With Halloween only a month away you’ll want to start rounding up materials to build something like this now. Nate took the time to make this project look right. He enlarged a photo to make sure the scale was correct for the claws. The claws are mounted securely to a drawer slider Taxi Driver style. It looks like a lot of work went into the uniform as well. You’ll get the gist of it from the first few pictures the rest are just excessive glamor shots. I’ll admit that I put a lot of effort into my Halloween costumes once I got to college, but I usually fell down way to much to be wearing something like this.

[thanks fstat]

This generator is built from an old alternator and a 2-stroke gas engine. The site has some suggestions on component mounting and properly sizing the drive pulley. The importance of getting an alternator with a built in voltage regulator is also covered. You could use this to charge a race car battery between rounds or add a power inverter to power AC items. Of course you could build a gas powered blender instead.

[thanks Howard and jon]

Continue reading “Build Your Own Generator” →

The Telecrapper 2000 is designed to intercept telemarketer calls. It checks the caller ID when a call comes in and picks up if the ID is “out-of-area”, “unavailable”, or “private”. A script then begins playing a series of WAV files. A new file is played when the script detects silence indicating the marketer has finished speaking. The entire conversation is recorded for later amusement.

[thanks h-tech]

Continue reading “Telecrapper 2000” →

[Phil Pemberton] has been building quite a few battery packs over the last year and decided he needed a better method than soldering. Soldering can often damage the end caps and cell seals. He decided to build a simple capacitance-discharge resistance welder to assemble the packs more efficiently. It doesn’t take many parts, but you’ll have to do some tuning to get it to work correctly.

Continue reading “Homebrew Battery Tab Welder” →

[Ben Hou] had originally sent in Godfried-Willem Raes’s automated sousaphone project, but digging around the site reveals a ton of other instruments (seriously, autosaw!). All of them are wired to accept MIDI input and there are schematics of the microcontrollers on almost every project. Quite a few mp3s are available too. Watch out for the unexplained pr0n

Siggraph is a hot bed for tech prototype research and crazy art each year. [Dan Kaminsky] attended the conference last month and graced us with tons of pictures and descriptions of his favorite projects and pieces. Thanks Dan! Many of the exhibitors at Siggraph are hardware hackers and handheld gadget modders. Where possible we’ve linked to project pages and videos. We’ve gone ahead and added a few more of our personal faves as well to round out this round-up. Get your groove on at this visualization and interaction party.

by Dan Kaminsky

Continue reading “Siggraph Best-Of 2005” →

Vacuum forming involves heating up a sheet of plastic and stretching it over a mold known as a “buck”. A vacuum is applied to pull the plastic up to the mold surface. The major parts are a table top grill and a shop vac. The author uses this set up to create studio props, but it can be used for a lot of other things. The acrylic bodies on RC cars are manufactured using this process. So, if you want to start generating your own custom bodies, this is where to start.

Continue reading “Vacuum Forming” →