An off-road machine from Boston, the tread skateboard was tearing it up around World Maker Faire New York yesterday. Part snowblower, part battery, this deck can hit 20mph. It was designed, built, and ridden by Charles Guan, a member of The Miters from MIT.
Ed Rogers lives next to active train tracks, which leads to a lot of noise in his bedroom when a train passes and the windows are open. Like any good maker, Ed solved his problem with a homebrew automatic window closer. He attached a pair of linear actuators to the windows with 3D printed brackets. These actuators are controlled by an Arduino with an H bridge and can be activated by a button on his nightstand. Not only that, but the project also integrates a motion detection system to close the windows automatically when a train is passing.
I love clockwork things. (I’ve built a couple of clocks myself) and so I am seriously impressed by the work of Chris Raynerd over at the raynerd.co.uk site. He’s only 28 and has already managed to equip himself with some excellent machining skills.
Schuyler Towne gives a great presentation on non destructive entry. As a bonus, there’s an intro by Jason Scott of Textfiles.com.
For those of you without metric intuition, 80mm is about pi inches. For those of you without metric intuition who flunked geometry, it’s about 3.14 inches. Which am big. Like, cannonball-sized.
I think you’ll all get a kick out of Duane Flatmo‘s El Pulpo Mecanico, a flame-shooting octopus vehicle from this year’s Burning Man. I have to agree with Cyriaque Lamar from io9, who likens this pyrotechnical cephalopod to a video game boss. Anyone out there who wants to ride this contraption has to line up behind me!
Bay Area maker John Knoll (of ILM and PhotoShop fame) just finished converting his old manual milling machine to CNC with a GRBLshield and took the time to thoroughly document the process. If you’ve ever thought about attempting this conversion, you won’t want to miss this informative overview. In it John runs through the entire process from start to finish, beginning with converting a model using a Python script, sending G-code to the board using a Processing sketch, and ending with cutting the part.
