Papercraft Strandbeest Is A Great Rainy Day Project

May 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

Here in the Midwest it sometimes seems like Spring will never, well…spring. We get that “April showers bring May flowers”, but nearly all of the last month has been cold and rainy around these parts. While things are improving, we think it’s always good practice to have a few fun projects at the ready, just in case your plans with the kids get rained out.

We think that Hackaday reader [Dombeef’s] papercraft strandbeest is a perfect idea for a rainy afternoon. The supply list is pretty short, requiring little more than some scissors, pliers, paperclips, and glue in addition to the thick paper that makes up the body of the strandbeest. The paper is cut into pieces according to the PDF template he includes in his Instructable, secured to one another via small pieces of paperclip.

Once the legs are all constructed, a main axis is built from one of the remaining paperclips, and everything is joined together under the main portion of the strandbeest’s body.

As you can see in the video, the legs work quite well, though the strandbeest can probably benefit from a hand crank in the short term. [Dombeef] plans on adding a small motor to his creation, which should get the strandbeest moving about quite rapidly once completed.

If you are looking for more fun projects to do with the kids, look no further than this papercraft gyroscope or these squishy circuits.

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Help Identify This Vintage Electronics Component

April 30, 2011 by Mike Nathan 45 Comments

mystery_board

[Windell] over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has reached out in order to help them identify a mystery piece of electronics equipment they came across a few years ago. Discovered at an electronics surplus store, the mystery component looks like a cross between an over-sized chess board and a breadboard. Failing to identify it they eventually disposed of the board, snapping a couple of pictures for good measure before it was gone for good.

Recently while visiting a local electronics flea market, they came across what looked to be a similar, though much smaller board. This piqued their curiosity and compelled them to dig out the pictures of the mystery board in hopes of finally discovering what it was. Using markings on the new board they found, the team at EMSL located some images of a patchboard cartridge that looked quite similar to their mystery object. Upon closer inspection however, they think that the two pieces might be related, but are not quite the same item.

Swing by their site and chime in if you happen to have any good leads – we’re sure they will appreciate it.

Build A Real-life Escher’s Waterfall

April 29, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 16 Comments

Instructables user [GuokrDIY] has provided a translation of a detailed guide on making one of our favorite Escher inspired illusions. Unlike the previous speculated solutions to Escher’s waterfall this one manages to keep the water path coherent up until the top level. The trick of the whole setup is very carefully controlling perspective to overlap the water source and outlet. We say water but for some reason the builder is actually using “toilet detergents” as the liquid… At any rate, the liquid is allowed to flow downhill until it reaches the fourth corner, which does not exist. The liquid actually falls off the end of the table (out of sight) and into a basin. A carefully timed pump in the basin pushes liquid up to the top of the waterfall through one of the model’s pillars, where it then cascades over the wheel.

Using sketchup to model the various structural components of the waterfall the design is fashioned out of PVC and ABS plastic, then skinned with mapped textures to ensure that everything looks coherent. The visual details are fine tuned by viewing the whole setup through a camcorder. The hardest part of the illusion seems to be modulating power to the pump in order to time it with the liquid’s flow.

We just hope that thing about toilet detergent was a mistranslation or some kind of sarcasm from the original Chinese article. Check out the model in action after the jump!

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Hacker Typer Lets You Turn Jibberish Into Useless Code

April 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

We generated the screen full of code seen above literally by bashing a hand on the keyboard repeatedly like a monkey. You know, just like how hackers are portrayed in the movies? Hacker Typer makes you look like you know what you’re doing even though you’re too lazy to do something real. It’s a pointless website that’s none-the-less worth a few moments of your time just for the sake of amusement. You’ll be greeted with a set of options. The first lets you decide what pre-determined text will appear as you type. The rest are for page title, foreground and background colors, and number of characters that will appear with each keystroke.

The default features start off with three characters generated for each keystroke, another annoying staple of Hollywood film making. Oh well, even movies that try really hard to get things right end up getting under the skin of someone. Case in point, the Linux shell readout from Tron Legacy.

[via The Presurfer]

Data Scraping And Visualization With Python

April 27, 2011 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

arduino_dial

[Greg] built himself a small indicator dial with his laser cutter, and wanted to use it for visualizing server performance and load information. Before he started using it for server monitoring however, he thought he should test out his data parsing skills on a simpler data set.

Pachube has a wealth of information that can be freely used for whatever project you might have in mind, so [Greg] started looking around for something interesting to track. Eventually he located the data feed for a tanker ship and wired his dial to display the ship’s speed. He uses a Python script to interface with the Pachube API, which is fed to his Netduino board. A servo motor then changes the position of the dial based on the feed’s data. Since large tankers don’t change speed often, the experiment was a bit of a letdown. He searched for a bit and tuned into another feed that tracked wind speed in New Zealand, getting much better results.

His future plans include hooking it directly to his network and eventually using it to monitor his servers…at least once the novelty of tracking random data feeds wears off.

All of his code is available on GitHub, and he is happy to make a gauge for anyone who is interested, though he doesn’t currently list a price.

Color-matching Powder Coat Paints

April 26, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Zitt] is sharing some methods he’s honed for color-matching powder coat paint. He developed these techniques while restoring a 1982 Star Trek coin-op machine. The image above shows a paddle used for the game. The plate that houses the control was beat up, and he needed to repaint it but wanted to make sure it didn’t look out-of-place with the molded plastic that surrounds it.

He gets his powder paints from Harbor Freight, a favorite depot for hackable goods (like drill motors, or metal carts). Usually these paints would be applied by attracting them to the piece using electrostatic charges. [Zitt’s] not doing that, but applying them with a paint sprayer instead.

The first step is to match your color. He’s using an electronic color matching device which gives data to plug into a chart on the web for a color match. Once you’ve got a formula, mix up the powder coat, and then dissolve it into some Methyl Ethyl Ketone. This goes into the spray gun and is applied in an even coat. Before heading into an oven for curing, it’s important to wait for this coat to dry. [Zitt] observed some boiling MEK on a wet test piece that left an undesirable texture on the baked paint after curing. After running a few test pieces he picked the blend that was the best match and then painted all of his restored parts.

Motorcycle Turned Chicken Launcher

April 25, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Those who frequently work with them will tell you that rubber chickens are actually pretty heavy. You’re not going to do much damage chucking them by hand and that’s why you need your own rubber chicken launcher. This most-excellent magazine-fed foul-flinger was built by artist [Sean Pace] as a senior project while working toward his fine arts degree at UNC Asheville. He reused the rear end of a motorcycle, purposing the spinning wheel to grab the birds out of an in-feed channel and fling them much like a mechanical football launcher would. It kind of makes us wonder if you could do the same thing with a pneumatic football launcher?

[Sean’s] contraption is built on a stationary base, but in the video after the break you can see it firing from a flatbed truck. Seems somewhat like a whimsical warthog if you’re a Halo fan.

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