DIY Projects

“I Made This” – photos

“I Made This” – photos

MotomWe’re getting ready to cover Macworld here in San Francisco, and as usual, bizarre flight and travel things tend to initially seem dismal, then work out – I saw two friends as I walked by Ritual Roasters in the Mission area that I haven’t seen since weirdos like us were running Generator 1.0 on online banks and Comcast cable boxes with Flash 3. Any way – one of them makes really fun things, here’s his photo set Link. Then, a few hours later, at the crosswalk, Stewart and Caterina from Flickr happen to be here, so we told them our plan to send live photos from the Macworld floor via EVDO, a WiFi network we’re making and the Kodak Flickr hack we did to auto-upload.

Mindstorm Pong

Mindstorm Pong

PongAmazing video of an RCX robot using vision command (or a derrivative) to play pong on a real screen. Jmarco writes: “I have designed a Mindstorm Robot who plays Pong game. It have a Webcam, and it’s controled through Infrared with the laptop computer. There is not trick. It truely plays itself!” [via] Link.

Gramophone Recorder

Gramophone Recorder

GramophonerecorderMichael writes: “I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I remember reading about an expensive commercial product for it, and there’s a much cheaper product available that is similar, but it records only things of a smaller size and the description seems to imply the recordings can only be played back on these machines, not regular turntables. (It’s a kit, which is nice, but the Gieskes.nl recorder looks much cooler.) I’m interested in trying Gieskes.nl’s project, but I’m wondering if there are other people out there who have done this so I can supplement these instructions a bit. Do you know of anyone else who has information about doing this sort of thing?” Link.

HOW TO – The Internet Dog Feeder

HOW TO – The Internet Dog Feeder

180Px-Dogfeed1Kkassing writes “After setting up two webcams and the new Skype beta to watch my dog while I’m out, I decided to give him some incentive to obey my commands over the internet. So I built an internet powered dog feeder with a Basic Stamp kit and two servos (one to drop the food, one to knock the funnel if it gets stuck). Full source included.” Link.

HOW TO – Bend tubing

HOW TO – Bend tubing

E10D8C4D1856F9F391199D09.SmallPaulIE has a great Instructable for bending tubing, he writes “Here I show how to bend aluminum tubing. This is basically documentation of how I built a new bow rail for my sailboat. I trace the curve that I want on some scrap lumber. This scrap will be used to build the bending jig. I’m just using a couple of old 2×4’s. You wood should be somewhat thicker than the diameter of the tub you wish to bend.” Link.