Cloudy (showers later)

Thursday, March 20, 2008

How would you like your egg? Scrambled, cooked, flying?

And yes, it is that time of the year again, time for the Fablab annual Easter egg competition!.
My colleague Ales Schaub is working hard to get his entry finished before the deadline tomorrow night at six. At that time we will all log on to the Polycom conference (the MIT lab is running a continuous online conference) for the judging. And I guess I will be one of the judges... Probably going to be a though job! I heard that they are working on a flying egg in Norway...
So make sure to check back in here for the entries and of course the winner, who will be awarded with a free trip to the Norwegian lab... How I miss that place...

Monday, March 17, 2008

Mom, our display died. Again.

In Norway, I met a really nice guy working on an ambient light display, which consisted of little round transparent patches containing oil and water. If one applies a (probably quite high) voltage to the patches, the oil will move to the side, thus letting light shine trough. If you line up an array of these things, and apply a current to specific ones, it's possible to display information. Kind of like E-ink is supposed to work i guess, but surely way cooler... you can build it yourself.
Then, last wednesday, I met this guy at the lab at Pakhuis de Zwijger, who is also trying to build an display, only he is using bacteria! Apparently, if you lower (or raise, not sure which) the PH value of certain bacteria, you can get the suckers to glow. So using these fluorescent bacteria, one can in theory create a display... how cool is that? You will have actual dead pixels!
I don't think our houses will be equipped with this technique for some time, because the stuff dies rather quickly, and is not really easy to handle. Real cool project though.
Check out his site: biodisplay