John – Page 37 – TeamDroid

Astounding Steam Powered Robot Arm

What a cool application of steam power. The perfect super retro project!

Armatron was my favorite toy as a kid, it was made by Tandy, and sold through Radio Shack in the 80’s. It was made with ONE electric motor, with gears and clutches throughout the entire base and arm, controlled by 2 joysticks that engages and disengages gears for 6 degrees of movement (the joy stick each move in 2 axis, plus they twist for closing/opening of the jaw, and rotating of the hand). This complex machine is a marvel of engineering, the amazing control and ease to operation made this toy amazingly fun to play.

Steam Armatron – Crabfu.com

New ‘Spin’ On Pinhole Photography

This is cool! Up and coming pinhole camera manufacturer 8 Banners has come out with their latest offering, a multi pinhole turret with built in shutter.

This turret can be mounted as an accessory on the various models of pinhole camera made by 8banners with the exception of Ma.
It replaces the normal shutter assembly by having instead of the choice of 1 pinhole plates but 6 pinhole plates.
For the 4×5 model, if u dun put in a plate for one of the hole, it can become a view finder that cast an image in the ground glass back behind the cam.

The idea of using an empty space as a viewfinder is beautiful. The greatest thing about 8 Banners, other than the cameras, is that they are very DIY friendly. You can but pinholes viewfinders, and shutters there at quite reasonable prices. The turret is lists as being $85US. Quite affordable if you ask me.
See more:
Turret Set on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Nuked Czech Live Remote

This may not have been the most advisable of artistic hacks ever done, but it did look pretty good. Nothing like watching the weather and all of a sudden you see a bright flash followed by a mushroom cloud! Who says the cold was is dead?

Members of ZTOHOVEN connected up to one of the stationary camera during TV weathercast and in real time broadcast their own shots, which showed nuclear exposion. Then the picture changed. Instead of the name of the locality (Black Mine) the website reference ZTOHOVEN.com (now is overloaded) came up on the screen.

No nuclear weapons have been harmed in the making of this video clip.

[via boingboing]
CzechTek WebLog

Apple IIe Animation from 1985

As seen on MAKE today:

Phil, you should check out this cool Apple II stop motion rig one of my commenters made in the 80’s, I think it’s right up your alley. He had the computer control the camera and a spinning wheel of color filters. The computer rendered one frame in monochrome for each color of each frame.

Years ago some of my friends were starting up a computer animation company, this was around 1990 or so. The computer they had was a 486DX that had MS DOS as it’s OS and was running a 3D program called Topaz. The computer had two special cards in it, one would act as the controller for a Sony Beta deck VTR and the other would display an image onto a NTSC video display. The animations were rendered to the video display one line at a time, sometimes taking hours for a single frame to render. When the frame was finished the Beta deck would spring to life and make all sorts of mechanical sounds as the tape was brought to the record head and a single frame of video was recorded. This would repeat over and over again until the segment had been recorded. I’m very glad the good old days of computing are long gone.

Flickr – Cinimagic 1985