The Bulbdial clock comes to life

posted Apr 8th 2009 8:15am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: classic hacks, home hacks, led hacks

bulbdial

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has built the bulbdial clock, an idea originated by Ironic Sans.  It’s basically a high definition indoor sundial. The LEDs arranged in a circle shine a light on the peg in the middle casting a shadow, just like a sundial. There are 3 colors of rings, allowing for hour, minute, and second shadows. This isn’t the first time that Ironic Sans has seen ideas come to reality. There were the pre pixelated reality show clothes and the sneaky histogram hidden message system. While it is a cute idea, it isn’t really new. People have been patenting this idea for a while.

Scratch built air muscles

posted Dec 21st 2008 5:00am by Eliot Phillips
filed under: misc hacks, robots hacks

airmuscle2

We first talked about air muscles in 2005 while lusting after Shadow Robotic’s dexterous hand. The pneumatic devices are known for being lightweight and compliant. They’re designed to be used in robot arms and legs. [jelengar] stumbled across this guide to building your own air muscles. We’re not exactly sure what the original source is since it reads like a machine translation. The core is a piece of silicone tubing used in aquariums. It’s sealed at one end with a bolt. Braided electrical sheathing is slid over the tube and secured using multiple wraps of 24gauge wire. They say to test it using 20psi, but there’s no mention of what the limits are.




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