A man’s love for the Atari 2600 drove him to learn it’s arcane programmings language and reproduce the famed German Enigma of World War II. Read more about it here:
Category: Mad Science
Homemade Air Engines
These little air powered motors remind me of a compressed CO2 airplane engine that my father had. It was a commercial product but the idea was the same. The high pressure gas would force the single piston down the cylinder and the inertia of the crankshaft would force the piston back up for another charge. It produced quite a bit of power from a single tiny cylinder of gas. The engines that Mike Smyth builds are a true work of art, all the parts were made from either brass from a local hardware shop or plastic form a cutting board. The tools were no more complex than a drill press and a belt sander. I’m quite happy to hear that he didn’t use a computer controlled mill or some strange stereo photo polymer lithography setup to build his wonderful machines.
[via MAKEzine blog]
Tribotix Robots
Ooo! More robot kit fun! I like it except that I feel very poor when I look at it. I guess robot kits will do that to you, it’s like looking at the prices of LEGOs.
[via robots.net ]
Virtual Humanoid Project
Humm, the Japanese are at it again. This time they are using a virtual reality head mounted unit to map the image of a real person over a 3D representation that is colored chroma key green. The idea is to enhance communications, for instance if you shake hands you will get tactile feedback from the dummy. They are working on a version that uses a robot and not a dummy to enable the user to interact better with the person that they are talking to.
[via engadget]
Virtual Humanoid Project (translated)
5000 Channels and Nothing On TV
This is just wild. The guy gets like 5000 TV channels off his dozen or so antennas. Not too shabby. This reminds be of the bit I did a while back on TV DX’ing. That used just your normal TV receiver to pull in the distant stations, but this guy is using all sots of old small dish satellite receivers to tune in the transmissions that come in as they say, ‘free to air‘. That translates as he "gets them for free ’cause no one encrypts them". 100% legal and it happens all the time. Some networks don’t even bother to encrypt anything (GASP!)
You can do this stuff yourself, all you need are some dishes and a receiver that can pickup these un-scrambled transmissions. Pretty soon you’ll be grooving to news air checks and weird foreign shows. I’d like it because I might be able to receive ThaiTV. Not only would my wife like it but it might improve my weak grasp of the Thai language a little bit more.
[via Boing Boing]
Champagne cork parachute
Umm.. Yeah. Stock up on these for the Yew Year. Or better yet, as the animated GIF is better at telling how it works than the patent papers, build your own. Ya know, nothing says ‘I’m a geek’ louder than a parachute on a champagne cork. Come to think of it, a cork parachute and a 2 liter bottle of something fizzy (I’ll go with baking soda and acid of choice for home chemistry, vinegar) should make for some weekend fun.
[via BoingBoing]