A Fantastic Acrylic Light Display

May 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

As a retired industrial designer, [Dave] has a lot of time to do what we’d all like to do: sit around in a workshop and make stuff. His latest project, an acrylic light display of an Indian motorcycle looks fantastic and betrays his designer heritage.

The base of the light display is made up of a laminate of a few 1/4″ pieces of Poplar carved on [Dave]’s CNC machine. These pieces were glued together with a slot routed into the top for the arcylic panel. Instead of going with a few LEDs for the light source, [Dave] used a small cold cathode fluorescent lamp with the requisite inverter tucked away inside the base. This is the same setup he used in an earlier project, and judging from that the Indian motorcycle display looks great on the inside.

After giving the wooden base a few coats of lacquer, [Dave] milled a piece of acrylic with an Indian motorcycle motif he created himself. It’s a great piece of work, sure to brighten up his very awesome workshop.

Retrotechtacular: Introducing The Brand New Acorn Risc Machine

May 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Get ready to be swept off your feet by this Acorn Risc Machine promotional video from the Mid-1980’s (also embedded after the jump). We’re sure most have put it together by now, but for those slower readers, this is the introduction of ARM processors.

The video has a bit of everything. There’s a deadpan narration with just a bit of British accent around the edges. But that’s spiced up considerably by the up-beat synthesizer track playing in the background. You’ll see plenty of programmers in short-sleeve dress shirts, and we challenge you to count the number of mustaches that make it on camera. But jest aside, it’s fun to think of how the advent of this chip affected the world.

This post is just the second installment of our Retrotechtacular series (here’s the inaugural post). We haven’t seen any old movies come in from readers yet. What are you waiting for? Digitize that footage because we want to see it! Of course it doesn’t have to be your own movies, so anything you come across that covers decades-old tech is fair game.

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Coating Technique Makes Glass You Can’t See

April 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

Some of the deep thinkers over at MIT have come up with an interesting hack for ordinary glass. If you coat it in a special way it becomes nearly invisible. This is only one of the effects of the coating, but brings images of people walking through glass walls to our minds.

Joking aside, this is really very useful. The images above show a microscopic view of the cones that are applied during the coating process. They prevent the surface tension on a drop of water from being broken, and you can see the clip of water actually bouncing right off the glass in the video after the break. This also means it acts as a non-stick coating for dirt, grime, and even fog. Anyone who’s taken a tropical vacation will know that taking a picture outside with a camera that’s been in an air-conditioned room results only in a snapshot of a foggy lens. This coating could change that. But it’s also got a lot of potential with the glass panes covering solar cells. If they can’t get dirty, and there’s virtually no glare, you should see a performance boost. It’ll be interesting to see how long this takes to come to market and what the first products to use it might be.

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Giant Space Invaders With Road Barriers And No Moving Parts

April 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This is space invaders on the large-scale. To give you an idea of just how big this is, that’s a street lamp to the left. It’s being played on the side of a building, but it’s not really done the easy way. We’ve seen gaming on the sides of buildings by using projectors, but this one is more like a classic LCD handheld game… just really really big.

Each of the game pieces is hung in place on a black backdrop. The invaders themselves are molded-plastic road construction barricades. The shield area on the bottom is made op of center-lane dividers. All of the pieces are wired with lights that can be addressed by a central controller. As you can see after the break, just one button gets the action under way.

This is along the same line as the Christmas Light game we saw several years back. If you’ve got some extra strings of lights and don’t mind building a controller we think you should add a little fun to the neighborhood with your own giant installation. Just don’t forget to send in some pictures.

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Pong, An Engine, And Bond Theme (oh My!)

April 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Hopefully you’re not on a network that blocks YouTube, because we’re sharing videos that show off three different projects. Alas, they don’t give any details about the development process, but we think you’ll like seeing the end results just the same.

First up is a Stirling engine. This one is pretty serious business, with machined parts making up the alcohol-lamp powered engine [Thanks Pete]. This is much more elegant than the tuna can version from last month.

Bust out your Arduino and give theoriginal video game a go. This game of Pong is played on an oscilloscope using two micro-trimpots. To make it happen a pair of MCP4901 DAC chips are feeding the probes.

While you’ve got that friendly blue breakout board out, might as well grab a set of old foppy drives. Here is an eight-channel version of the James Bond theme [via Technabob]. Unlike the sampler from the other week, this one uses the stepper motor noise to create sweet music.

Stop Motion Animation Creation

April 23, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 4 Comments

Stop Motion Animation has always been interesting to me since I “discovered” that one could make animated flip books by drawing each frame a little different. Fast forward 20 years or so, and computer technology has gotten to the point where this sort of thing can be done electronically quite easily and at an incredibly low price of a camera, computer, and free or paid-for software (here’s the technique using GIMP, a free, good quality photo editing tool) to put everything together.

The frames in the picture above are of my latest [PVC man] animation, which can be made with some electroluminescent lights, gloves, and some PVC pipe. Each frame was individually photographed, and after several hours of work we had enough footage for 17 seconds of so of stop-motion animation.

Although by no means perfect, the quality of these animations has gone up dramatically from the first animations that I made using an old ENV2 camera phone. Although I was using a “custom mount” for it, it’s amazing these came out as well as they did. As with everything hacking related, this process is a constant work in progress. Check out the videos after the break for the [PVC man] video as well as one of the early ENV2-produced stop-motion shorts!

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Slow Motion Destruction Of Random Things

April 22, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

Though we can’t really tell you how this is hacking related, we’ve always shared random videos of stuff getting destroyed with you. Invariably someone in the comments goes on a rant about how wasteful and/or dangerous it is. This clip, from a Danish TV show called Stupid and Dangerous, fits that description quite well. It is also freaking awesome.

We’re really not sure what draws us to these videos exactly. Is it vicarious destruction or possibly our natural affinity for slow motion?

[via Dvice]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUZ-e2SkeMI