That’s right, people, the 2009 Gizmodo Gallery is here! As I’m sure you have read, it’s bigger and better! Guess who got to go to the media day today?! That’s right, The iLife!

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Take a look after the jump, and get a sneak peek at whats inside.

After having the door judo-chopped closed in our face by a crazy-looking Tesla coil operator (ArcAttack‘s Patrick Brown, B.K.A. Parsec), Sidney and I were allowed to enter Gizmodo Gallery. With everything from musical Tesla coils to the worlds biggest Cheeto on display, the gallery is a great experience for all.

Lets start off the tour with our favorite judo-chopping crew working on the Tesla coil music maker thingy. The musical compositions are played by two solid-state Tesla coils playing along with a robotic drummer. To give you some sort of idea about how fast these coils are powered on and off, to make a an A note, they must turn the coil on and off 440 times… each second. The coils are operated by computer through a MIDI control box. In case that’s too easy for you, remember that the team still had to work around the fact that the electromagnetic field from the Tesla coils disrupts signals sent over copper, so they use light pulses over fiber optic cables instead. They also had to figure out how to turn a Tesla coil on and off 440 times a second, hence the solid-state controls.

Where did this idea come from, you ask? The team member we interviewed says they came up with it in a coffee shop. Since Tesla coils have been around since the late 1800’s, it’s mixing old tech (Tesla coil) with new (computers). He put it, “it’s kinda like the first dude that ever put wheels on a cooler.” Not exactly what I would compare musical Tesla coils to, but I’m sure you get what he’s trying to say here.

Next on our list of totally awesome gadgets is the ChefStack automatic pancake maker. The machine that has already been made famous by Gizmodo themselves is on display all week and making free pancakes for all! If you would like, you can buy an automatic pancake maker for your own house and make 200 pancakes an hour! You just have to pay $3500 to get the machine in the first place… but that’s beside the point. The pancake maker is a great innovation that just shows that literally anything will sell to the right person.

New York University also brought over two interesting products that students are working on in the Tisch School. The first is a machine I can only describe as a guitar piano (although they like to call it the Irregular Incurve). A piano keyboard is hooked up to a machine that strums different strings with guitar picks that correspond to the keys on the keyboard. This supposedly makes music, although when I used it it just kinda…failed.

The other project from NYU is the Mud Computer. As the projects website says, “the Mud Tub is an experimental organic interface that lets users control a computer while playing in the mud.” When you first see the “Mud Tub,” you’re gonna think, “Why is there a strange man playing with mud in the middle of a tech gallery?” unless, of course, you’re reading this. After closer examination, we see that the man is actually interacting with a computer by playing with the mud. A projector shines a green ball onto the mud from above that you can move around. It slides down to the lowest parts of the mud, just like a real ball. Cool, isn’t it?

There were obviously many other items at the Gizmodo Gallery, such as the worlds biggest Cheeto, a 103″ plasma TV, the world’s smallest drill (I’m not sure if that’s true but it is pretty small!), and much more. Sidney and I do plan on going back later this week to see if the most fun items, like a huge 3D Etch-A-Sketch and Alpay Kasal’s interactive mirror, are working (they were out of commission today due to power issues). So stay tuned in for more on Gizmodo Gallery 09! If you so happen to be in the New York City area, I truly suggest heading to the gallery and checking it out for yourself.

The Gizmodo Gallery is open all week long (September 23rd-27th, 2009), in New York City. Check Gizmodo’s Website for more details.

–Geoffrey Kaicher