The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Excellent front page business section article in today’s NYTimes – …a crowd of programmers, roboticists and tinkerers who are getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do. The attraction of the device is that it is outfitted with cameras, sensors and software that let it detect movement, depth, and the […]
Shown above is a small sample of Justin Michell’s meticulously-documented dice collection over at Kevin Cook’s DiceCollector.com. Justin’s is one of six collections, besides Kevin’s own, hosted at the site, which makes for fascinating browsing. Most folks’ experience of dice is limited to the simple Platonic-solid dice, but of the first 20 integers, only 1-, 17- and 19-sided dice are not represented in Justin’s collection.
Disclosure: I got wind of Justin’s collection when he contacted me about putting my old design for an alphabet die up on Shapeways, which I did. His print in stainless steel is shown uppermost. I make two bucks for each one they print.
In this episode of The Ben Heck Show, Ben modifies the Rock Band Stage Kit, to create four synced stage light modules, adds control buttons to the game mic, and modifies a Rock Band guitar to make it “clickier.” He also finishes the Xbox 360 laptop build he’s been working on over the last six […]
Never underestimate the ingenuity of a true fan. Lego is selling blind packs of collectable minifigs, the idea being you’ll have to buy lots of extras in order to complete your set. However, Lego didn’t count on AFOLs figuring out the system. Apparently every bag has been embossed with tiny raised dots, marked in the […]
We featured the meticulously-organized workshop that Milwaukeean Cindy Smith shares with her husband, Craig, back in March. Craig saw our recent human-powered lifting devices post and wrote in to share with us the custom snow-plow-tricycle he built for removing light snowfall from his driveway:
Phillipe “Philo” Hurbain created a neat 3D scanner out of Lego last year. It used a needle mounted on a Technics linear actuator to measure the dimensions of objects for conversion into LDraw parts. Now he has upped the ante with his latest version that uses a laser and David laser scanner software to do […]
The Kinect hackapalooza continues. Here, PhD student Philipp Robbel, of MIT’s Personal Robotics Group, combined an Xbox Kinect with an iRobot Create to come up with KinectBot. It can can generate “detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements […]
