Fun & Games

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.

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.

Continue Reading July 8th, 2010 Sean Michael Ragan2

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!]

Continue Reading July 8th, 2010 Sean Michael Ragan2

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]

Continue Reading July 6th, 2010 John Baichtal

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 […]

Continue Reading July 6th, 2010 Becky Stern2

Lego NXT drum machine drops mad beats

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 […]

Continue Reading July 6th, 2010 Collin Cunningham

Holy smokes Iron Man costume

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.

Continue Reading July 6th, 2010 Sean Michael Ragan6

Slurp: A digital eyedropper

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 […]

Continue Reading July 5th, 2010 John Baichtal4

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