Refurbishing old scientific and industrial equipment from eBay is something I love to do. If you understand what you’re looking for and are a savvy eBay user, you can score some amazing bargains on stuff that just a few years back was high-end, cutting edge, extremely expensive research-, factory-, and/or military-grade equipment. Garage quantum physicist […]
Last March, roboticist Eric Brown and co-workers at the University of Chicago made headlines with their new, unconventional robot gripper design: a balloon filled with coffee grounds or other grainy material and fitted with a vacuum line. At atmospheric pressure, the balloon is squishy and can be “mushed” around an object—even traditionally hard-to-grip stuff like […]
In today’s project on diyphysics.com, David Prutchi shows how to build a Cockcroft–Walton multiplier using a “ladder” of capacitors and diodes on perfboard, submerged in mineral oil, inside a sealed plastic container. The multiplier takes high voltage AC, e.g. from a TV flyback transformer, and both rectifies it to DC and steps it up considerably. […]
David Prutchi, whose surplus plutonium probe shenanigans we covered last week, received Micro-Mark’s branded version of the popular Sieg X2 mini mill for a recent birthday, then retrofitted it with a CNC kit from CNC Fusion, and then retrofitted it again with a CO2 laser head he built himself from a surplus tube. David writes: […]
The late unpleasantness in Japan has recently focused our attention on homemade radiation detectors. These are often lumped together under the term “Geiger counter,” but in fact there is more than one way to skin that particular cat. A “Geiger counter,” formally, is a radation-sensitive instrument that uses a Geiger-Müller tube to detect the tiny […]
DIY methods for electroactive polymer actuators are hard to come by, and none of them are kitchen-counter simple. But compared to the wet chemical methods circulating in the academic research community, the purely mechanical process documented in this video from the Swiss ShapeShift project is relatively accessible. Click here to skip the how-to and go […]
On Friday, the Discovery Channel announced that Mythbusters stars Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage are creating a new reality show where contestants duke it out by creating Rube Goldberg machines. Sounds intriguing! Discovery Channel announces UNCHAINED REACTION, a new series executive produced by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of MYTHBUSTERS. The duo also serve as […]
