If you’re so accident-prone that your clothes are always getting ripped, but you aren’t handy enough to mend those rips, the future holds some pretty good news for you. Designer Ingrida Kazenaite has come up with a concept that would let anyone quickly and easily repair damaged clothing, even if they’ve never before picked up a needle and thread.

The Fabric Pen is a kind of small-scale garment 3-D printer. On one end, controls let you scan the material you want to match and choose the printing function that will repair the damage.

Pressing a button releases a spray-on fabric that mends the rip. The nano-material attaches itself to the fabric’s threads, matching the texture and pattern perfectly. When you change out of the garment, you can choose to leave the repair in place and wear it over and over or just remove and dissolve it.

The conceptual product is meant to cut down on the amount of clothing that is needlessly discarded every year. By repairing rather than replacing, we can greatly reduce the amount of material entering the waste stream before its useful life is over.

The Fabric Pen clearly isn’t ready for real-world production just yet, but the concept perfectly illustrates the type of product that could change the way we use our resources in the future.

The post Sew Simple: Fabric Pen Mends Clothes, No Needle Needed first appeared on Gajitz.

You’ve heard all of the urban legends about how to fix a phone that’s been rendered useless by a dunk in liquid, but real working solutions that won’t void your warranty are few and far between. A new device called DryBox is a different kind of fix that will restore your waterlogged phone to working order in less than half an hour. All you do is stick your wet phone in the patent-pending drying chamber and the device purportedly removes moisture at the molecular level.

With a claimed 80% success rate and a money-back guarantee if the process doesn’t fix your smartphone, the DryBox seems like a pretty great deal for the butter-fingered phone owner. The machines are currently only located in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, but the brand is looking to expand. We can imagine one of these in every mobile phone store, saving the phones of the chronically clumsy – for a fee.

The post Wet Phone? This Box Will Rescue it in Under 30 Minutes first appeared on Gajitz.

Working on cars or trying to fix machinery can be a headache when you can’t locate the exact spot of the problem. Listening to how the machine or engine runs is a big help, but it doesn’t always lead you to the exact source of the sound. Enter the SeeSV-S205 sound camera, developed by SM Instrument Company and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

The sound camera is a small hand-held device that, when pointed in the general direction of a troublesome sound, takes an unusual kind of picture. Data from microphones and an optical camera are combined to form an image that looks a little like a color-coded thermograph picture. It’s communicated to a linked computer so that the mechanic or technician can then study the source of the sound.

The SeeSV-S205 isn’t the first “sound camera,” but others are big, heavy contraptions that have to be mounted on tripods. This newer sound camera is smaller because it focuses on a more specific range of frequencies – those most commonly found in industrial products. As long as you use the device in the context for which it was intended, the relatively narrow frequency spectrum should be sufficient.

The post Synthetic Synesthesia: Hand-Held Cam Lets You See Sounds first appeared on Gajitz.

Reaching for an object you need only to find out that it’s broken is kind of a drag. But not being able to fix it? That’s a drain on natural resources and money. London-based designer Paulo Goldstein has invented his own fantastical fixes for several ordinary items and called it “Repair is Beautiful.”

Rather than throwing away the broken items, Goldstein repaired them with readily-available tools and materials. Sometimes this was cool-looking metal bits or pieces of string. Sometimes it was spare ribs.

A director’s chair, iPod Shuffle, desk lamp and headphone were all treated to Goldstein’s unique brand of repairs in this project. The items were seen as useless garbage before Goldstein’s intervention, but he saved them from the landfill while creating fascinating new pieces of technology-based art.

The project, according to Goldstein, has a deeper message. It represents the financial crisis which has been affecting us all since 2008. The system is broken, and maybe it will take some unconventional thinking in order to repair it.

The repaired objects are returned to their old environments as a hybrid of new and old components. They can still function, proving that even items which were once rejected and considered useless can serve a purpose.

The post New Life for Broken Things: Project Shows Beauty of Repair first appeared on Gajitz.

In climates where the transition from winter to spring involves dramatic temperature changes, potholes are a familiar feature of roads. They aren’t just annoying, though – potholes can cause serious damage to cars. A group of college students in Ohio has come up with a simple and brilliant way to fill potholes temporarily until crews can patch them permanently.

The idea makes use of a non-Newtonian fluid: a mixture that is liquid under normal conditions but which stiffens up instantly when force is applied to it. Although the group is not releasing its specific recipe pending a patent application, the mixture likely contains cornstarch and water. The mixture is simple, inexpensive, biodegradable and even edible.

The plan involves placing the non-Newtonian fluid into heavy-duty plastic bags, throwing the bags into potholes, and then covering them with black material so that drivers don’t mistake them for obstacles. As cars drive over the bags, the fluid inside stiffens up and lets the vehicles pass without the familiar jarring. The bags are not meant as a permanent solution, but they could help prevent damage to vehicles just long enough to allow crews to get out there with some hot asphalt.

The post Bags of Non-Newtonian Fluid Are a Temporary Pothole Fix first appeared on Gajitz.