The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 I spent way too much time with the folks from Zome – Zome is based on a version of the 61-zone structural system which includes purely mathematical models from tilings to hyperspace projections, as well as molecular models of quasicrystals and fullerenes, and architectural space frame structures. Zome’s balls (nodes) […]
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 Toyops had a giant bio-green-science area where they had their Triassic Triops, Space Farms, Just Look and Tree Toys’ Wild Science products. Triops are shrimp that look like horseshoe crabs and date back to the Triassic Period in fossil records, they’re also known as dinosaur shrimp — you bring them […]
My colleagues and I in the Arts, Media and Engineering program at Arizona State University are working on a wireless tangible interface object for collaboration, called the Sensor Squid. It’s basically an Arduino-controlled, Bluetooth communicating 6-foot plush cephalopod used to control a Max/MSP game about community-generated media. You can download the code, parts list, and […]
The gang(s) from Fascinations (wonders created by physicists) & SimerLab (makers of floating things) were @The NYC Toy fair 2008 – I’ve seen the glowing ant farms before (called AntWorks) but seeing this many in one spot is pretty interesting. AntWorks is based on a 2003 NASA Space Shuttle experiment to study animal life in […]
OWI robots was @ The NYC Toy fair 2008, this is another company that I’ve never seen in person but have seen their kits online before. They have a lot of variations of a solar cell with a motor – aerial cable cars, solar cars, viking ships, solar climbing monkeys in addition to nicely machined […]
Matt Mechtley writes: You’re throwing a party for the Game Developers Conference and you think it would be cool to have a custom game. What’s the natural response? How about Pong that adapts its difficulty based on how drunk you are! Matt hacked a breathalyzer by reading the pinouts to the seven-segment LCD with an […]
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 K’nex had their line up of builder toys (favorites at Instructables) as well as some new efforts. There’s now a line of educational sets, DNA – solar, stuff like that and a new line of carnival rides, very fun. I think K’nex’s new additions are good a direction to go […]
