Riding a manual wheelchair everywhere you go can be exceptionally tiring, which is why Rio Mobility has introduced the Firefly, an electric attachment that easily clamps on to most manual wheelchairs. The small device attaches in less than a minute and turns the manual wheelchair into a type of power trike.

The Firefly lifts the wheelchair’s smaller front wheels off of the ground and replaces them with a larger single wheel. The wheel is attached to a power pack and a set of motorcycle-like handlebars. The device features an odometer, a speedometer, a reverse gear, a parking brake, a twist throttle and two brake levers. In other words, it’s almost like turning your chair into a cool little power chair that gives you the power to go back to your manual chair whenever you like.

With a top speed of about 11 MPH and a range of 15 miles per charge, the Firefly seems just about right for running errands on those days when you’re just not feeling up to going the manual route. The contraption only weighs a little over 30 pounds, so it’s portable enough to keep in your car. The Firefly costs just under $2,000, which could buy you a lower-end electric wheelchair that isn’t convertible – but the Firefly gives you the ability to choose whether you want to travel under arm power or battery power.

The post Handlebar Attachment Turns a Wheelchair Into a Scooter first appeared on Gajitz.

The Strandbeest began as an art project of Dutch artist Theo Jansen in the 1980s. Today, amateur Strandbeest enthusiasts are building their own walking beasts and putting some unique spins on the idea of a wind- or gravity-propelled walking sculpture. I-Wei Huang, an artist and tinkerer, has come up with what might be the cutest version yet: a hamster-propelled Strandbeest.

After receiving a mini Strandbeest kit from Gakken Magazine, Huang set out to create a unique propulsion system for the little plastic critter. He though about steam, but realizing that plastic and steam don’t exactly get along well, he scrapped that idea for a far more adorable one.

Huang modified the small Strandbeest to include a hamster ball on top. He hoped that, as the hamster ran inside the ball, its weight and movement would be strong enough to propel the machine along. He added some cogs and a chain that would activate the Strandbeest’s legs and move it forward with the hamster’s movement.

The artist didn’t have a pet hamster himself and wasn’t interested in keeping one as a pet, so he borrowed a hamster named Princess to test drive his contraption. It clearly worked very well, and it made for an oddly beautiful vision: a tiny animal running quickly while the mecha-legs below seemed to creep along slowly. In any case, Princess the hamster got to feel large and powerful for a few minutes while running right past a seemingly disinterested cat.

The post Hamster Powered Walker Ushers in Era of Rodent Rule first appeared on Gajitz.

Don’t you just love it when two different gadgets come together to make one awesome technology that you never knew you needed until it was invented? Yeah, that’s what we were thinking when we heard about Netflix’s hack of their own system using a FitBit fitness sensor to determine if you’ve fallen asleep while watching something on Netflix. The FitBit tells your streaming device – computer, smart TV, Roku or whatever – when you have nodded off.

Netflix then pauses the program at that spot, saving your place for later so you don’t have to do the endless fast-forward searching for the last scene you remember. When you wake up, you just go right back to the bookmarked spot at which you drifted off. If you fall asleep watching movies as often as we do, this will seem like some kind of magical gift. This hack came from an internal hack session at Netflix, so there doesn’t seem to be much of a chance that it will actually be marketed – but we can always hope.

The post Ingenious Netflix Hack Pauses Movie When You Fall Asleep first appeared on Gajitz.

Our little red View-Master toys gave us hours of entertainment as kids, but their static images are a little old fashioned for today’s kids who have their own iPads. Alec Smecher decided to modernize an old View-Master to play 3D movies, and the result is pretty impressive.

He started with a deluxe View-Master that has an attachment for batteries and a light. This attachment was a vital part of the final design because it provided enough space for the hardware needed. This was Smecher’s first foray into Frankensteining View-Masters, so he did a fair amount of trial and error before coming up with the perfect combination of hardware.

In the end, the redesigned toy looks amazing. The mini CD that replaced the original cardboard picture discs sticks out of the top a bit as it spins rapidly, so it may not be an ideal toy for young kids. If you’re interested in recreating the awesome project, all kinds of technical details can be found on Smecher’s website.

The post A Modern View: Old Toy Transformed Into a 3D Video Player first appeared on Gajitz.

Remember playing with a Magic 8 Ball when you were a kid? You would ask a ‘yes or no’ question, then turn the ball over to see its highly dependable answer floating up through a mysterious blue liquid. It was fun, but there were only 20 possible answers and it got old pretty quickly. DIY-er Jason Poel Smith decided that the toy deserved a 21st century upgrade.

Smith met his goal by cutting apart a Magic 8 Ball, scooping out its innards and replacing them with a small digital picture frame. The frame can hold up to 60 pictures at a time, and what those pictures are is up to the user. You can change them at any time through the handy new USB port created during the project.

The project looks easy enough, but it would be kind of a pain to work with all of those little pieces and avoid super-gluing yourself to all of them. If you’ve got more patience than we do, you might have some fun making this digital magic 8-ball and loading up some crazy pictures on the tiny screen. The only drawback seems to be that the digital frame doesn’t have an accelerometer to tell it what position it is in, so it can’t be activated by just flipping the ball over. It will cycle through all of your pictures as a slideshow, and whatever pic happens to be on the screen when you flip the ball over is your answer.

The post 21st Century Magic 8 Ball Lets You Set Customized Answers first appeared on Gajitz.