The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
I have been hacking on some cheap R/C cars, lately, and wanted to etch metal films off of a few of the bits. I knew that the usual strong acid and base suspects would remove it, but many folks don’t keep these substances around, for whatever reasons. I got curious about milder etchants, and did a simple test with some household chemicals.
21-year-old MIT computer science and electrical engineering student Stephan Boyer built Bullet, a self-balancing electric unicycle that reaches a top speed of 15 miles per hour and is the envy of his peers.
When I was younger, I absolutely loved the Pinewood Derby, the miniature car building and racing competition that we participated in as Cub Scouts. Recently, I was talking to a group of fellow ITP students and we thought, wouldn’t it be fun to hold our own derby, but with no rules?
Seeing this old Connect 4 game took me on a nostalgic trip back to the early 80s, sprawled out on our old brown carpeting, spending hours strategizing, stacking the chips, then pulling the lever and watching them all fall. And the fact that three classmates thought to convert it into a binary clock and share […]
The bibliophile in me cringes at Rodney LaTourelle‘s and Theo Folkerts‘ art installation, but it’s indubitably cool: Walls, benches and carpets made of discarded books structure a series of rooms at once framing and dissolving into their environment. Invoking the mythic relation between knowledge and nature integral to the concept of ‘paradise’, we expose these […]
Toy vehicles from plastic bottles are pretty cool. Add an Arduino, solar panel, batteries, ultrasonic range finding, a few servos, some beefier tires, and you’ll have something like Fijibot, an autonomous, self-charging robot.
A full-size skeeball game took over a year to make, and is built entirely with K’Nex components.
