Deconstruction

2 Articles

Push Button, Receive Bacon.

November 19, 2014 by 28 Comments

Members of the Rabbit Hole hackerspace spent the last weekend competing in The Deconstruction, a 48 hour hackathon competition. The hackerspace’s theme was “Light it up!”, so members created some awesome projects involving light. The star of the show was their bacon cooking machine. The Rabbit hole made the “Push Button. Receive Bacon” meme real.

A broken laser printer was gutted for its drive train and fuser assembly. Laser printer fusers are essentially hot rollers. The rollers melt toner and fuse it with paper as it passes through the printer. The heat in this case comes from a lamp inside the roller. That lamp also puts out plenty of light, which fit perfectly with the team’s theme.

The Rabbit Hole members wasn’t done though, they also built a pocket-sized infinity mirror from an empty Altoids tin. The bottom of the tin was cut out, and a mirror glued in. A filter from a broken projector made a perfect half silver mirror, and some LEDs completed the project.

The members also built a fandom art piece, consisting of 25 fans connected together in a skull shape. The eye and nose fans were lighted. When the fans were plugged in, they kicked for a few seconds before spinning up. Once they did spin though – there was a mighty wind in the Rabbit Hole.

Click past the break for The Rabbit Hole’s Deconstruction video!

Continue reading “Push Button, Receive Bacon.” →

Watching 50 Teams Build Something Cool

February 23, 2013 by 5 Comments

Last summer, we here at Hackaday participated in the Red Bull Creation Contest. Basically, twelve teams were given webcams and instructions to build something cool. The teams live streamed their build process, and the best of the bunch won a trip to the New York Maker Faire. [Jason Naumoff], the guy behind this build-off is doing it again right now. It’s called The Deconstruction and it pits 50 teams on 6 continents to build something cool while streaming their project to the Internet.

The Deconstruction is a little bit different from Red Bull’s contest – first, the teams don’t have access to ludicrous amounts of energy drinks. Secondly, there’s no set theme for the group entries. It’s a free-for-all build off where teams can make anything they’d like.

We’ve really got to hand it to [Jason] for pulling this off. He MC’d the Red Bull Creation Contest live stream – nearly all 72 hours of it – and was entertaining right up to the very end. You can check out the official stream on the main Deconstruction site, or you can check out the individual team streams here.