The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Cubelets are a robotic construction system from Modular Robotics. Using color coded cube modules, a maker can create a robot from snap together pieces that contain sensors, logic circuits, or “actions”. When attached together, the modules communicate via i/o built into the connector. Cubelets seem like they’d be the perfect introduction to robotics because you could easily get started creating robots without having to pick up a soldering iron.
Photos of Steve Lodefink’s cool Pinewood Derby Racer
A short film about Bill Holloway and Mauro Hernandez, of Masterworks Woodworking who “salvage condemned city trees, then build beautiful bicycles out of them.”
Members of Chinese Mindstorms site CMNXT made this excellent platform for controlling a camera. [via the NXTStep]
Wannes Vermeulen created an iPad app to control a modded RC car, complete with a remote point-of-view camera: I used two servo motors attached to the original remote control of the car to adjust speed and steering. These are controlled by an Arduino Uno, which gets the accelerometer data from the iPad through a socket server on my laptop. I also fitted my old Android smartphone to the car, which uses an IPCam app to stream the video to the iPad. The “camera”, the iPad and the laptop are connected to the same Wi-Fi network to share their data.
This model by Bohr Institute physicist Sascha Mehlhase does not, of course, represent the whole Large Hadron Collider, which is a huge circular underground accelerator. Even at minifig scale, such a model would be enormous. Rather, it represents what is probably the most iconic part of the LHC, the ATLAS detector (Wikipedia). Dr. Mehlhase reports 80 hours of work in the build, about evenly split between design (in software) and physical assembly of its almost 10,000 bricks. [Thanks, Rachel!]
Slingshot artificer Jörge Sprave is at it again. This time he’s made a vicious slingshot (no surprise there), but with a second business end — a deadly counter-weighted spike, aka the Zombie Hammer.
