Optical Tremolo Box
Plug your guitar into light-programmable waveforms with this unique effects box.
Continue Reading
Adhesive
Monkey Couch Guardian
My cats like to jump on furniture and shed their fur, which ends up on my clothes. To stop them, I’m using a Monkey Couch Guardian. I made it from one of those old-fashioned cymbal-banging toy monkeys, modified with an inexpensive Arduino microcontroller and a proximity sensor. Now when a cat jumps on a table, […]
Continue Reading
The Fire Piston
Carl von Linde was dead tired. The eminent engineer, considered the father of the modern refrigerator, had just returned to his home in Germany from a lecture tour that took him to, among other places, Malaysia. This being the late 19th century, the voyage had taken months. Von Linde had seen and learned much during […]
Continue Reading
Dodecahedron Lamp
People appear symmetrical, but even the most perfect human face shows irregularities if we compare the left side with the right. Perhaps this is why the absolute, rigid symmetry of crystals seems beautiful yet alien to us. Unlike DNA’s soft spiral, a crystal’s molecular bonds align themselves to form regular three-dimensional structures, which the Greeks […]
Continue Reading
The Autophenakistoscope
Motorize a phenakistoscope, a 19th-century parlor novelty that preceded motion pictures, and keep its frames synched to an LED strobe by using a sensor and an Arduino microcontroller. Invented in 1832 by Joseph Plateau, this device creates a moving picture from a sequence of stills arranged on a spinning disk and viewed through strategically cut […]
Continue Reading
