The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Peter Cocteau turned the brain of the Lego Mindstorms platform into very cool little drum machine – the NXT-606, featuring – -Monophonic sample based drum machine -24 percussion and Fx sounds -Sampling rate: 8Khz -memory: 96 measures -control: 2 rotation sensor +NXT buttons -hacked loud speaker to mono output: jack 6,35mm -Editor: NXT-G -Real time […]
t may look like a CG rendering from a big-budget movie, but it’s really just a photograph of Colorodan Anthony Le wearing his $4,000 homemade costume.
[Le] used thin, high-impact urethane for the armor, cutting it into plates and joining them with some 1,500 rivets and washers. He sculpted a clay helmet mold and then used a liquid resin mix to create the final product…He also added a small servo motor that opens the faceplate, as in the movie, and built a gun out of pipes and a motor. LEDs in the eyes and chest-plate further add to the illusion.
Jamie Zigelbaum, a former student at MIT Media Lab, created a computer interface that takes the shape of an eyedropper. Slurp is tangible interface for manipulating abstract digital information as if it were water. Taking the form of an eyedropper, Slurp can extract (slurp up) and inject (squirt out) pointers to digital objects. We have […]
MAKE subscriber Jennifer Holt of Columbus, OH, wrote in to share her rather overpowered electric mountain bike, running on a 48V motor powered by a homemade battery pack consisting of 144 3.3V lithium ion cells. Data from the battery monitor is logged to an SD card. This is the second of the two electric bicycles […]
Fra Fondi sent us info on this awesome soccer (foosball) table, made entirely of Lego parts, and programmed and controlled (sounds, score-keeping) with the Lego WeDo kit. Sariel tells us that: “Counting the game score and returning balls to a box are both fully automated. The actual game remains, obviously, fully manual, with eight players […]
Boris Smus, a student at Carnegie Mellon, built this elegantly simple robot that uses a smartphone to interpret commands from Twitter. A few projects around the internet use an Android phone to control the Lego Mindstorms NXT brick. Most involve an ugly hack in which the phone communicates with a computer over WiFi, and the […]
Uppermost, what I’m pretty sure is a rendering of a virtual Lego model called Brick by Brick, by graphic designer Ian Leino. Immediately above, MC MECHANIC, by photographer Shane Willis.
