How to build an Eames shell chair
“How to build an Eames shell chair”…
Retro
Handmade LED wristwatch
Who makes an anachronistic-but-who-cares steampunk LED wristwatch from scratch? Eric Schleapfer does. Nice work! Yes, it’s an LED steampunk wristwatch! It uses the LED wristwatch board… The watch is constructed from a small piece of oak and pieces of brass sheet and tubing. I used hand tools, a Dremel tool and a cordless drill to shape and form each of the pieces.
Back to the watch. It keeps the time with a fairly pedestrian PIC16F628A. It has an internal timer that operates with a separate oscillator (which is the watch crystal in the lower right corner) which can run even during sleep mode. This is critical to keeping the power consumption low. When a timer tick occurs, it generates a wakeup event, and the processor can increment the internal timekeeping registers. The processor can also wake up when one of the buttons is pressed. When that happens, it turns on and starts multiplexing the LEDs so that it can display the time. After a short delay it goes back into sleep mode. I haven’t yet calculated or tested the battery life.
Sweet atomic age GE exoskeleton prototype
OMG it’s like something out of Fallout 3, only real. And I want one. Or at least a Lego version of one, with an awesome hard-hat-wearing engineer minifig at the helm. This photo of GE’s “Hardiman” dates to the late 60s. cyberneticzoo.com has more photos, concept drawings, and good back story. [via adafruit]
Floppy disc lunch boxes (and more floppy projects)
Floppy disc lunch boxes. Floppy disk ceramic tiles HOW TO – Make a floppy disk bag HOW TO – Reusing a floppy stepper motor Floppy disk greeting cards
Tai Goo’s railroad spike knives
Knifemaker Scott Roush (aka Makers Market seller Big Rock Forge) first put me on to the work of Arizona bladesmith Tai Goo. Forging a knife out of a railroad spike is an old blacksmith trick, and lots of folks will sell you lower quality “tourist grade” RR spike knives as souvenirs, but Tai Goo is widely regarded as the master of the form. Besides his evident skill, Tai Goo is a minimalist. He practices an art called “neo-tribal knifemaking” that involves using as few power tools as possible. [Thanks, Scott!]
Home-brewed, tenth-scale Cray-1A
When NYC Resistor’s Chris Fenton wanted a Cray, he wasn’t talking about a casemodded PC. No, he really wanted his own Cray. His exhaustively-researched machine simulates the functionality of one of the old-school supercomputers, to the point where he’s researching old Cray resources looking for programs to run — apparently you can’t exactly download Centipede […]
How-To: Watt-style mechanical governor
Adam Richard Cooper built this hand-cranked model of a classic mechanical governor–which, as MachinistBlog succinctly put it “regulates the speed of steam engines by acting as a negative feedback system”–and made the dimensional drawings and build notes freely available for download at his site. I like the idea of a hand-cranked governor model, particularly, because it provides tactile feedback of the device’s purpose: You crank it faster, it gets harder to crank.
