Most of you probably have a webcam sitting around somewhere, and after all the high voltage projects you’ve done using disposable cameras, we bet you have some camera lenses too. You could always do what [Butch] did and combine the lens from the camera with the webcam to do some up close inspection.

This seems like something we’ve seen several times, but we can’t find it in our archive. Such a simple and quick hack looks surprisingly effective in his shots. If you want to see the details, like where he tied into the webcam’s board to power an external LED, you’ll have to download the PDF.

Here is a nice video to wind down the day. It’s [neorazz]‘s micRo playing the theme from Tetris. The micRo is a simple CNC kit sold by the team at Lumenlabs. For more servo music, peruse our CNC category.

[Thanks grayson]

Here’s an interesting concept, the bot pictured above has no internal control mechanisms.  His claims to have built the smallest bot are dubious, considering it requires a much larger control platform to function, so lets just set that aside and look at how it works. The bot itself is basically a hollow box with a hinged manipulator mounted on it. He has then built a modified CNC type structure with various magnets below a platform. The magnets can move the bot and control the manipulator (assuming the bot isn’t trying to pick up anything magnetic). He talks about this being a possible control scheme for smaller bots, though we think he would have to make some major advancements to his magnetic controls for accuracy’s sake. As for his claims of being the smallest, well, we’re sure we’ve seem similarly sized bots, even hexapods,  that were completely self contained.