You can get 720p projectors for pretty cheap now.
My 17 year old son has this t-shirt.
He’s loaded it with sound bytes and music clips. When he and his friends walk down the halls at school he plays this.
His friend has these.
He is very proud that his mother gave him both herpes and the clap for his birthday.
Looks like a third boob.
For a couple hundred bucks I’d buy a stunt kite or a unicycle.
The coolest thing you can do is building a UAV with a camera link and then try to shoot it down with fireworks.
I was sticking to the RC helicopter category. Especially RC helicopters with geek appeal (photo/video capability in this case). Star Wars fans might get a kick out of this.
American Science and Surplus is great. They have tons of stuff, and I’m sure that I could easily spend several thousand dollars there without even looking at the top shelf items. And you just can’t beat the price of their merchandise.
Some good stuff here - I already have an RC helicopter. I’m kind of leaning towards the Lego NXT system, but I’ll wait a few more days to see if there are any other suggestions.
Nemesis Factor: It’s only $5-10, but it’s a start.
Van de Graff wand with mylar forms, also from thinkgeek. Oo, floaty and all magically delicious.
If that’s how you’re leaning, then I need to ask, how much of a geek are you? Are you thinking you’ll want to flash the chip in the programmable brick and install a custom kernel and write your own code for it? Because if you do, then you should do a little more research as to which set makes sense for you. The NXT 2.0 is the current model, and the one with the most current development support, and is generally the cheapest. Some geeks swear by the older sets though. My stuff is all older and I haven’t felt a need to get the newer stuff, although I certainly have the itch.
Enjoy,
Steven
I blew off Arduino because it is a little too close to what I do for a living. Right now I’m only interfacing with controllers, but not too many years ago I worked on writing HVAC controllers using eCos and the Motorolla Coldfire chip.
I’m looking for stuff to play with. I thought I might make an M&M sorter, just for fun. Then maybe do something with Bluetooth and a robot that patrols a certain set area. I don’t, we’ll see.
A bit practical but still a bit geeky and arguably fun:
Western Digital Media Player, my next tech acquisition.
(Also available in HD flavour.)
I currently have the livingroom TV set up as a second monitor on my PC, to watch DivX/Xvid stuff without burning to a DVD first. Downside - I am forever leaving my mouse in the couch or at my desk, and anyway it’s not an ideal remote device for TV watching.
A $100 unit that I can plug USB drives into to play 99% of my media with a handy remote, without the power-consumption overkill and noisy fans on my PC? Sold!
I found it was difficult to play with my Mindstorms. Either I’d build something which was supposed to be autonomous, and chafe at the restrictive, basic-ness of the built in programming capabilities(which were VERY primitive in my version), or I’d build something interactive(using the IR controller usually) and feel that I had wasted the autonomous capabilities of the set. Good ol’ Technic LEGO sets, especially the pneumatic ones, gave me the engineer geekiness I was looking for when I wanted entertainment. I’d break out the Mindstorms when I wanted to use my programming skills in a different way than I do in my normal work, or impress the kids(they love daddy LEGO night). Maybe the NXT is sufficiently flexible and powerful that you won’t have the same issues I did, but going from c to LEGO programming was like going from Technic to Duplo and I wasn’t willing to do that.
Enjoy,
Steven
If you just want something that looks cool, there’s this keyboard.
If you want something to fiddle with, there are several sites discussing ways to pimp or hack a roomba.
Get a 2 foot long copy of the Trojan Horse, made of wood, with wheels, & filled with hoplites.
What…?
Oh. A geek toy!
That’s very differnt.
Nevermind.
Or this one.
There are at least two C compilers for NXT, one is free the other you buy. I haven’t looked too closely at them yet though. There is also a NXT.NET environment which looks interesting, but again, I haven’t really looked at it yet. I think - but am not sure - that you can also use Visual Studio’s Robotic Studio with NXT.