Category: Mad Science

Radio Ace Kit

 

This kit not only has a high cool factor (glowing electronics, does it get any better than that?) but is also a good starter for someone that isn’t all that sure of themselves winding coils and soldering wires. 

Build a nostalgic radio with a real vacuum tube and explore the airwaves as they did in the 1930’s! Historic technology comes to life again with 30 engaging experiments. Assembling this radio is a fun project for radiomen, tinkers and gadget-buffs of all ages. Once your radio is up and running, hunting for radio transmissions becomes a fun challenge. While learning how the radio works, you will discover the fundamental parts of electrical circuits.

The radio is pre-wired for easy assembly. Users need only to plug in the various components, attach an antenna and a ground wire, and make tuning adjustments to get the radio working. The wooden base is beautifully finished with a polished cherry stain and golden labels for an authentic look. The vacuum tube glows with a soft orange glow when you are using it!

 

[via Mavromatic ]

Thames & Kosmos – Radio Ace Kit

Vehicle piloted by a fish

Vehicle piloted by a fish

How cool is this? A camera detects the movement of the fish and steers the robot accordingly. This is right up there with the roach robot and the monkey controlled robot arm. This is not only a fish driven robot, but it is now the first time one of our finned friends can explore on its own the strange alien world of the ‘surface’. One small stroke for a fish, one giant leap for all fish-kind! (I smell a movie script in here somewhere…)

Vehicle piloted by a fish

Mythbusters – Rockets

Mythbusters

Tonight I saw an outstanding episode of Mythbusters. The myth was ‘did the Confederate army create a two stage liquid fueled rocket that was fired 200 miles’. Sounds cool but if you know anything about the history of rockets this is way on the incredible side. Anyway, the result of the build session was a hybrid rocket made from a paraffin and carbon tube that had nitrous oxide shot through it. All using technology that would have been available during the civil war. Well maybe the TIG welders were in short supply back then, but the N2O was made the traditional way at M5. They did however censor the ingredients so you can’t go out and get high from it. Oddly, they in trying to make liquid oxygen Grant heated up mercury oxide. I guess that’s safe to show because you can’t find mercury oxide at the local hardware store. Not that you should do that, you do get O2 but you also get mercury metal. Fun stuff by the way but real bad to have around the house if your not careful. BTW, I had about 1/8 cup of it decades ago. And yes, I did make a tiny bit of it from the decomposition of mercury oxide.
Anyway, it was a great episode to watch and makes me want to know what they used to make the N2O. The actual rocket used a commercially bought cylinder of N2O just to save time but if they had wanted to they could have done it on their own.
They also made gun cotton ( nitrocellulose ) in a kid safe way but that you can’t make a rocket out of, just things that go boom. And we don’t want that. Not that it’s hard to make, its actually pretty easy. You just take… Oh wait, I don’t want to tell you that do I. 😛

MAKE 04

Make vol4

The latest issue of the tech DIY magazine is soon to be hitting my mail box, if you don’t have a subscription already you can buy from Amazon (and a nice discount I might add). The editor, Mark Frauenfelder has this to say about the latest issue:

The fourth volume of Make magazine, which I edit, is now available on Amazon.
The major projects include an electric cigar box guitar, a kit to take high speed strobe photos (so you can capture a balloon or light bulb in mid-pop), and how to turn kids’ electronic toys into musical instruments. There’s also a guide to a bunch of different kinds of kits (electronic, beer making, robots, etc) and a how-to by Mr. Jalopy on converting a vintage hi-fi cabinet into an LP and CD ripper, burner, and player.
David Pescovitz started a new column for the magazine called Proto, which profiles cool makers in corporate labs around the world, and Cory Doctorow weighs in on the Supreme Court’s unfortunate Grokster decision.
I’m especially excited about the do-it-yourself section with ways to hack your coffee and espresso makers.

I can’t wait to read this!

Buy MAKE 04 from Amazon here
MAKE site
[spotted over at BoingBoing]

The Paparazzi Costume

Paparazzi Costume

Rob over at Cockeyed.com is just brilliant. A few years ago he built this paparazzi costume for Halloween. Quite an inspiring rig he came up with. Not to be outdone by himself, he went on to build a Dr. Octopus Costume in 2004. These are a must see if your going to be making your own costume.

Cockeyed Presents: The Paparazzi Costume and Lucasfilm Costume party, 2000

I/O Brush

I/O Brush

I saw this tacked on the end of a Rocketboom episode a while back and thought it was a clever project. Students at MIT have built a paint brush that uses sampled video as its paint bucket.

I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by “picking up” and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special “ink” they just picked up from their immediate environment.

Dow does it work?

In our current prototype, the brush houses a small CCD video camera in its tip with a ring of white LEDs around it. Force sensors are also embedded inside of the brush, measuring the pressure that is getting applied to the bristles. When the brush touches a surface, the lights around the camera briefly turn on to provide supplemental light for the camera. During that time, the system grabs the frames from the camera and stores them in the program.

I like it and so did the judges at the competition. It won a gold award.

I/O Brush: The World as the Palette