Toys and Games

POV ping-pong paddles

POV ping-pong paddles

Here’s a clever idea I’d love to see liberated from its high-design context by the maker community: Sports equipment with integral POV displays. These ping pong paddles by Troika are an interesting start, but there’s all kinds of other onomatopoetic possibilities, like, say, baseball bats or tennis rackets that leave a glowing WHACK! in the air when you hit the ball. Personally, I want a set of boxing gloves that provide Batman-style comic book POW! and BAM! captions when I punch things. [via adafruit]

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Unusual building blocks based on close-packed spheres

Unusual building blocks based on close-packed spheres

Mathematician and artist George Hart (who writes our Math Monday column), created a cool set of six building blocks by slicing up and combining bits of these rhombic dodecahedra. Theoretically, the same set of blocks can be used to build tetrahedra and octahedra of any size. Thingiverse user Lenbok printed a set on a MakerBot. George’s are printed in nylon using selective laser sintering, and, as he points out, look a lot like fancy sugar cubes. I suppose you could print them on a CandyFab and make them actual sugar cubes. Or sugar Voronoi cells, rather.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan
How-To: Retrofit a Magic 8-Ball with an OLED display

How-To: Retrofit a Magic 8-Ball with an OLED display

>The steps outlined here will show you how to modify a standard Magic 8 Ball to replace the normal message icosahedron with a OLED screen, and how to add wireless microcontroller, and accelerometer. The screen is submersed in the normal Magic 8 Ball goo so that all the original aesthetics are preserved. The messages can be reprogrammed wirelessly without having to open the 8 Ball. The accelerometer detects when the 8 Ball is in use (e.g. tipped from resting to looking through the Magic Hole) and signals the microcontroller to turn on screen and fade in the messages.

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