Ford Explorer Lives Again As A Jurassic Truck

January 28, 2016 by James Hobson 24 Comments

After Jurassic World came out and interest in Jurassic Park took off, [Voicey] decided he just had to make his very own Jurassic Park tour vehicle. Only problem? He lives in the UK and Ford Explorers aren’t exactly common there.

Wanting to keep it as movie-accurate as possible, he knew he had to get a first generation Explorer, and luckily, he managed to find one on an American car Facebook page. He bought it and got to work.

The first step was building custom bumper and brush guards, which he re-purposed from a Land Rover. Then he had a lot of painting to do. A lot.

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Conductive Concrete Melts Snow And Ice

January 27, 2016 by James Hobson 93 Comments

Winter sucks. Ice sucks. Shoveling sucks. What if roads, or your driveway, could get rid of snow and ice by themselves? (…with the help of our friend, the electron.)

A few days ago we shared a project about building an epic snow-melting system right into your driveway. But for obvious reasons, it’s not that easy to do — or cheap. But [Chris Tuan], an engineering professor at the University of Nebraska thinks he can change that.

He’s created his own special formula for conductive concrete. Which means you can turn the concrete into a resistive heat load. And this isn’t just a university research project that is going nowhere; it’s actually being trialed by the FAA for use in airports . There is a patch of it in Omaha undergoing testing right now.

And it’s actually not that complex. It consists of a mixture of 20% steel shavings and carbon particles, in a regular run-of-the-mill concrete. Apparently, this is enough to cause the entire patch of concrete to become conductive, meaning if you pump enough juice through it — it’d definitely melt some ice on top.

[Thanks Michael!]

Robot Solves Rubik’s Cube In Just One Second

January 27, 2016 by James Hobson 55 Comments

Some of the fastest Rubik’s cube solvers in the world have gotten down to a five second solve — which is quite an incredible feat for a human — but how about one second? Well, [Jay Flatland] and [Paul Rose] just built a robot that can do exactly that.

The robot uses four USB webcams, six stepper motors, and a 3D printed frame. The only modification to the Rubik’s cube are some holes drilled in the center pieces to allow the stepper motors to grip onto them with 3D printed attachments.

The software is running off a Linux machine which feeds the data into a Rubik’s cube algorithm for solving. In approximately one second — the cube is solved.

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Turning A Lapdock Into A Laptop With The Pi Zero

January 26, 2016 by James Hobson 25 Comments

Do you remember the Motorola Lapdock 100? It was a CPU-less laptop designed for plugging in your smartphone that enabled you to use your phone as a computer! Perhaps a bit ahead of its time, they never really caught on — but now you can buy them pretty cheap, and with the release of the Raspberry Pi Zero, it was only a matter of time before someone combined the two.

The Lapdock 100 has long been a useful accessory for the Raspberry Pi, but until the Zero came out, it was always a messy bundle of wires running to and from the devices, making it a less than ideal solution. The Zero changes everything. [Ax0n] knew he had to try combining the two.

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Stop Driving Laser Cutters With 3D Printer Software!

January 26, 2016 by James Hobson 64 Comments

Laser cutters are fantastic pieces of equipment, and thanks to open-source improvements in recent years, are getting even cheaper to make. It can be as simple as throwing a high-powered laser diode onto the head of your 3D printer! With so many home-brew designs out there, wouldn’t it be nice if there was some all-encompassing open-source, laser-cutter controller software? Well, as it turns out — there is, and it’s called LaserWeb.

What started as a simple personal project by [Peter van der Walt] has recently grown into a very formidable piece of software with over 10 contributors in just three months. It even supports four different firmwares, from grbl, to smoothieware, marlin and even lasaurgrbl!

It’s designed to support home-made laser cutters, diode based laser engravers, and even converted Chinese laser cutters. With built-in CAM for PolyLine DXF, and SVG, it can even create rasters from images. Stick around after the break to see a quick video demo — we’re going to have to try this out!

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Raspberry Pi Zero Cluster Packs A Punch

January 25, 2016 by James Hobson 91 Comments

If you could actually buy 16 Raspberry Pi Zeros, you might be able to build your very own Raspberry Pi Cluster for only $80! Well… minus the cost of the board to tie them all together…

A Japanese company called Idein is developing a Raspberry Pi module called the Actbulb for computational sensing and data analysis. In order to perform internal testing they decided to make things easier for themselves by developing a board to allow them to plug in not one, not two, but sixteen Raspberry Pi Zeros:

Since we will use Pi’s GPU for image processing, deep learning, etc. We need real Pis but not just Linux machines. Another reason. It can be used for flashing eMMCs of our devices via USB ports when we have to do that by ourselves.

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Homemade Exoskeleton Lifts Mini Cooper With Ease

January 25, 2016 by James Hobson 37 Comments

As some of you may or may not know, I’m interested in everything exoskeleton related. I’ve been messing around with my own designs for the past year or so, and just this past weekend, tested out the latest lower body design. There are a lot of boring (and some would say safe) ways to test this. But that’s no fun. For my test I used the lower-half of the exoskeleton to pick up a Mini Cooper.

You might remember my original upper-body design which was something I threw together in my garage as a proof of concept. It worked well for what it was, and surprisingly, took the internet by storm — amassing over a million views in a single week for a video of me curling 170lbs in my backyard. The fire had started — I knew I had to make something better. And that was the beginning of my quest to build a full-body powered exoskeleton.

The biggest problem with the original was a lack of back support — it didn’t matter how much weight I could lift, it was still my feeble human skeleton taking the weight. So it was time to go back to the drawing board, and start the design from the ground up. Continue reading “Homemade Exoskeleton Lifts Mini Cooper With Ease” →