[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkUSjf0U-GU]
Meet Skelly, the propeller powered singing skeleton, winning entry to the Unofficial Propeller Halloween Contest. Sick of the massive amounts of Arduino projects floating around the web, [Oldbitcollector] offered a halloween challenge. Make something spooky using a propeller and other parallax stuff, win a prize. Skelly, made by [Chuck Rice] was the star of the show, so [Chuck] will be getting some USB development boards in the mail.
It can sometimes be difficult to decide what items we want to fill space in our homes. Our health is valued highly, as is our ability to consume cold beer. Someone out there must have been thinking of us when they designed this exersize bike that chills your beer. Admittedly, it won’t chill it as fast as some other methods we’ve tried. We also may end up forcing our friends and loved ones to do the actual chilling, but beer tastes better when cooled by slave labor anyway.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUH3m6ZyW-g]
We don’t know whether to be horrified, or elated at the sight of this dancing hexapod. Yeah, it isn’t a hack. It isn’t even a build article. But if there is ever a time to post a six legged dancing head with glowing red eyes, it is today, Halloween. Enjoy.
[via BotJunkie]
Promises, promises, promises. The $200 Eee PC is supposedly coming in 2009, according to chairman Johnny Shih. No word on whether it will be a 10 inch screen, but it seems possible as they have stated they are phasing out the smaller models. Other interesting facts were divulged, such as 70% of them are now loaded with Windows XP and hard drives.
[via Engadget]
The Hex Bug, at $10, proves to be a perfect platform for building your own droid. Out of the box, it has pretty limited functionality. It walks forward until its antennae bump something, then it backs up and turns left. Applied inspirations shows us how you can replace the bug’s brains with a microcontroller to give it much more life. Instead of hacking into the existing electronics, they chose to completely replace the board. The final result, though still only able to turn one direction, is much more robust. They discuss the ability to add numerous sensors as well as pre program different behaviours and personalities.
We were expecting eye gouging and body slams, but this review of several thumb drive Linux distributions will do. They compared Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora. They don’t mention why they chose these four specifically, as UNetbootin has many many distributions available. They put each through its paces, listing common issues and boot up speed.
Their conclusion was that puppy Linux was preferable as it has a graphically nice interface and the ability to have persistent data storage on the disk. They have a poll going though, so head over and voice your opinion.
[youtube=http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=aoRh8T_VX-Y]
[Rick] has been building Tesla turbines in various ways and posting his projects to youtube. For those who are unfamiliar, a tesla turbine is a fanless turbine that uses a smooth central disk spun by friction from a gas or fluid. Since the turbine itself has no protrusions, it is extremely stable. There are lots of other benefits, which can be explored on the Wikipedia page. [Rick], as you can see from the video above has found several uses for them, from Halloween props, to generators for lights, to an automated shake flashlight shaker, you can even watch him rev one up to destruction. Though most of these are at relatively low speeds, he has shown that he can make one from CD spindles that is stable enough to reach 10,000 RPM. [Rick] admits that all they really do is spin fast and make cool noises, but they do that pretty well.
Update: Moments after this was published, we found an instructable by [Rick] on how to build a blender using a tesla turbine.
