360 Car Demo
If you’re new to upLog, it’s an occasional blog post and email update from the workbench of Uncommon Projects in which we share development ideas from recent projects. In this post we’ll show a proof-of-concept we’ve been developing with our friends at Hush Studios. The goal was to create a working prototype to [...]

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In this post you’ll find Photos, Videos, Source Code, CAD files and Schematics for the recently completed Purple Pedals project. Purple Pedals saw us make 20 solar-powered, geotagging, photo-taking, flickr-uploading bikes to be ridden in cities all over the world.
So I’d like to put a bow on our little bike project and share some [...]

Looks like yahoo finally got around to stealing the ybox idea we presented at the 2006 hackday:
The Yahoo! Widget Engine is based on the popular Konfabulator(R) widget platform for PC, which has been re-engineered specifically for consumer electronics devices.
Here’s what we wrote about the ybox in 2006:

It’s sort of like Konfabulator for your TV (where [...]

One of the coolest parts of working on the Yahoo Purple Pedals project was figuring out how we could get the bikes as far off the grid as possible. Once we decided on using the N95 as the brain for the bikes, we had to figure out how much juice it takes to run the [...]

We’ve just finished a project for Yahoo called purple pedals (a.k.a. the yBike). There’s a good explanation of the project on Yahoo’s corporate blog and on lifehacker. In a nutshell, it’s a bike that takes pictures and uploads them to flickr in real time. Yahoo also produced some great videos about the project, and [...]

Behold the Pixelmusic 3000, the music visualizer on a microcontroller. The PM3K was created as a project and article for Make Magazine. This means the schematic, parts list, code and a photo/text walkthrough explaining the build are printed for anybody to make or modify as s/he wishes. The PM3K is intended both as an ode [...]

Entrepreneurs kiosks with C&G Partners for the Museum of American Finance 
So if you can forgive my awkward Bob Vila impersonation above,  I wanted to show off one of our recent projects.
We created 10 touchscreen Kiosks for the Museum of American Finance, housed in the former Bank of New York building on Wall Street. The museum was founded [...]

Making Things Talk
OK, it’s been a while since I’ve checked in. We here at Uncommon have been a little swamped (more on those projects in another post). Anyway, we’re pleased to announce that the ybox (picture p.114-woot!) has made it into a book written by Tom Igoe and released by O’Reilly. We’re even more pleased [...]

Near Death iPhoto Export Plugin
An iPhoto plugin that approximates the proverbial Near Death Experience. Exports all or part of your library as a quicktime movie. Each photo in your library becomes a frame, about twelve hundred per minute.
Here’s 2004-2007 of my iphoto library (about 3000 photos in 2 1/2 minutes):

Download OS X Installer
iPhoto [...]

Email is an asynchronous medium and, as such, I’d like to add a touch more ‘asynchronicity’ to the mix. I’ve waited a good decade for this feature, and since it still hasn’t emerged I’ve decided to photoshop it into the blogosphere in the hopes that the powers that be (hello Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) or an [...]

Here’s a simple tool for generating rss digests out of flickr photos. We call it digestr The idea is that instead of getting an rss item for each photo, groups of photos uploaded over a day or hour are consolidated into a single item.
You can subscribe via rss to a particular user, group, [...]

When I was a teenager I had this sweet stereo in my room with an Aiwa receiver and some crazy big Yamaha speakers. All through my 20’s I lugged those big Yamaha’s to about 6 different apartments in New York until finally I decided they were just too big for a Manahattan apartment. Today, I [...]

With any luck, we’re hoping the above video is the most succint and understandable explanation of the ybox yet. It’s a project that started as a hack and finished as a workshop, and describing it along the way has been interesting. There’s a large element of whimsy in the project (it’s in a candy tin [...]

We here at Uncommon Projects are technology generalists. As such, our skill set is broad enough that folks can have trouble pinning down what it is we do. Our solution to this problem has been to create an ongoing portfolio of our work at Uncommon Projects and show what we do by example.
While this [...]