Toy Hacks

975 Articles

A Nibble And A Half Of Wooden Bits

September 25, 2018 by 8 Comments

If you are familiar with binary, what would you need to teach someone who only knows decimal? If you do not know how to count in binary, let us know if the video below the break helps you understand how the base-2 number system works. If learning or counting binary is not what you are interested in, maybe you can appreciate the mechanics involved with making a counter that cycles through all the ones and zeros (links to the video shown below). The mechanism is simple enough. A lever at the corner of each “1” panel is attached off-center, so it hangs when it is upside-down, then falls to the side when it is upright, so it can swivel the adjacent panel.

Perhaps this is a desktop bauble to show off your adeptness at carpentry, or skills with a laser cutter, or 3D printer. No matter what it is made out of, it will not help you get any work done unless you are a teacher who wants to demonstrate the discrete nature of binary. If wood and bits are up your alley, we have a gorgeous binary driftwood clock to feast your eyes on. Meanwhile if analog methods of working digital numbers suit you, we have binary math performed with paper models.

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Self-Solving Rubik’s Cube

September 24, 2018 by 48 Comments

Rubik’s Cube has been around for what seems like forever now, and has spawned an entire subculture devoted to solving the puzzle with automation. Most Rubik robots put the cube in a specially designed cradle bristling with actuators and sensors, and while those rigs are impressive, they don’t come close to this robotic Rubik solver built into the cube itself.

Fair warning that [Human Controller] doesn’t provide much detail on this build other than pictures; even translating the Japanese web page doesn’t offer much more information. But there are pictures, plus the video below, which reveal the engineering masterpiece encased within the standard sized Rubik’s cube. The internal mechanism of the original cube had been replaced by a spherical assembly around which the cube’s faces rotate. The sphere, which appears to be 3D-printed, houses six motors and gear trains, along with a microcontroller board and what appear to be Hall sensor boards to detect the position of each face. Everything is wired up with magnet wire to keep bundles to a minimum size, and buried deep inside is a LiPo battery pack. A disassembly video offers further clues to this ingenious device’s inner workings.

Once the cube senses that it has been scrambled, it sets to work on the solution, walking all over the table in the process. It’s clearly not just recording the scrambling steps and playing them back in reverse; the video below shows far more moves to solve the cube than the 15 it took to scramble it.

While we’re always impressed by marvels of speed like this robot with a 637 millisecond solve time, putting everything needed to solve the cube inside it is a feat worth celebrating. Here’s hoping that a build log shows up soon to satisfy our need for details.

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This TARDIS Is Bigger On The Inside

September 21, 2018 by 24 Comments

A few months ago, YouTube user [Maladroit Modeller] uploaded a video of his model TARDIS from Doctor Who which shows an inside that’s bigger than the outside. Recently, [Maladroit Modeller] posted some pictures and has now uploaded a video showing how it’s done.

The TARDIS model itself is a 3:75 scale “Spin & Fly” model. The case to show everything off is built from foam core and the interior is built from foam core, silver paper, cardboard, styrene and other bits and pieces. There looks like there’s some EL wire being used, too, along with a lot of LEDs.

The build looks great and the illusion works very nicely in the video. Check out the video after the break, and then check out the “how it’s done” video for an explanation. Continue reading “This TARDIS Is Bigger On The Inside” →

Cheap RC Boat Turned Weirdly Capable Seaplane

September 9, 2018 by 8 Comments

What do you get when you combine a cheap RC boat from Walmart, foam board, a couple powerful motors, and some aluminum cans? Most people would just end up with a pile of garbage, but we’ve already established [Peter Sripol] is fairly far from “most people”. In his hands, this collection of scraps turns into an almost unbelievably nimble seaplane, despite looking like something out of a TailSpin and Mad Max crossover episode.

In his latest YouTube video, [Peter] takes viewers through the process of turning one of these rather lame RC boats into an impressive flying machine. His took inspiration from the Sikorsky S-38, an American amphibious aircraft introduced in 1928. The S-38 looked like a fairly traditional boat bolted to the bottom of a set of huge wings, so it’s little surprise that he patterned this build after it.

The construction of the seaplane is very simple, and boils down to cutting some big wings out of foam board, using some sticks to give it some rigid framing, and putting a tail on it. The biggest problem is that the boat’s hull lacks the “steps” that a seaplane would have, so it’s not an ideal shape to lift out of the water. But with enough thrust and a big enough control surface, it all works out in the end.

Which is in effect the principle by which the whole plane flies. There’s a large elevator cantilevered far astern to help leverage the boat out of the water, but otherwise all other control is provided by differential thrust between the two top mounted motors. The lack of a rudder does make its handling a bit sluggish in the water, but it obviously has no problem once it’s airborne.

If [Peter] and his foam board artistry seem familiar, it’s probably from the not one but two homemade aircraft he built with shockingly similar techniques to this current project.

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FOSSCON 2018: Where Open Source And LEGO Collide

September 7, 2018 by 10 Comments

It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this, but hackers and makers absolutely love LEGO. We think you’d be hard pressed to find a Hackaday reader, young or old, that hasn’t spent some quality time with the little plastic bricks from Billund, Denmark. So it follows that there’s a considerable community of individuals who leverage their better than average technical prowess to utilize LEGO in new and unique ways. But the activities and history of these LEGO hackers is not exactly common knowledge to those who aren’t heavily vested in the hobby.

During the recent FOSSCON 2018 in Philadelphia, Daniel Pikora gave attendees a comprehensive look at the intersection of open source development and the world’s most popular brand of construction toys. A software developer with a penchant for open source code by trade, he’s also an avid member of what’s known as the Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL) community who’s exhibited his creations at shows across the United States and Canada. Such a unique perspective, with a foot in both the FOSS and LEGO camps, makes Daniel an ideal tour guide for this particular microcosm of toys and tech.

In a whirlwind presentation that took attendees through 49 slides in about as many minutes, Daniel covered LEGO’s beginnings in the 1930s to the rise of 3D printed custom bricks, and everything in between. Some of the engineering-centric product lines, such as Technic and Mindstorms, were already fairly well known to the types of folk who spent a beautiful Saturday in Philadelphia at an open source conference. But Daniel’s deep-dive into the long history of open source LEGO projects brought to light the work of so many dedicated developers that everyone walked away with a newfound respect for the amount of work the AFOL community has put into elevating LEGO from a child’s toy to a legitimate tool. Join me below for a look at the particulars of that deep dive.

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3D Printed RC Jet Boat Gets Up To Speed

September 5, 2018 by 9 Comments

In one of those weird twists of fate, there’s currently a very high chance that anyone who owns a 3D printer has made a boat with it. In fact, they’ve probably printed several of them, so many that they might even have a shelf filled with little boats in different colors and sizes. That’s because it’s a popular benchmark to make sure the printer is well calibrated. But if you’re going to spend hours printing out a boat, why not print one that’s got some punch?

This 3D printable jet boat designed by [Jotham B] probably isn’t a great print to check your desktop machine’s calibration on, in fact you’re going to want to make sure you’ve got everything dialed in before taking on this challenge. If the classic “Benchy” is the beginners boat, then this is certainly for the 3D printing veterans. But if you’ve got the skills to pull it off, and some RC gear laying around to outfit it with, this could be a great project to end your summer on.

Unless you’ve got an exceptionally tall printer, the 460mm long hull will need to be printed in several pieces and then grafted back together. You could potentially use glue, but something a bit more robust like welding the parts together with a soldering iron is a better bet to make sure your printed boat doesn’t do its best Titanic reenactment out on the lake.

[Jotham] recommends printing the impeller at 0.15mm layer height, as you’ll want all the detail you can muster to provide a smooth surface. You’ll also need to use supports, so expect to spend a fair bit of time cleaning it up post-print. The rest of the model can be printed at 0.3mm, which is going to save a lot of time on the hull. All told, it will take about half a roll of filament to print all the parts for the boat (assuming no mistakes), which puts the pre-electronics cost at around $10 USD.

Speaking of electronics, you’ll need a RC receiver, a servo for steering, an electronic speed controller (ESC), and a suitable motor. [Jotham] used a 3674 brushless motor with a 120A water-cooled ESC, but notes that the setup is way overpowered. In the video after the break you can see the boat spends as much time airborne as it does in the water, which might look cool, but isn’t exactly efficient.

If you want to round out your 3D PLA fleet, we’ve also seen a printed FPV lifeboat as well as a hydrofoil that “flies” through the water.

[Thanks to Aidan for the tip.]

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The E-Waste Apocalypse Looms

September 2, 2018 by 13 Comments

What does post-apocalyptic technology look like? Well, that kind of depends on the apocalypse. Regardless of the cause, we’ll need to be clever and resourceful and re-learn ancient crafts like weaving and pottery-making. After all, the only real apocalyptic constants are the needs of the survivors. Humans need clothing and other textiles. Fortunately, weaving doesn’t require electricity—just simple mechanics, patience, and craftsmanship.

If it turns out the apocalypse is scheduled for tomorrow, we’ll have piles and piles of e-waste as fodder for new-old looms. This adorable loom is a mashup of old and new technologies that [Kati Hyyppä] built at an artist residency in Latvia, a country with a rich historical tapestry of textile-making. It combines a cheerful orange telephone with an old cassette player and some telescoping rods from a radio antenna. [Kati] reused the phone’s hang-up switch to trigger tunes from a deconstructed toddler toy every time the receiver is lifted. Check it out after the beep break.

And yeah, you’re right, it does use batteries. But the looming part doesn’t require power, only the music. In case of apocalypse, just scrounge up a solar panel.

If you’d rather be prepared to have to make your own clothes someday, print this loom beforehand.

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