Here’s a fun art installation which you might run into downtown. It’s called the Dilemmabox and lets you pull a rope to up or down vote a question. [Christoffer Lorang Dahl] realized that touchscreens are wiping out a lot of really fun user interfaces of yore. He incorporated the two hanging rope inputs as an homage to doorbell ropes.

The built process works much like a laptop-to-digital photo frame conversion. The first step is to liberate the LCD screen from the laptop body. Both are housed in a wooden box, with a window cut out to show the screen. The mechanically clever part is the rope pulls. They’re both just pressing a key on the keyboard in a roundabout sort of way. [Christoffer] attached a smooth hemispherical piece to two keys. The ropes are connected to wooden levers which are held in place by springs. They rub on the hemispheres just enough when passing by to register a keypress.

The photo above was taken during the Dilemmabox’s brief appearance at a shopping plaza in Oslo.

[Kirov], a regular reader and one of our most notorious commenters, tipped us off about this lawn mowing hack. On one hand we’re wary that this is bait for a huge flame war, but on the other hand it’s a hack that brings a smile to our mischievous faces. By pounding a stake into the center of the yard and connecting a mower to it with a piece of rope, [Korey99] has achieve an automated lawn mower. He tied the self-propelled mower’s throttle bar down to make the machine run unattended. There’s no kill switch or any kind of remote control for the lawn mower so we wonder what happens when the rope gets all wound up?

Rigging the device is fairly straight forward; you could probably figure it out without any instruction. We attached a standard climbing harness to the device for our ascent. An additional rappelling rope was used as a backup.

It’s a simple device to use. You just flip the large toggle switch to “on”, pull the small trigger and off you go. The original unit moved at 10ft/s, but it was almost too jarring. The newer unit has a much higher load capacity. To descend you squeeze the large metal brake release handle. This causes you to drop fairly slowly since the electric brake is still engaged. The solution is to turn off the machine and regulate the descent with the handbrake.

Right now they’re in the middle of doing a short production run that will be evaluated by the military. In service, a squad would have one person climb the obstacle. The next person would use the ascender and then just keep the ascender at the top to pull up the rest of the troops… I’m guessing they won’t be using it to peep second story windows like us (no, not really). While the method of rope engagement is pretty much finalized, the team is constantly trying to improve the motor and battery efficiency.

We’d like to thank Nate Ball and the rest of the ATLAS Devices team. Your next chance to see the ascender in person will be Wired’s NextFest Sept. 13-16th in LA.