Zero Gravity (sort Of) On A Budget

zeroGravRoom

At $250,000, Virgin Galactic is probably out of most people’s price range; even reduced gravity flights run $5k. You may be in luck, though, as [Justin] and his friends have built a spinning room for $350 (Warning: loud noise @ beginning) that can turn your world upside down. The video provides a time-lapse of the build, but you’ll probably want to skip ahead 5 minutes in for the real fun.

It may not be anti-gravity, but holding onto furniture to keep from flying into the ceiling looks pretty entertaining. The room works like the fairground favorite “Gravitron” ride turned sideways. 2 forklifts support a massive wooden cube, which includes familiar features from home: drywall, flooring, and some furniture. [Justin] managed to borrow two car wheels, which he mounted in the middle of the walls on opposing sides of the cube. Two casters support each rim, and the forklifts hold the casters just high enough to allow a few friends to manually sling everything around.

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Drawbot Produces Portraits… Very Slowly

This robot artist, the Drawbot, produces images using an Arduino and Processing. A piece of paper is attached to a wall as a stylus connected to a couple of stepper motors scribbles out patterns that gradually become the image seen above. Each drawing is different and can take several weeks of constant operation to finish. That must have made debugging a real problem for [Harvey] during development. We wonder if this would work with homemade pencils?

Wireless Painting

[Tom Shannon] uses science as part of his art. One of his methods when painting is to use this radio controlled paint pendulum. He gave an interview at his studio, which we’ve embedded after the break, and goes into detail about this device. It has six different reservoirs that hold the paint colors. Each gravity-fed canister connects to a central nozzle with flexible tubing. The hand held control box has a slider for each color that moves a servo pinching each supply tube. This ingenuity keeps him creating even though Parkinson’s Disease has started to manifest itself with tremors in his hands.

It’s hard to make out the paintings seen above, but the ones on display in the video are pretty amazing. He mentions that anything can be loaded into the hoppers, including tomato sauce. Is anyone else thinking about large scale pizza constuction? This also reminds us of the mechanical bartenders we’ve seen in the past. Continue reading “Wireless Painting”