Just in time for the holidays, Gadget Freaks get your pumpkins ready - the 2007 Punkin Chunkin World Championships is this week. In case you aren’t familiar with the event, thousands descend on “the Chunk” in Bridgeville, DE. With a schedule of events filling all three days, the Canons are the gadget of choice for these fierce competitors all vying for one thing – to chunk their pumpkin the farthest. The 2006 adult winner catapulted its pumpkin last year a whopping 3,870.50 ft! Now that’s some far sailing orange vegetable! You can check out all the past winners’ distances here.
Sponsored by the Punkin’Chunkin’ Association, the annual event has a category for everyone from youngsters to teens to adults. You can go to the event’s official website for a look at all the classes and contest rules.
Doug Conner's self-starting, solar-powered Stirling engine runs all year when the sun is visible from the sculpture’s location. The engine can shut down when the sun isn’t visible, and it can restart by itself when the sun comes back up.
This recycler determines the type of material being entered, by scanning it in or entering it via a touchscreen; and an RC servomotor opens the trash flap, dropping the material in the can.
To help his sister, who has cerebral palsy, Glenn Johnson created an easier-to-use Kindle by taking the controls from a children's V.Reader and routing them into the Kindle's interface board.
Jared Bouck found that off-the-shelf monitor systems were lacking the features he needed and were cost-prohibitive, so he created the sprout board, which is 100 percent open-source and totally customizable to the needs of implementations.
Thanks to embedded electronics, medical devices are getting smaller and smarter than ever. Pacemakers and implantable defibrillators are now able to call physicians. MRIs, CT scanners, and ultrasound machines are gaining mobility. And the venerable Band-Aid may soon be able to detect illnesses ranging from fevers to heart arrhythmias. On February 21, join Design News senior editor Charles Murray for a wide-ranging discussion, "Embedded Angles for Medical Products," which will explore the latest developments in medical electronics. The discussion will examine advances in medical device technology and offer an inside look at the embedded electronics behind it.
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