Day: April 21, 2011

Rube Goldberg Machine Puts Engineering Students In The Record Books

April 21, 2011 by 36 Comments

rube_goldberg

Rube Goldberg machines are always a fan favorite around here. They truly embody the concept of over-engineering, and are an entertaining departure from what we normally cover on Hackaday.

Back in February, engineering students from two on-campus professional associations at Purdue University teamed up to construct a world record-setting Rube Goldberg machine. Their entry in the Purdue Regional Rube Goldberg Machine Contest not only won them the regional title, but also potentially put them in the books as creating the most complex device of its nature.

Their contraption was dubbed “The Time Machine” and acts out events in our planet’s history. It starts with the big bang, moving through various other time periods, including the stone age, ancient Egypt, and the medieval era. It also makes several stops in more recent times, including World War II and the Cold War, before self-destructing at the Apocalypse.

All told, the machine incorporates 244 steps to water a plant, which is 14 more than the previous record holder. Continue reading to see a video that highlights some of the machine’s more interesting features, and be sure to check out these Rube Goldberg machines we’ve covered in the past.

[via BoingBoing]

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Cotton Candy Just The Color You Like It

April 21, 2011 by 9 Comments

Hit the web to order up your custom-color cotton candy from this machine (translated). A computer monitors a web interface for an incoming order, then pushes commands to an mbed microcontroller which dispenses three different colors of sugar to whip up your custom shade of the cottony delight.

In addition to the sugar dispensing system, the candy maker itself is also a do-it-yourself design. It looks like the most difficult part of this project was getting this component right. They’ve got a collection of videos documenting the multiple attempts on the road to success. Once dispensed, the colored sugars make their way into a spinning metal cylinder where they’re heated by the flame from a butane candle lighter. Eventually the team manages to get cotton candy to form but we can’t help but feel like they’re trying to reinvent the wheel with this one.

[via Make]

DoJ And FBI Now Issuing Command To Botnet Malware

April 21, 2011 by 65 Comments

Looks like the FBI is starting to get pretty serious about fighting malware. Traditionally they have attacked the servers that activate and control botnets made up of infected computers. This time they’re going much further by taking control of and issuing commands to the botnets. In this instance it’s a nasty little bug called Coreflood, and they’ve been given permission to take the yet-unheard-of step by a federal judge.

An outside company called Internet Systems Consortium has been tapped to do the actual work. It will call upon the malware on infected computers and issue a command to shut it down. That falls short of fixing the problem as Coreflood will try to phone home again upon reboot. This gets back to the initial problem; we won’t ever be able to stop malware attacks as long as there are users who do not have the knowhow (or simply don’t care) to protect and disinfect their own computer systems.

How long do you think it will be before some black hat comes up with a countermeasure against this type of enforcement?

[via Gizmodo]