparent than ever before. And, while log-ins and passwords are critical elements required to access the sites and services we use on a daily basis, remembering complex credentials can be quite difficult. So, in an effort to minimize the number of ways a password could be compromised, the Hackaday community recently devised an offline password keeper called Mooltipass. The crew selected an ATmega32U4 MCU to power the device, which also boasts an easy-to-read OLED screen, a read-protected smart card (AT88SC102) and Flash memory to store encrypted passwords.

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A portable breathalyzer that has your BAC

Developed by the team at Edge Tech Labs, DrinkMate is a lipstick-sized breathalyzer that plugs directly into your smartphone. The project recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, where it garnered well over its original $40,000 goal. Unlike those of the past, the world’s smallest breathalyzer — which measures 1.8″ long x 0.62″ in diameter — works in conjunction with the Android phone’s app and displays his or her blood alcohol content (BAC) results instantly with no calibration, no mouthpiece and no battery. A user simply inserts one end of Atmel based DrinkMate into a phone’s microUSB port, while blowing into the other end. BAC results are then displayed instantly.

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A Polaroid printer for your smartphone

Have you ever browsed through your smartphone pics and wished you could print copies in a moment’s notice? A new device, aptly named SnapJet, is now making that a reality. The open-source, instant-film printer uses Polaroid technology to let users wirelessly print their photos directly from a smartphone. Impressively, the SnapJet doesn’t require any mobile app, wires, or other connections, such as Wi-Fi, NFC or even Bluetooth. Driven by an AT90USB1286, the SnapJet also features an OLED display and other connectivity options — like USB and BLE — just in case you feel the need retouch a few pics, or for those Makers out there, the urge to reprogram or hack the open-source device.

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A handheld air quality monitor

Designed by the Brooklyn-based HabitatMap team, AirBeam is a portable, palm-sized system for mapping, graphing and crowdsourcing air pollution in real-time as you make your way around city streets. While the wearable instrument may not purify the air, it does enable you to monitor what you are breathing in, thereby increasing your awareness of the budding issue. As its creators note, pollution is among the leading causes of chronic illnesses as well as contributor to a number of terminal illnesses. In an effort to share and improve the atmosphere, the ATmega32U4 based AirBeam uses a light scattering method to take regular measurements of fine particular matter (also known as PM2.5), convert the data into a more digestible form and relay it to its companion smartphone app via Bluetooth. The Android app then maps and logs the data in real-time.

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A tracker for your environment

Wearables? More like air-ables! While a majority of the wearable tech space has been focused on tracking what’s inside our bodies such as activity and stress levels, a new kind of device is emerging, one in which monitors what’s going on outside of us — specifically in our environment. Similar to the aforementioned AirBeam handset, TZOA is capable of measuring air pollution and UV exposure in one’s immediate environment using advanced sensor technology. The tiny, round tracker is equipped with optical laser sensors that keep tabs on air quality, UV light, humidity, and temperature — all of which transmit data to a companion smartphone app via Bluetooth to quantify the environment around the wearer. Using this information, the wearer can determine whether they need to open a window, step outside to catch a few rays, or simply take a different route on their way to the office.

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An all-in-one prototyping gadget

Fresh of a successful crowdfunding campaign, Makers Pamungkas Prawisuda Sumasta and Ralf Smit have created the first all-in-one Arduino-compatible prototyping gadget. While its form-factor is rather convenient, its hackability and wide-range of applications is where the so-called Phoenard truly sets itself apart. The gadget, which is powered by an ATmega2560, not only sits perfectly in your hand but can slide quite easily into your pocket. The 11.8 x 6.1 x 1.1 cm device boasts a full-color touchscreen display and an on-board battery, and is even equipped with its own operating environment. Given its incredible versatility, the self-programmed Phoenard is bound to make every true Maker’s dream a reality. As its creators note, the prototyping platform can be used as the ‘brain’ of any DIY Project. Unlike an Arduino, Phoenard encompasses several features built entirely into a single unit, which can also serve as your daily mobile device. Sure, you can buy a smartphone, but wouldn’t it be even more awesome to devise your own?

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A gaming console that’s smaller than your credit card

Developed by National Engineering School of Saint-Etienne student Aurélien Rodot, Gamebuino is a retro-inspired, pocket-sized game console built around an ATmega328. No larger than a credit card, the successfully crowdfunded device gives a whole new meaning to portable gaming. With its metallic and vintage appearance, it will surely spark up some technostalgia of the Gameboy Advance of the early 2000s. According to its creators, Gamebuino is a true turnkey solution that enables Makers of all ages to begin creating their own 8-bit games — even those with very little programming knowledge. Advanced users will take comfort in knowing that the device is open-source, hackable and expandable.

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Another open-source 8-bit gaming console you’ll love

In honor of Game Boy’s 25th birthday, the Microduino Studio team debuted the Microduino-Joypad, an 8-bit multi-functional game console capable of playing all-time classics ranging from Tetris to Snake. The open-source gadget allows Makers to relive some of their greatest childhood memories of clicking away at those giant buttons on a vintage Nintendo handheld. Based on both ATmega328P and ATmega644PA MCUs, the Joypad can be used for everything, from controlling a quadcopter to playing a few levels of the latest Angry Birds installment.

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An interactive near-eye display

A group of researchers from Nokia and a number of universities have come together to design a gadget that has the same benefits of Google Glass, while eradicating the need to wear them around one’s face. The device, which is tethered to an Epson Android computer and an Arduino Pro Mini (ATmega168), provides an eye-level display for quick, discreet access. Named after the small magnification tool commonly used by jewelers, Loupe is described by its creators as a novel interactive device with a near-eye virtual display similar to head-up display glasses. With its cylindrical shape, the chapstick-sized gadget can be held up to one’s eye when a user wants to check their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and such. When not in use, the device can easily be stowed away in a pocket or worn like a pendant necklace.

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An open-source radiation detector

Developed by AeroSplice, the APOC Pro is an advanced open-source Gamma particle and X-ray radiation detector powered by an ATmega328. The device logs data onto a microSD card in a readable format, which is later analyzed using a custom web application and displayed to other users located throughout the world.

The Atmel powered DrinkMate has your BAC

Developed by the team at Edge Tech Labs, DrinkMate is a lipstick-sized breathalyzer that plugs directly into your smartphone. The project recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign having exceeded its original $40,000 goal by nearly $60,000.

Unlike others of the past, the world’s smallest breathalyzer — which measures 1.8″ long x 0.62″ in diameter — works in conjunction with the Android phone’s app and displays his or her blood alcohol content (BAC) results instantly with no calibration, no mouthpiece and no battery.

How does it work? One end of the DrinkMate simply plugs into the phone’s microUSB port; a user blows into the other end; BAC results are then displayed instantly. However, keep in mind that like with any breathalyzer, users can’t eat or drink anything for 15-20 minutes prior to using the device in order to get an accurate reading.

DrinkMate has a low-cost advanced stability semiconductor-based sensor, which will get you results within 0.01%. Though the sensor’s limit is 0.20%, as the creators mention, if you’re past 0.20% then you would “probably need help standing anyway!”

Led by Shaun Masavage and Mack Redding, the team devised the portable, lightweight (only weights 0.2 oz) yet powerful breathalyzer entirely from scratch, along with an Atmel microcontroller (MCU), of course.

“DrinkMate was designed entirely from scratch. We knew that to make a new breakthrough in size reduction, we couldn’t have any bias from existing larger designs,” a company rep noted on its site.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 33,561 people died in traffic crashes in 2012 in the U.S. alone with an estimated 10,322 as a result of drunk driving, accounting for nearly one-third of all traffic deaths that year. With its latest innovation, DrinkMate hopes to heavily reduce the number of drunk driving incidents and corresponding fatalities.

When discussing the goal of the pocket-sized breathalyzer, Masavage shares, “By making DrinkMate more accessible and cheaper ($25), we’re hoping users will use it publicly, and that it will take away some of the stigma of checking on your BAC.”

Interested in a DrinkMate of your own before heading out for a night on the town? They are now available for pre-order on the team’s official website, and are expected to begin shipping in December.