Some of you probably have plans to build your own spaceships, we know we do. Well, the propulsion system can be a bit tricky, especially if you plan on using plasma drives. This breakdown and build of a simple plasma thruster should help you on your way. All you really need is some Argon, a large capacitor bank, and a custom nozzle. You’ve already got most of that right? As usual, be very careful. This is high voltage and very hot.
For those unfortunate few of you who don’t already have a plasma cutter sitting around, [jandgse812] is here to help. He walks you through the process of building your own plasma cutter from scratch. Adding up the list of parts brings the total project to roughly $300. He has included visual diagrams for all the wiring as well as specific part numbers and where to get them. Be careful, this is potentially very dangerous, but also very cool. You may need to get a copy of the mission impossible theme to play whenever you use it. At least, that’s what [jandgse812] recommends. You can see a video of it in action after the break.
[rog8811] sent in this really cool hack where he used the optics sled from a PS3 as a foundation for a 7 color hand held laser projector. Combining a green laser, a blue ray laser, and a red laser, he is able to produce a variety of color including white. There are step by step instructions on how to make a multicolored laser. He then goes even further, showing how to integrate this into a hand held projector with pre programmed patterns. You can see some examples of the different colors and patterns in this video.
Kit builder oomlout—we’ve featured their servo bot—needed to produce a lot of precut wires. After cutting and stripping more than their fair share, they decided to apply some heavy engineering to make things easier. They constructed a machine to do the job for them. It has three main components: a servo driven wire feeder to measure the length, a two servo wire stripper that uses an exacto blade, and finally a wire cutter made from snips and a drill motor. The machine is controlled using an Arduino. They’ve published all the plans and code to Thingiverse incase anyone else wants to build a similar machine for their own kit shop. A video of the machine is embedded below.
[Max] sent us his dorm room RFID controlled lock. While RFID door locks are nothing new, his implementation is very slick. The entire unit is attached with suction cups to a mirror on the inside of the door. It looks like it could be removed and put elsewhere in a matter of seconds. That’s pretty slick. Much cleaner than the touch sensitive dorm lock we saw last year.
[Conundrum] shares with us his MyVu hacking experiences. The MyVu personal display seems like it would be a great foundation to build some decent 3d display goggles, it is fairly small and has a screen for each eye. This opens up the door to possibly driving them independently for 3d. Those giant helmets we used to use were not anywhere near as stylish as these. Apparently, some quick hacking can double your resolution or even possibly supply 3D imagery! The details are pretty sparse, but it appears as though he has gotten some of these mods functional and tested. Lets hope he posts some more information, we’re definitely interested. We normally wouldn’t post something with so little information, but we’re hoping this encourages him to give us more.
[thanks andre]
[jandgse812] shows us how to build a Jacob’s Ladder from mostly household parts. The bulk of the instructions for this project are included in the downloadable document, there is a downloadable video as well. Be sure to follow to the end where he shows us a much safer and possibly better looking revision. The Jacob’s Ladder has become standard fair for any mad scientists laboratory. If you plan on having a workshop suited for world domination, it absolutely must have one of these in it. Be careful though, the high voltage can be deadly.
