Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Simple and not so simple mechanical toys from the engineers at Hitachi. The designs are quite clear and should tickle your brain to come up with ones of your own. The ‘south’ pointing car is a classic design that could have some use as a maze solving robot, or at least one that keep track of what was was south when it started.
[via MAKE fourm]
Add one part Sony PS1 LCD screen and one part SanDisk Digital Photo Viewer bake for half an hour in a slow oven and you get a sub USD$100 digital picture frame. (I’m kidding about the oven part). I have an TFT LCD screen that I wired up as a remote TV monitor a few years ago that would be perfect for this. I’ll have ro find one of those SanDisk Digital Photo Viewers and build one of these. Funny, I remember seeing one in a store and I thought that it would be the perfect thing to load up and send to the relatives for them to see pictures of the kids. Now I can add a screen and presto! Zero instalation (ok, grandma will have to attach the wall wart, but that’s pretty easy). With 32 MB CF cards costing next to nothing this might be fun to do.
[via MAKE]
As many of you might have seen I recently posted a project for gutting an old light bulb in order to make other things out of it. Well one of the great uses a resurrected light bulb has is as a small vessel to boil liquids in. As long as you don’t confine the gasses crated by the boiling you should be OK, the glass is thin and won’t take all that much pressure. This DIY camping stove would make a great heat source for boiling water in a light bulb. Plus, you can take it with you when your in the woods. How neat is that?
[via Google]
You can never have enough projects, right? Well I think that’s true. Tonight I finished my tutorial on how to hollow out a light bulb and re-use it for other things like art projects and science stuff. So don’t throw out that dead light bulb, make it into a salt shaker or something…
Now this is the sort of project I can sink my teeth into. What do you get when you cross a disposable camera flash with a bit of wire, and steel BB’s? A coil gun! Yeah… That’s the good stuff. Jeff provides plans and links to build your own weapon of choice. Have fun and be safe, if you can do the two at the same time. If not you can go as a pirate for next Halloween.
This struck me a being quite beautiful, go have a look at the full sized image on Astronomical Picture of the day.