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The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.

Radially expanding and contracting table

Radially expanding and contracting table

Some observations: The table top pieces are only truly circular in their larger arrangement. In the “contracted” table, the 6 wedges in fact form a kind of rounded-off hexagon, and the outer table edge is made circular by the rotating rim, which has a complementary inner profile. Besides the wedges, there are two other types of pieces that make up the table top–6 “darts” having two parallel sides that rise to fill the spaces between the wedges, and the “star” (a dodecagram, in fact) that rises up in the middle. The table is locked in either configuration by one or more threaded detents which are quite clearly shown in the upper video.

DIY Magic Mirror kits

DIY Magic Mirror kits

Al Linke’s DIY Magic Mirror first appeared on our radar back in 2008, when Al posted a classic Instructable describing the project, which went on to win the Tech Grand Prize in our 2008 DIY Halloween Contest. Al’s Magic Mirror features a Snow-White style floating, talking face in a gilt-framed mirror with an amazingly wide variety number of integrated and integratable functions–breathalyzer, weather forecast, stock tracking, X-10 lighting control, doorbell input with camera feed, Picasa-based slideshow, various themed personalities, etc., etc. He’s selling them, now and gets $219 for the kit.

32-robot NXT chess set

Imagine building a chess set 12′ on a side, with each piece its own robot. Oh yeah, and make it all out of Lego. Team Hassenplug’s Monster Chess packs 100,000 elements and 32 NXT bricks, and uses a laptop running a chess program to coordinate the robots. Want to see the game in person? It […]