Disco helmet provides party microclimate
Paul Overton at Dude Craft has got his maker priorities straight. Set simple, achievable goals, and make them a reality. Behold the disco bike helmet, a party on your head.
Fun & Games
The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Tactile gaming vest lets you feel the pew pew pew
Roboticist Saurabh Palan, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, just hipped us to his “Tactile Gaming Vest” project. The vest contains solenoids, rumble-packs, and Peltier heating elements, and is designed to provide haptic feedback in first-person shooters. Get shot with a pistol, get a kick in the chest from a solenoid. Was it a laser? Add some local heat from the Peltiers. Vibration from the rumble-packs can be used to simulate explosions or slashing attacks. There’s more info at Palan’s personal site, iRoboticist.com. Double win for scoring that URL.
John Park in the Maker Shed: Karakuri kit build
John Park, host of Make: television, builds the Gakken Karakuri Somersault Doll from the Maker Shed http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKGK26 This is a good thing, since the instructions are in Japanese.
Getting to know “foamies”
One of the things we talk about in the new issue of MAKE, in my “Remote Control State of the Art” piece, is foamies, R/C planes made out of foam building material, often carved from blueboard insulation foam. They have getting started info, videos of foamies in action, project articles, and they even sell plans […]
Featured Maker: Shing Yin Khor
Shing Yin Khor is a sculptor and illustrator inspired by monsters, tentacles, mediocre science fiction movies, bikes, Dungeons and Dragons, and really adorable cats. Educated as a theatrical scenic designer and prop maker, and employed in the technology field, [I] now synthesize my eclectic skill set into accessible and affordable art ranging from desktop monster sculptures to walk-in spacepods installed at Burning Man.
Virtual Lego bird-of-prey
19-year-old German Lego fan Kevin Walter used CAD program LDraw to ‘build’ this awesome starship. If actually built the model would be 13′ long by 11′ wide by 5′ high and use 274,350 bricks. See Walter’s Flickr page for more renders. [via Brothers Brick]
Letterpress prints using dice as “type”
From Etsy seller Stukenborg. It occurs to me that, besides (the admittedly beautiful) geometric patterns shown here, one could probably work out a way to do monochrome images this way. [via Dude Craft]