RFID Tracking System

February 20, 2010 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

[Nicholas] built an active tracking system using RFID tags. The system’s tags operate in the 2.4 GHz band and are used to track either people or assets. The readers are on a mesh network and can triangulate the location of any tag for display on a map. His system is even set up to show the travel history of each tag. [Nicholas] shared every detail in his writeup including some background about available hardware options and how he made his final decisions on what devices to use for the job. His conglomeration of software that ties the whole project together is also available for download.

Sausage Gun 19mm

February 20, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 39 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frtQXzt1_E0]

If you are anything like us, you find yourself needing, on occasion, to fling sausages at high velocity. [F00] sent in his solution, the SG19. While the details are glazed over pretty quickly, we get the point. This is basically a smaller diameter spud gun, meant to shoot sausage. While it may not be remarkable in its design, we have to wonder who came up with the idea to use sausage as the ammunition.

Rube Goldberg FTW

February 20, 2010 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

This video was on its way to a links post until we saw the game of chess right in the middle of it (bishop to H5). [Tom] and [Ben] put their Master of Manufacturing Engineering degrees to use by jam-packing every conveyance method possible into a Rube Goldberg machine. There’s violin bows, a polo mallet, a rolling candle, a ball-popping umbrella, texting cell phones, toppling jewel cases, and plenty of ball-on-tracks implementations. All of that setup and all that the device does is… well, you’ll have to see for yourself.

[Thanks Phil via DVICE]