Classic game cabinet becomes a drivable car

[Garnet Hertz], a professor and “artist in residence” at UC Irvine, built a drivable Outrun arcade cabinet for an experiment in augmented reality.

The old fiberglass and wood cabinet was hacked up and the motors, wheels, and drive train from an electric golf cart were stuffed inside. The original steering wheel and pedals were used for the controls. Although the … Read the rest

Visualizing PCB revisions using a Gerber viewer

gerber_schematic_highlighting

We all know that Eagle has its share of shortcomings. Instructables user [westfw] was particularly annoyed by the fact that while Eagle keeps copies of up to 10 revisions of your board, it cannot open those files without resorting to manually renaming each one. Even more frustrating to him is the fact that you can’t use Eagle to view two … Read the rest

Only losers text message on cellphones – this guy carries his own teletype for that

Yes, that’s an SMS text messaging device. [Mdziewie] decided that texting on a regular cellphone was too boring and decided to build himself an old-school SMS gateway. Here’s a translated link but the formatting of the forum post gets screwed up with the machine translation.

The device he’s using is an ASR-33 Teletype machine, which was introduced to … Read the rest

Chainless bicycle will turn a few heads

Someone let [Tane] play around with welding equipment and bicycle parts and look what happened! He built a diminutive velocipede. Now that’s just a term for a human-powered land vehicle, but the term fits a bit better as this is missing most of the stuff you’d expect to see on a bicycle.

He started with a mountain bike and … Read the rest

Incredibly fast 3D printing with the Ultimaker

ultimaker_3d_printer

There’s a new 3d printer on the block, and hot damn is it fast!

Hailing from the Netherlands, the Ultimaker 3D Printer has finally hit US shores, and aims to give the MakerBot a run for its money. The Ultimaker was designed by Utrecht Fab Lab manager [Siert Wijnia] along with two frequent lab patrons, [Erik DeBruijn and Martijn Elserman]. … Read the rest

Virtual Segway tours using the Wii Balance Board

Take a tour of anywhere on earth without leaving your home. This virtual Segway tour uses the Wii Fit Balance Board and Google Earth to let the rider control a virtual tour by leaning in the direction they want to travel. It’s the product of a hackathon at SVI Hackspace, a new hackerspace in Stanford’s Huang Engineering Center.

The … Read the rest

Tiny external system monitor makes it easy to keep tabs on your PC

tiny_pc_resource_monitor

Instructables user [Jan] likes to keep close tabs on his computer’s memory usage, but wanted something more interesting to look at than the standard resource manager. He preferred to have an external display available that would show his computer’s status with a quick glance, and thus this system monitor was born.

His status panel contains a trio of constantly … Read the rest