MIT student Christian Reed built this pneumatic grappling hook launcher. As surprising as it is, there really is no where on the internet where I found any decent instructions on how to make a grappling hook gun. Figuring it would not be that hard to make, I decided to design and make one myself. [Via […]
Since most urban cyclists can never be sure what they’ll be locking to, they’ll often keep both a chain and a U-Lock for versatility’s sake. If you had an extra twelve pounds to make your bike theft-proof, how would you do it?
I used some ShapeLock the other day to fix my washing machine but Alexey from Russia used some to make this robotic arm and controller! Each piece was hand crafted out of ShapeLock by hand using hot water and a hairdryer. The electronics consist of an Arduino variant, servos, and some potentiometers for the controller.
Joey Daoud, the producer of Bots High, says: Bots High is a funny and inspiring documentary that follows three teams of high school robotics geeks who build and battle their way to a national robotics competition in Miami. Funny, smart, and inspiring, these kids navigate high school, adolescence, and first love while reducing enemy bots […]
Rich Decibels created a tutorial for designing and laser cutting a project enclosure. He covers everything from designing the circuit boards to visualizing the project in SketchUp, exporting the panels to Inkscape and then lasering the enclosure.
For those of you with an overwhelming desire to build your own subatomic particle accelerator, look no further than this Instructable by Xellers, which shows you how to convert a wine bottle into a cathode ray tube (CRT). Of course, that’s not all you need: other ingredients include a two-stage vacuum pump, a neon sign […]
As I develop new projects for my classroom this summer, a recurring theme has been to explore just how many times it takes to get a new design right. As far as I am concerned, nothing ever works properly the first time, and it is useful for students and new learners to a subject to recognize this. Programmers call this the iterative process, Engineers use the Engineering Design Process, both of which are relatives to the scientific method. Sure, just about anything can be fixed with duct tape and zip ties, but to get beyond a temporary kludge, you will need to put some time and thought into analyzing the problem and crafting a proper solution.
