Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
I was doing research for an LED project and I ran across this site that sells all sorts of LEDs, fluorescent lamps, and very cool nixie tubes. Just thought I’d mention this because nixie tubes look real cool. So if you need some for a project you know where to go now.
LEDsales. LEDs, nixies and other cool stuff. – Nixie tubes and accessories
If you every play with webcams you quickly discover that the field of view just isn’t what is should be. These guys have put together a nice little hacking tutorial on how to mate a door peephole lens with an ordinary low end digital camera. Now I’ve been doing this for some time, either with peepholes like these guys or with some random lenses that I happen to have in my junk box (meniscus, plano convex, convex, etc.). Years ago I used to have a web cam pointed at a TV with a plano concave lens taped in front of it to expand the field of view. Worked great, it was fun to mess with. Adding a super wide angle lens to a low end camera will yield some pretty cool results, I suggest that you run out and pick a few peepholes up, they don’t cost much. I got mine and Home Depot for around $5USD. Heat up the hot glue gun and have fun!
[via Hack-a-day]
The Aggregate: Fisheye Digital Imaging For Under Twenty Dollars
NASA has announced that they will be launching a new space craft that will search for ice at the moons south pole. The hope is that water ice may be found to exist in the craters that never receive direct sunlight. If this is the case then the pathway to a fully manned moon base might be one step closer to being traveled upon. I hope that I can soon sit with my children in my arms and say, "Look at the moon, if you play your cards right you can live up there."
This is pretty neat stuff, the thing that makes it even neater is that it uses the same principal that keeps a gecko lizard stuck to walls.
Dartmouth College engineering professor Victor Petrenko… has devised a way to use a burst of electricity to remove ice caked on walls or windows. For surfaces coated with a special film, the jolt gets rid of ice in less than a second, far less time than it takes to hack at it with an ice scraper.
Look for this soon on everything from car windows to the wings of airplanes.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to see this toy once again, even if it is a simulator. Growing up in the heyday of the Apollo space program, any toy that gave you your very own CM (Command Module) to recover from the carpet sea was instant gold. I don’t know what I miss more, the Vertibird or the safety orange reminder of the space race. Who would have known that a toy that just flew in a big circle and hooked things off the floor would be so much fun. If your like me, you played with it on a carpeted floor. I think the instructions said that you should never use it on anything but a smooth non-carpeted floor because the drive shaft will get gummed up with fluff and will ground your Vertibird until your Dad comes home and takes the tweezers to it. That is unless you did it yourself and as a result gained and intimate working knowledge of how flex shafts worked. 🙂
I suppose that is you could build the power transmission in the base you could build your own. Everything was cable controlled. The direction of the Virtibird was done by applying a twist to the long support arm that pitched the nose either up or down. I’m not too sure how the power was varied, that might have been done with a potentiometer in the control unit. Might be worth it, it did take a bit of skill to pick things up, especially if you had an oscillating fan in the room to simulate gusting winds. If you would like to know more about building your very own Vertibird, take a look at the build your own project page. Or if your lucky you might be able to find one that has been retired by a science museum.
[via MAKE]
