Lego Classic Space “Relativity”
Alex Eylar’s “Fall of the House of Escher” MOC adds a logical twist to the Escher classic. The best part? The astronauts are in old skool Classic Space suits. Excellent! [Via The Brothers Brick]
Fun & Games
The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Unusual building blocks based on close-packed spheres
Mathematician and artist George Hart (who writes our Math Monday column), created a cool set of six building blocks by slicing up and combining bits of these rhombic dodecahedra. Theoretically, the same set of blocks can be used to build tetrahedra and octahedra of any size. Thingiverse user Lenbok printed a set on a MakerBot. George’s are printed in nylon using selective laser sintering, and, as he points out, look a lot like fancy sugar cubes. I suppose you could print them on a CandyFab and make them actual sugar cubes. Or sugar Voronoi cells, rather.
Plush Hobbes
FurGots on Craftster made a plush Hobbes, from the comic Calvin & Hobbes. In only 3 hours! I like his serious face. She says: After a conversation with my friend, who dressed up as “Calvin” for Halloween, I got around to thinking…. it would be awfully neat to make a Hobbes stuffed animal. With all […]
How-To: Retrofit a Magic 8-Ball with an OLED display
>The steps outlined here will show you how to modify a standard Magic 8 Ball to replace the normal message icosahedron with a OLED screen, and how to add wireless microcontroller, and accelerometer. The screen is submersed in the normal Magic 8 Ball goo so that all the original aesthetics are preserved. The messages can be reprogrammed wirelessly without having to open the 8 Ball. The accelerometer detects when the 8 Ball is in use (e.g. tipped from resting to looking through the Magic Hole) and signals the microcontroller to turn on screen and fade in the messages.
I made one of these Death Star cookies when I was five…
Well, OK, “I” made it in the sense that I watched my mother make it and (I think) she let me poke some of the holes with a fork. But of course she gave me all the credit. A great memory, for both of us, that would have been lost if not for the magic of the internet. The Sith Lord’s original recipe appears in 1979’s Darth Vader Activity Book. [via Boing! Moreover, Boing!]
Gestural interface via flamboyant glove
MIT student Robert Wang and professor Jovan Popovic have come up with a neat project, creatively titled real-time hand-tracking with a color glove, a gestural interface consisting of nothing but a webcam and a startlingly polychrome glove. According to the creators, an API will soon be released. Cool! [Via Core77]
How-To: Indoor bike parking
Check out Instructables user lamoix’s indoor bike rack for his Portand bike-lover’s palace. Like most houses in Portland, we have a lot of bicycles, and we are always coming and going on them, often changing out bikes several times a day. Not satisfied with outdoor parking, or stacks of bicycles in the workshop, I decided […]
