Here’s a simple weekend project for anyone who’s ever dreamt of piloting a blimp, but miserably failed out of Goodyear University. You can easily build your own miniature version and all you need is some tape, a few binder clips, 2 24 inch dowels, 2 miniature RC helicopters and a helium balloon that’s large enough to keep the rest of the materials afloat. (And of course enough helium to fill said balloon.) The most expensive part of the build is the RC helicopters, but these days you can get a couple of the PicooZ or AirHog varieties for under $60. And what’s even better is that the project doesn’t require you to dismantle or destroy the helicopters in any way.
Basically the dowels are attached to the underside of the balloon with the choppers mounted on each end serving as propulsion. Since binder clips and tape are used to hold it all together, when the balloon inevitably runs out of helium you can easily disassemble it and swap in a new one. When it comes to controlling the blimp you need to use both remotes at the same time, but you only need to move one joystick on each which apparently makes it feel like steering a flying tank. As an added bonus the blimp is a lot easier to fly than the helicopters themselves, and crashing it into the wall or a piece of furniture probably won’t cause that much damage.
Normally when I hear about something being stashed inside a briefcase it’s either a bomb, a machine gun or even a miniature remote-control go-kart track. This time however it’s something considerably more practical. Using a standard hard-shell briefcase and a set of nylon straps, artists Joan Korbes and Denis Oudendijk designed this briefcase which can be attached to a rail or other sturdy object and used as a seat. The pillows seem a necessary addition for making the seat a comfortable place to sit, but they unfortunately also take away from how much other stuff you can carry inside. And while the Briefcase Seat isn’t available for sale, with a little bit of engineering know-how (you might want to reinforce those hinges) you can probably just make your own.
X-Men fan Everett Bradford has constructed a wrist-mounted flamethrower designed specifically to emulate Pyro, a superhero with the ability to control (although not create, hence the flamey little wrist toy) fire. The device is constructed of a remote lighter coupled to a pressurized liquid fuel reservoir. Somewhat remarkably, Everett has yet to suffer any permanent damage, and you can check out several more pyrotastic videos over on Everett’s YouTube channel.
Believe it or not, there was a time when Radio Shack was actually a cool place to visit for electronics enthusiasts. These days the shelves are lined with the same crap that put The Sharper Image out of business, but as a kid I remember them carrying some pretty cool robots (Robie Junior joined our family one year), computers (remember the Tandy?) and electronic components that were actually useful. Those days are long gone but thankfully there’s a much better alternative where I live. Active Surplus is the kind of place that attracts a wide range of people from geeks to hackers to artists, and it’s mostly due to their eclectic stock of merchandise.
There’s kind of an ‘anything goes’ mentality at Active and you can find everything from empty Lacie drive cases, to chemistry glassware, to any kind of computer, audio or video cable you can imagine. And more importantly, most of the stuff is dirt cheap. The staff is also very knowledgeable (one thing Radio Shack never had) and while they don’t tend to roam the store (the aisles are pretty narrow) they’re always ready to help you find what you need. After the jump you’ll find a few more pictures I took during my most recent visit.
Thanks to dropping prices and increased availability, green laser pointers are becoming more and more common. As a result you no longer feel like a member of the ‘tech-elite’ when you pull one out. So the only solution to that problem is to upgrade to a blue laser pointer. Unfortunately if you decide to pick one up from Wicked Lasers you’ll be spending almost $1,700. Sure that price will eventually drop, but if you must have one right now here’s a brief tutorial by Joey Hagedorn on building your own that’s surprisingly cost-effective.
The key to this project is finding a Sony KES-400a replacement Blu-Ray drive module for the PlayStation 3 console. Thankfully there seems to be a few available on eBay right now, ranging in price from just $39.99 up to around $54.99. Of course there are other items you’ll need like a housing, a PCB breadboard and even a 650nm 5mw 12X30mm laser module, but overall you will save quite a bit of money by building it yourself. While the homebrew laser’s performance might not be as impressive as the version Wicked Lasers sells, it still produces a bright blue dot that can cause eye strain, and the beam is actually visible in a dark room.
When his Casio CFX-400 scientific calculator watch broke after 10 years of day-to-day use, David Jones went looking for a replacement. Unfortunately similar watches on the market today just didn’t cut it, mostly because they only include basic 4 function calculators. So instead of resorting to carrying a full-sized calculator wherever he went, he decided to try and make his own. After finding a 53mm x 20mm compact 2 line LCD display that seemed to fit his wrist, he spent about 30 hours building the first prototype using only off-the-shelf components. The version pictured above is actually the second prototype, and while it might look a little rough without a case, it’s actually more impressive since you realize it’s not a commercially available watch.
For those hoping to make their own calculator watch, there’s a Design & Construction section on David’s website which will hopefully one day include a thorough tutorial on how he put it together. And for the electronically inept, there’s a Get One! section, which is also unfortunately empty at the moment.
Without a big fat defense contract from the government, how is the average consumer supposed to go about creating their own wise-cracking, sequel-spawning, remake-coming robot sidekick? Since Heathkit never sold a complete Johnny 5 kit, you’ll have to slowly piece together your own. And you can start with this robotic arm available from RED5 for about $60.
While it comes partly disassembled (oh no!) you can put it together without having to do any soldering or wiring. It’s powered by 5 electric motors that allow it to lift a whopping 100g and the arm features a 120 degree wrist pivot, a 300 degree elbow motion and a 180 degree base motion. And if I remember correctly, if you want it to develop some level of sentient intelligence, you’ll need to use it outside during a storm and hope for the best. Just be aware that a lightning strike doesn’t always guarantee it will develop a soul. It sure hasn’t worked for me.
I suppose that part of the ‘tough’ image associated with tattoos is having to go through the tattooing process itself. But we at OhGizmo! are all for any solution that skips the pain part of getting ink done. That’s why this inkjet tattoo paper is so awesome. Not only is it painless, but it allows you to turn any design or image on your PC into a temporary piece of body art.
Actually creating your own tattoo design is probably the hardest part. Once it’s printed you just need to apply an adhesive sheet to the printout and smooth out any bubbles. When you remove the adhesive sheet, the printed tattoo will be left with a sticky surface allowing it to be applied to your skin with a wet sponge. The tattoos are water-based and non-toxic, so while they’ll stick around for about a week if you avoid bathing or showering, they can easily be removed with just soap and water.
A single A4 sized sheet of Inkjet Tattoo Paper is available from Crafty Computer Paper for about $5, while a 5 pack is about $25. So there’s no real savings for buying in bulk.
Someone with the alias of ‘Klee’ has posted a brief guide on the VWvortex Forums of how to use the Wiimote’s built in 3-axis accelerometers to measure g-forces and calculate the 0-60 performance of your car.
So I did. I wrote a script to dump all the g-force readings from the wiimote to a comma separated value file, then did some post processing in MS Excel, and voila, I can see every bump, every curve, my acceleration and braking, and even calculated my current speed using high school physics (v=a*t)
I admit, it’s not super accurate since the wiimote spits out G readings rounded to two decimal places. It also provides other acceleration readings in finer granularity, but I couldn’t figure out what metric it was recording in. I used Gs since I knew it was just the acceleration of gravity (9.8 m/s/s).
Besides the Wiimote itself, all you need is a copy of Glovepie v0.29(or higher) and a bluetooth dongle with the BlueSoleil human interface drivers. Klee has also provided the Excel spreadsheet document he created, complete with formulas and graphs for crunching and interpreting the numbers.
What better way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day than with a creation by Ireland’s most famous inventor? (Who cares if Thomas Edison was actually Dutch? On March 17th everybody’s a little bit Irish.) This build-it-yourself phonograph kit comes with everything you’ll need to recreate Edison’s waxed pipe experiment, except that since waxed pipes have gone the way of HD-DVD, it uses plastic cups to record your message.
The only thing you’ll need to provide are a Philips’ head screwdriver, some scotch tape, scissors and a D-cell battery to power the motor. And by recording your own music you’ll never have to worry about the RIAA busting down your door, unless of course you start transferring your CD collection to plastic cups, as I’m sure that doesn’t fall under fair use rules.
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By Andrew Liszewski
