Out in the Open: The Free Tools That Let You Hack Your Whole Life | Wired Enterprise Tessel, a piece of open source hardware that lets anyone hack their home. Photo: Technical Machine Imagine a home speaker system that identifies everyone in the room and plays only the music they wanna hear. Tapping into tiny RFID chips installed on people’s cell phones, this system would pinpoint each person’s Facebook profile, parse their music tastes by way of the streaming music service Spotify, and create a playlist on the fly. And as new people enter the room and others leave it, the system would adjust this playlist accordingly. What you imagine is here today. ‘We wanted to create a platform for building socially connected machines.’ — Tim Ryan The core of their project is a custom-designed circuit board called the Tessel, and they’ve now “open sourced” the board’s designs — made them free for anyone to use — giving people everywhere the power to fashion their own Tessel boards and use it as the basis for whatever new-age contraption they like. The Technical Machine team.
Scanadu's Medical Tricorder Will Measure Your Vital Signs In Seconds It was less than a year ago that we first wrote about Scanadu's ambitions of building a Star Trek-worthy medical tricorder--a handheld device that can quickly record vital signs and diagnose diseases. At the time, co-founder Misha Chellam estimated that a prototype tricorder would be ready by the end of 2012. This week, the NASA-Ames Research Center-based startup, announced that it will have a prototype that meets that deadline. The Scanadu SCOUT is incredibly easy to use--just raise the handheld device (connected by Bluetooth to a smartphone) to your temple, and wait 10 seconds for it to scan your vital signs, including temperature, ECG, SPO2, heart rate, breathing rate, and pulse transit time (that helps measure blood pressure). The device, which will retail for under $150, was surprisingly difficult to build. Think about it: When you take your blood pressure, it’s usually with a cuff on your arm. "We really want to show people their health stream.