The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Aaaaaaaaand we have a serious new contender for the title of Best Who’s-in-the-Box Ever. Adafruit senior designer Phillip Burgess was inspired by customers’ observations that their new-ish 10 cm “Massive Red Arcade Button” looks a lot like the iconic eye of Clarke and Kubrick’s famously malevolent mainframe. For sheer comedic value, I think…
Operation is a game that lets you test your hand-eye coordination by removing a variety of ailment tokens from a cartoon patient without touching the metal sides of each slot. Since its release in 1965, there have been a lot of special editions created. These feature popular characters such as Buzz Lightyear, R2D2 and Iron Man. The game’s simple design makes it very versatile and easy to adapt.
Lego builder Matt “Monsterbrick” Armstrong rebuilt a Lego 10225 (a 2,000-piece R2-D2 model) in black and gold to create R2-Pi, the Death Star astrodroid. It will be featured at Legoland Star Wars Days.
There is a large field of mustard a couple miles from MAKE headquarters, and for a few weeks in spring, all the mustard blooms, and the field turns brilliant yellow. On the way home from work about a month ago, I stopped at the field, with a plan to to take some photos. As I got closer to the ideal photo spot, I came across a gentleman, documentary filmmaker Michael Heumann, flying a quadcopter. We got to chatting, and I ended up snapping some photos. Michael has a DJI Phantom Aerial UAV Drone Quadcopter with a GoPro camera mounted to it, and he showed me how he had installed some Moongel pads on the top and bottom of the camera, to absorb shock to reduce video shakiness.
The lever is one of the six classic simple machines. A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes a force’s direction or magnitude. The other five simple machines are the wheel and axle, the pulley, the inclined plane, the wedge and the screw. Explaining simple machines to kids can be a fun learning experience, especially if you include some demonstrations in the lesson. Here’s how I built a lever for a demonstration of simple machines for my son’s 3rd grade clas
Instructables user bwrussell put together this clever tutorial for making “Creeps,” which are spicy marshmallow versions of the Creepers from Minecraft.
CircuitCo’s Motor Cape with NXT allows you to control up to 8 Mindstorms motors with a BeagleBone microcontroller. Alas, the board doesn’t accept data from sensors or from the encoders built into Lego’s motors. You can preorder the board on Boardzoo and they also have a version with terminals blocks.
