We are a big Lego-fanatic family, and it’s fun to find ways to work Lego into all aspects of our lives (not just playtime). This tutorial from Roots and Wings shows how to create a mold from Lego blocks that you can then use to create these fun Lego soaps. These would make great favors […]
We just received a fresh supply of MintyBoost USB Charger kits v2.0 that are all ready to be soldered up taken on a road trip. What’s a MintyBoost? It’s a small and simple USB charger for your iPod or other MP3 player, camera, cellphone, or almost any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge.
This project combines two of my favorite things: crayons and rockets. It may have taken John Coker 12 years to complete this project (hey, who among us hasn’t had a case of lingering works-in-progress?) but the result was more than worth it. He’s even included a step-by-step of how he made the rockets. The detail […]
Using a shoebox, some convex lenses of varying focal length, and a bit of poster board maker manish15 has assembled an inexpensive art enlarger on the cheap. Similar to an epidioscope, the device projects an image onto a drawing surface.
So I don’t want to go too far down the “funny warning signs” rabbit hole (you could get a whole blog out of that, I think), but a commenter on last Tuesday’s “Big Scary Laser” warning sign post linked to this design, of hers, for a warning sign to go on robotic power tools. I get a huge kick out of the giant menacing robot with the buzz-saw hand. [Thanks, Jennifer!]
A so-called “stick bomb,” “frame bomb,” or (worst of all) “xyloexplosive device” (Wikipedia) is an arrangement of flat flexible beams, like popsicle sticks or tongue depressors, that are woven together under tension such that they can be “set off” at one point and sort of explosively disassemble starting at that point, with the reaction propagating away along the structure. Like domino toppling, but flashier.
On Wednesday morning, Evan Ackerman over at BotJunkie posted about MIT’s Flyfire system. The idea behind the system is simple and very exciting: Swarms of tiny LED-carrying robot helicopters arrange themselves in the air to make 2D or 3D displays in which each bot serves as a single pixel. Evan linked to the project’s homepage on MIT’s SENSEable City Lab server and embedded a video posted by the group to YouTube showing the individual prototype swarmbots, which already exist, and some computer renderings of what the working displays would look like. Exciting, eh?
