Printer that doesn’t require Ink

Check it out, its a printer that doesn’t require Ink. How is that possible? It uses special re-usable plastic paper.  The paper can be reused up to 1000 times. After you’re done with the paper just put it back into the printer and either erase or print something new.

Now for the problems. It only prints Black and White. The printer costs $5,600 and each piece of paper cost $3.35 in lots of 1,000.

Compared to $0.01 for a normal piece of paper is a hard sell.  It has the potential to be a lot “greener” than a normal printer, but only if your the type of company or individual that does a lot of printing but doesn’t really need the print outs for very long.

Let me know when it does color and cost < $1 per page.

Goodbye Black and White E-Ink: Hello, Color!

Black and white E-ink is about to be overrun by at least 3 new technologies, Color E-ink, Mirasol and Pixel QI’s Transflective LCD.  Color E-ink is what it sounds like, from the few shots I’ve seen of it, it still has the lag of Black and White E-ink no video (yet). Mirsaol is a cool new display technology from Qualcomm that reflects light using interference to produce different colors making for an excellent display that can be viewed in any light, it also has super high pixel density (1024×768 in the 5.7 inch demo unit). The only problem I see with the display is white’s appear yellowish, but I’m sure they’re working on it. We might see devices within the year, hopefully full tablets and laptops and not just stand alone E-readers. Then there’s Pixle QI’s display which is an LCD technology that uses way less power, can be viewed in direct sunlight and can switch to black and white mode to save power and make it even more visible in and out of direct sunlight.  Pixle Qi’s display was seen in several different devices including tablets and e-readers. They may make some screens available to the DIY community.  Since the screens use LCD technology it might be possible to replace your current screen with one of these. Qualcomm’s Mirasol looks like the best of the 3 display techs but it might be awhile before we see it in a working tablet. It looks like they are initially focusing on getting in to stand alone E-readers. Pixel Qi displays have already been seen on Tablets at CES.  Engadget has a great write up on all the E-reader gadgets at CES this year.

Library of Congress Experience

Wow, today I went to the Library of Congress and was introduced to one of the best interactive displays I’ve ever seen. The Library of Congress Experience is an interactive display that is featured in front of many of the Exhibitions. In the Thomas Jefferson Library  you can choose any shelf and then use the interactive display to turn the pages of the books.  You can take a look at the actual art and then use the Kiosk to zoom way in to see the fine detail. The system features a passport system where you can create your own collection of content, you can then access that content from any other kiosk.   Judging by the fact that the web site is hosted on a Microsoft System and the Interactive displays feel like silverlight, I’d have to guess that the system uses silverlight or more likely the full desktop version of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), which Silverlight is based off of. They have a scaled down version of the interactive bible collection but unfortunately it is no where near the interactive ability of the real thing.

Here’s a link to a great intro video of the Experience, and a few more photos.

‘Sixth Sense’ — Reality Augmented

Augmented reality is pretty cool, using a camera, display and a phone or computer with a GPS and compass make for some interesting apps like I talked about here. A PhD candidate at MIT Pranav Mistry has created a new kind of augmented reality, that displays information on top of reality instead of on a display. Imagine taking a picture by just holding up your hands in a square, or getting a review of a book displayed on the book itself while you’re at the book store. He also shows an example where he’s at a grocery store and a simple traffic signal (red/yellow/green) appears on an object to let him know if he should buy the item. I don’t think I’d want to walk around with one of these tied around my neck anytime soon.

Check out http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/ for more Information.

E-Ink with Color, Dual Screen Dell Mini

I don’t have an E-reader like the Kindle yet, I’m waiting on Color E-Ink. A company called PixelQI (pronounced Pixel Chi) is gearing up for production of their E-ink displays with Color. Its hard to tell if these are Color E-ink Screens or two screens on top of one another, one a B&W E-ink display the other a Color LCD. There displays can be viewed outside in bright sunlight, their refresh rate is even fast enough for video. You can turn off the backlight and the screen turns black and white but is still readable, like an E-reader but way better refresh rate. Hopefully a courier like device will feature these type of displays. The Pixel QI site mentions that they want to make a small number of the screens available to the DIY crowd, so maybe I’ll be building my own Courier after all.

One member of the myDellMini blog is working on a dual screen Dell mini-9, they call it the Harlequin project. Combine this with the PixelQi display and you’ve got yourself a winner.

iPhone Messenger

Hopefully the Microsoft Courier is the real thing, but if not I may have to build one out of an iPhone and an iPod Touch. I call it the iPhone Messenger.

The device would be connected to the iPod Touch with a hinged, low profile case. The iPod and iPhone might talk to each other over Bluetooth™ , or directly connected through an iPod to iPod cable that would be embedded in the case.

In one mode the screen could become the keyboard. In another mode the device could act like the Infinite Journal, we see in the Courier videos.

Then again, maybe not.

Microsoft Courier

If you haven’t heard of the (hopefully) upcoming device from Microsoft Courier you’ve been missing out. In 2 posts by Gizmodo we learn about the new dual screen table notebook from Microsoft which will hopefully come out soon. In this post we learn how we could use the Courier (if we worked for Nike developing shoes). In the second post we learn more about the Courier’s Interface. The device features two 7″ screens and looks like it will be great for taking notes, sharing ideas and making presentations.

You might be familiar with the other rumored tablet device in the works from Apple. Less information is known about this device (if either really exist). It appears to be a giant iPhone or a full tablet computer. If both tablet devices come out, I’m leaning much closer to the Microsoft Courier. I’m a sucker for multiple displays and the UI seems so intuitive.

Augmented Reality

Finally after hearing about Augmented Reality for the past 10 years, its finally available and its free. Augmented Reality is the process of using a camera, gps and compass to overlay information over the real world like Restaurants, Gas Stations, Real estate and even where tweets are coming from. There’s a couple apps out there for you lucky IPhone 3GS or Android users. Layar Reality Browser is an app that works on the Iphone 3GS and Android Phones. Layar users different users selected layers (looks like only one at a time right now) and displays that information over the image that is being captured by the phone’s camera. The program is a little buggy but fun to use nevertheless. Some of the cool layers to user are google search, drinks (bars,nightlife,etc), Wikipedia, and hotels just to name a few. You can even create your own layers using the developers API. Here’s the Itunes Link for you IPhone users. Check out the Layar’s site for more info.

I’m on a boat

Well not quite yet but I did manage to pass my boater safety education class online. I ended up using boat-ed.com. This site has a really easy to use page by page interface. This is a pretty long course taking at least 6 hours to complete plus quizzes.

The course is broken into 7 units (one being a quick intro). Each of the units are broken into Topics. And each topic is broken into pages.

There were a few things I didn’t like about the course. 1. you couldn’t really tell how far you were through a unit, each topic’s page count varied. Some are 12 pages and some are a single page. 2. The quizzes at the end have several tricky questions. Finally the last thing I didn’t like is if you failed a topic (9/10 to pass) you needed to start the entire topic over again (another hour). It’d be great if you could just retake the quiz but I guess they’re trying to drill the information into you. Now the class is over and I never have to take it again (until they change the laws).

LED Cube

I came across this video last week and it got me interested in possibly building an LED Cube.

This 8X8X8 cube features 512 RGB LEDs. Each LED can produce 4096 colors. To wire the LED I’d need to solder 2048 wires from the LEDs to a controller board.

lumisense.com features all the schematics and instructions.

Lomont.org features some step by step instructions.
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Hypnocube features a 4x4x4 cube kit ($175) that I may purchase as a first effort to the 8x8x8 cube. Then again I could just by the 4x4x4 cube ($380) and not spend 20 hours building one.