Building A SuperMacro Lens

June 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 51 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0cFk9d-P0]

[Lozzless] has a steady hand and plenty of confidence in his hacking skills. The video above is worth watching for the full eight minutes. In it you’ll see him convert a lens into what he calls a SuperMacro lens with a working aperture. The process involves fashioning a connector ring from a lens cap, modifying an Electro-focus lens mount, and assembling the parts to do his bidding. We don’t have the photography background to fully understand what he’s doing here, but we can appreciate the process, and the results are shown at the end of the clip.

[Thanks TommyC]

Coachella Lamp

June 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

This little art piece might be just the thing to add that mad scientist look to your room. It’s called the Coachella lamp and it makes use of several throwback display devices. At the top an Argon discharge lamp puts out ultraviolet light. Protruding from each of the four sides you can see a set of decatrons. There’s also four Nixie tube bar graphs standing tall from each corner of the base. The final touch is the colored glow in the center which is provided by LEDs. We’ve embedded some video of the device after the break.

The lamp is powered by a wall outlet and controlled with an Arduino. We’ve seen deactrons used as timing devices and would love to see some clock functionality added to the lamp. Trying to decipher the time from the different Nixie displays would put this up there with some of those other hard to read timepieces.

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Arc Reactor Replica

June 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

This Arc Reactor is a great re-creation of the fictional source of Iron Man’s power. It’s really just a holder for a bunch of LED’s, but it exhibits some fine craftsmanship which we enjoy in any project. This rendition is much more true to the movie than the last look-a-like we saw. These might end up being for sale (the webpage narrative is kind of weird) but you really shouldn’t be wearing this kind of thing around unless you made it yourself, or if you can add it to some kind of Iron Man simulator.

[Thanks Cr8vie]