The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Over on our Make: Projects platform, our old pal Stefan Jones shows you how simple it is to create your own nichrome igniters for model rocket motors, using little more than nichrome wire, masking tape, and some lacquer paint, hobby dope, or nail polish. How-To: Make your own model rocket igniters
Apart from the fact that the bricks and plates are open at their bottoms, and so the pieces always have one side that can’t be “smooth,” Lego is a pretty handy way to prototype interlocking solid puzzles. Many of these are based on cubic units, and can be built in Lego at a scale of 1 cube = 2 studs x 2 studs x 5 plates.
Eric Harshbarger, whose Lego hijinks we’ve featured a couple times before, has produced some lovely models based on this principle. Shown above are his 6-piece burr, checkered solid pentominoes, Soma cube, and deluxe polycube set. The awesomeness continues at Eric’s site.
This excellent factory, built by Martijn Bosgraaf, is controlled by 5 NXT microcontroller bricks. It took 150 hours and 25,000 Lego elements to build, and can assemble a model from up to 95 different types of brick using building instructions created by Lego Digital Designer. [Via The NXT Step.]
Dearest readers, gaming enthusiasts, and dice aficionados, I present to you a roundup of our favorite dice projects here on Make: Online! Photo above by PT from the NYC Toy Fair 2008. Polycube Puzzles from Dice Letterpress prints using dice as “type” LED Dice kit in the Maker Shed How-To: D12 and D20 Dice Purses […]
Woohoo! I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. I have painted a few minis in my time, but my eyes are almost always bigger than my stomach when it comes to buying and planning elaborate armies. Thankfully, there’s plenty of eye-candy out and about the web, and in our own archives, to satisfy my long-standing dreams vicariously. Here’s a list of top content that can get you started on your own mad schemes. Happy Friday!
Here’s one for the “limiting your options is the best way to stimulate creative thinking” file. Lego does not make many elements in its metallic silver color, so Flickr user Alex Schranz had very few pieces to work with when designing the fuselage and skin of his minifig-scale B-17 bomber model. I’d say he succeeded admirably.
Hack the new Xbox Kinect and collect a $1k bounty for open-source drivers… It was $1k but they doubled it after Microsoft didn’t seem to like the idea… Open source hardware company Adafruit Industries is offering a $2,000 bounty for the first person or group to upload code and examples under an open source license […]
