I can't believe how much work someone put into this adorableness. I'd love to see remakes with other animals and games. Sonic with real hedgehogs? Via Cute Overload
I featured Jerome Demer's ingenious little one-motor walker in my book Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. I've been hoping he'd put up an Instructable and he finally has. This is a bit of a finicky mechanical build, but worth the effort. It uses a standard BEAM bicore circuit as its brain (via the 74HCT240 chip).
The Sashimi Tabernacle Choir is an art car project by Richard Carter, John Schroeter (Houston, TX), and some thirty volunteers. The car incorporates 250 singing Billy Bass animatronic fish and 250 mechanical lobsters, including a conductor that's perched on a boom over the hood of the 1984 Volvo sedan the choir calls home.
After the car made an appearance in Lewes, DE yesterday, the Cape Gazette wrote:
Occasionally you witness firsthand an astounding display of American ingenuity. Such is the case with the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir art car that wowed dockside crowds in Lewes Wednesday afternoon. When you see such displays, you wonder: wouldn't we do better in Afghanistan and Iraq if we rolled more of these down the streets of Kabul and Baghdad?
The project's website has a lot of construction information, photos, and video clips of the car singing and twitching its goofy little heart out.
Sean Ragan welded together his own flask for green sand casting of aluminum. A flask is the two-part frame that holds the sand for this method of casting. His is better than a wooden flask (which can't handle the high temperature if you accidentally spill some molten aluminum), and his method of construction is quite clever and well documented on his site.
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Citizen Engineer is an online video series about open source hardware, electronics, art and hacking. The first video debuted at "The Last HOPE" conference today in New York City. Volume 1is about phones: SIM card & payphone hacking. Learn how a SIM card works (the small card inside GSM cell phones) make a SIM card reader, view deleted messages, phone book entries and clone/crack a SIM card. Modify a "retired" payphone so it can be used as a home telephone and for VoIP (Skype). Then learn how to modify the hacked payphone so it accepts quarters - and lastly, use a Redbox to make "free phone" calls from the modified coin-accepting payphone...
Around the 12 minute mark it gets really exciting.
More: Want to build your own SIM card reader? The SIM card reader/writer is available at Adafruit Industries, it is for experimentation and investigation of SIM & Smart cards. Once the kit is built, accompanying software can be used to read and write from the card. Together they can be used to backup stored SIM card data, recover deleted SMS's and phone contacts, examine the last 10 phone numbers dialed, etc. (Despite being called a SIM reader, it can also write to SIM cards). Source, schematics and software included.
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Here's two things I'd never think to combine: Tori Amos portraiture and everyone's favorite childhood building blocks. Found in the MAKE Flickr pool, Steven Goodwin made this Tory Amos portrait entirely from LEGO blocks.It really looks a lot like her when you squint at it.
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Here's a nice how-to on pitch bending a standard cassette walkman. This hack uses a photocell as a tripper pot on the device. Check out the link for instructions on how to put this together.
This "obnoxious noise maker" called the "Ubnox-O-Phone" by its maker is a combination of a sound generator and Ruby Guitar Amp who's schematic can be downloaded from their site. The whole project only cost $35 so it's a pretty cheap way to annoy people. Check out the video at the link below.
Jon Edmiston wrote a nicely flexible C# application to control a LEGO NXT car with a Wiimote - he says he could switch the remote out for a Wii balance board and he could still control the car. via NXT Step
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A commenter from our previous humongous woofer post points out another contender for biggest-sub-ever - Enter(literally) the Matterhorn -
The most powerful sub ever created. It was born out of a military request and is housed in a 20' x 8' x 8' shipping container. 40 drivers, 40 kwatts of self powered and built in generator to boot.
Hoo-aah! - Matterhorn Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!
CNET posted a piece outlining what HOPE is all about and conducted a brief interview with the conference founder and 2600 publisher Emmanuel Goldstein -
"Basically what the hackers and phone phreakers of the past were doing, everybody is doing today," he said in an interview on Thursday. "This is the price of success; we have these fads of everybody jumping into technologies and playing with things, (but) it's also gotten more commercial."
Back in the day, the phone system was a "giant toy that people wanted to figure out. That's what hacking is all about," he said. "The interest is still there. People want to know how things work, but there's no practical reason for (phone phreaking) beyond curiosity" because of the advent of the Internet.
Meanwhile, the widespread distribution of technology has turned millions into would-be criminals. "It's a free-for-all as far as legal precedent goes," Corley said. "Something you think is completely above-board, like running a program on your own computer, can be a violation of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)."
The "Rechnender Raum / Calculating Space" is a light-weight kinetic sculpture by Ralf Baecker that is constructed from sticks, strings, and fishing weights. The sculpture also functions a fully functional neural network. Really impressive piece and the video at the link below is pretty amazing to see it in action. Also, the piece will be showing at Arbots 2008 this coming Sept, in Dublin, Ireland.
I wanted a boat that would allow me to cast into the shore instead of from the shore. Being a mechanical engineer, one thing led to another and as the years passed I decided I would build a skin-on-frame kayak. The final kayak would be wood framed and fabric skinned. I searched for additional ideas and eventually made a balsa and tissue paper model of an 18 footer. Not wanting to invest more money and time than necessary in a prototype, I began thinking of a simple and quick way to test a design.
Again one thing led to another, and my son Daniel and I came up with the idea of a PVC pipe frame, duct tape for fastening the pipes together, and 4 mil construction plastic for a test skin. We arrived at an initial design that would use 10 foot sections of PVC pipe, since that was the length available at our local stores. Since fishing was the primary aim for this boat, shorter and wider would be more maneuverable.
We put our first prototype in the water in the summer of 2007 and it sat a little lower in the water than we wanted. The next design, shown in this article, was widened from 30 inches to 36 inches but the keel form stayed the same. Each boat was put in the water for less than $25.00. In addition to the change in width, we added the use of brackets formed from PVC pipe to help hold the pieces in the proper position, since the duct tape lashing on the original design had allowed two joints to shift slightly.
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Hanker-'tude allows the wearer to update their Twitter feed just by tying the bandanna around their neck. It uses an Arduino Lillypad, blueSMiRF, and a Nokia phone to get the job done. Hanker-'tude is a very simple, and a very unique way to twitter.
Having to interface continuously with a gadget to update your online presence is a drag on your real-life presence. Using a bandana/hankerchief instead is at least briefly amusing and requires only minimal setup typing.
What do you do with your crutches after that nasty crash on bicycle? Well, if the wheels are still in good shape you could always make your own stool to commemorate the occasion. Then again, you can find old crutches and some wheels in the recycling and/or garbage and forgo the whole bicycle accident part.
This DIY battery charger is based on a Lipo Charger designed by Scott Henion. This is a perfect charger for RC enthusiasts, and robot makers. Check out the website for a few more pictures and a schematic.
When the you push the button, The Applause Machine claps it's hands for you. The Applause Machine is a motorized automaton designed by Martin Smith that will be widely available in September of 2008. The piece is constructed of coated steel, brass, Walnut, plastic and a small motor. It measures about 45cm in height and is powered by 2 AAA batteries. It will be available in a number of very nice colors.
More: The Designing Automata Kit is great value and fantastic quality. No glue or tools are required, and you will learn about simple mechanics using cams and a crank slider mechanism. Many different designs can be made, and the kit used over and over again. Produced in Thailand using chemical-free rubber wood, from sustainable sources. Make is proud to be the only store this side of the pond to carry this kit. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!
This looks like a simple enough remake, spotted in the MAKE Flickr Pool: a bench made from two snowboards. Might be great for your out-of-commission boards or for ones so artsy you can't bear to take them out on the snow.
