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What's the Coolest Thing You've Ever Built?
Josh Lindenmuth asks: "In high school I was involved in an engineering competition where we needed to create a machine that could move 100 lbs of groceries from a disabled person's car up and down a set of stairs, and then into their kitchen. It was probably the coolest thing I ever built (there were only 3 of us on the team), even though the wooden treads started splintering halfway up the stairs (we didn't have a metal shop, so it was made entirely out of wood, spare boat parts, and conveyor belts) and then it completely destroyed the stairs on its way down (it weighed over 300 lbs)." That's Josh's story, now he wants to know yours. Cool computers, cars, hovercraft, handheld devices, fusion reactors — what is the most interesting gadget, product, or device that you've ever built on your own?
Period!
I built a reality simulator. You're living in it right now. Neat, huh?!
I had a fancy Williams-Sonoma aluminum cork screw and bottle opener. It was a flat oval and the end opposite the bottle opener hook split open like wings. The wings revealed a cork screw, which was yanked out of the gizmo the third time I opened a bottle with it.
So, a little epoxy and an old aligator clip...I have a stealth bottle-opener and roach clip.
Was also involved with 'Odyssey/Olympics of the Mind', but that was lame because every team had parental help and the money rules were shat upon constantly.
Blar.
There was that one time I built a machine that could propel cats to the moon. It almost worked, too.
but... how could a 300 pound machine completely destroy stairs... because of its weight? For what it's worth, I imagine that many of us weigh > 300 lbs when carrying our MASSIVE computers upstairs from the car... or 130 pounds of Ramen noodles... or about 60 of the lastest video games... or... well, you get the point.
... I build a radar.
Now I don't build cool stuff I just write code.
I have built Ronja Optical Datalink (FSO) according the instructions on the homepage (ronja.twibright.com). It's amazing to build a wireless network device on your own.
One time I made a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it was this mat that you would put on the floor... and had different conclusions written on it that you could jump to.
I'm building a RANS S6S Coyote airplane, together with a friend. We're six years and counting, with just a single evening each week. Yes, it takes *forever*, but it's truely amazing to see this pile of aluminum, steel and pop rivets slowly transform into a real plane that I can take for a spin. 2007 should be the year...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
My first semester at UW Madison my Introduction to Engineering class buit a BioDiesel Reactor. It was 18 freshman students who knew nothing about biodiesel, and by the end of the semester we designed and constructed the reactor. I was involved on the team that designed and executed a safety system that monitored the temperatures inside the reactor tank, if the temperatures exceeded 60 degrees celsius a relay shut off the heating element in the reactor. This was one section of a larger lecture, and all other projects pailed in comparison. We also had a $500 budget which we exceeded by $4500, the project was paid for by a department at a technical school in Madison.
Back in the 80s I had 2 Amstrad CPC464 personal computers (Z-80 CPU, 64k, tape deck built-in). I built an electronic circuit to link the joystick port from one to the sound-out port of the other (sound triggered a switch-effect using transistors)
I wrote Morse-code modulator/demodulator software and set them up as a simple text-based comms system down the garden...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Because, even if you were his mother, you didn't 'build' him any more than you 'built' that giant corn-speckled turd you just dropped off!
Blar.
He views his device as a failed stair climber, I view it as a successful stair destroyer.
Mission Accomplished!
The coolest thing I ever did was build my own custom Linux Kernel. It was way back in the year 1999 when the process was not that straight forward. My distro was called `Bogaboga Linux' and is still available on a 486 system.
I once stuck my dick in 2.5" drainage pipe as an improvised version of your wife's pussy.
I built a makeshift air conditioner using 12 40mm case fans from old computers, a barrel (so the fans blow air through cold water) and a 220V to 12V inverter.
When I was about 11 or 12, I helped my dad build a Z80 based computer. As far as what I have done one my own (although the article had three people), all of my early exploits were software based. When I was around 13 I wrote the entire game of Monolopoly on a TRS-80. A few years later, since I couldn't afford Tetris, but I had seen how it worked, I wrote Tetris on my very early PC.
Nowadays, I build more hardware stuff, but it is not as cool because I am an adult and should know how to build it. For example, I built a 180 gallon saltwater reef tank with an oak cabinet, aut water replenisher, Carbon doser, protein filter and all kinds of other accessories, and plumbed the sump down to my basement.
A few years back, I built a 20X40 swimming pool with diving board and slide, and built a 70X40 concrete deck (yes, I mixed and poured it myself) with cedar railing to surround it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Where can I sign up to order one of these 300 pound pirates with peg legs?
I built 9-foot-tall monolith out of wood once. I put it in my school woods and, to the best of my knowledge, it's still there
With a friend I built and wrote an IM client that worked between two TRS-80 model I computers. We "networked" them together by connecting the tape drives between each other (needed an amplifier), and cross connected the "send" and "receive". Then we wrote software that accepted input, sent it across the tape drive, then listened for a message from the tape drive.
It worked well, but of course was very slow.
Then there's the joystick-controlled typewriter...but that wasn't as cool.
Purchasing a Sinclair Research ZX80 in kit form, assembling it and making it work first time.
Outside of computing, I've rebuilt a 1969 Datsun 240Z (with chrome badges on the pillars, Japanese import into Australia). Lesson learnt? Next time, make sure the body/chassis is in better condition before starting. I've learnt to hate panel and general body work. Sold for a loss, but made up for it in learning.
Task Mangler
We were the terror of Fraternity Row. It used steal pipe and multiple pieces of chem hose - after a little practice we could lob a water balloon through an open window hundreds of feet away.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You want to see some neat engineering? Most is not practical at all which means it's all that much more awsome. Go to Burningman
And who do you work for now?
I'm guessing NASA or the Army Corps of Engineers...
As a freshman in the danish "gymnasium" (which is senior year of high school + 2 years of college), we had
:-)
an project in physics class where we could write about anything we wanted to. As a group of three students
we chose to write about digital logic. In the beginning, we only planned to write about digital logic theory,
circuit design theory, and so on, but we soon realized we wanted to build an actual circuit design.
After spending days or even weeks designing the thing, we finally had our ÜberMachine - we called it the
DALO (Digital Arithmetic and Logic Unit). It was essentially an ALU with support for addition, subtraction,
logic "or", logic "and", and logic "not".
Now, in this day and age of computers, it would take most programmers just a few minutes to make such a program
in most programming languages. But this was done entirely in hardware, with no fancy integrated circuits! We
used about 15 simple chips (classic phillips 74xx-series), which only contains or, and, not and the occasional
full-adder.
For the input, we used manual flip-switches, connected directly to the input legs on the microchips.
For output we used a series of LEDs to output each of the 4 digits in the A-input, B-input and the result. At
the same time, we used a classic 7-segment display for each, driven by a 7-segment-decoder chip.
In the end, the things actually worked, which was quite amazing to see. We hadn't received any formal training
in digital logic, electronics, or circuit design - and yet it worked. The entire machine was soldered with more
wires than I ever wish to see again, and it took a lot of blood, sweat and... time - but we did it!
Some years later, I was employed as a teaching assistant at the university. One of my classes were in machine
architecture, a course which most students couldn't see as relating to reality very much, because they didn't
believe anybody except large companies could build computers or circuits. On the day of my last class, just a
few days prior to the exam, I brought our high school project with me, and showed them how it was built.
Several of them were amazed by it, and it really seemed to make a difference. Computers were no longer magical
devices crafted by dwarven builders, they were simply complex machines, free for anybody to build.
That's the greatest thing I have ever built. Now, if we were talking about programming, that would be
another matter...
With great numbers come great responsibility!
...four robots over 4 years while in high school for the FIRST Robotics Competition. The first two years they were completely human controlled, the next to (and every year sense) there has been a time period of automation before human control takes over.
6" mirror grinding kit from Edmund Scientific (God I miss that store), purchased secondary and rack & pinion focuser. The rest was scavenged. It was pretty neat at low powers, but no where near as good as a cheap dept store scope today.
I built a robot in jr high that could walk up and down stairs. The robot had two legs, w/ four feet, two on each side. Each leg was bound to the robot's body using a turning motor in the center of the leg (which was really just a tubular pipe about 1 ft in length). Each leg had one foot on the end, which had a flat, circular surface that was adjoined on a small 1" pipe, attached to the end of the leg. The feet could spin freely at the endpoint of the leg. So, when the legs spun, the feet rotated around. Gravity moved the feet flatly towards the floor. Walking up stairs, the robot would have two feet on the current stair, with the next two rotating upwards or downwards towards the next stair. I built in a little button on both sides of the robot's body that would alternate the direction of the leg motors, so when the robot got to the top of the stairs, it would bump the wall, change direction and walk back down. About every 3 weeks I'd change the batteries and put it back in action. Pity my poor parents, having to walk over my robot anytime they wanted to go up or down the stairs for about 3 months!
Too bad i cant get it to move off zero, must be a flaw in it somewhere....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I built my own computer, but it's not very cool. In fact, it can get quite warm at times.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
A few months ago, I started learning electronics. My first project is (electronically) complete - it just needs some finishing off to the housing.
It's a Nixie tube display, with 7 nixie tubes. I built an RS-232 reciever/sender out of 4000-series logic ICs (not a CPU or microcontroller in sight) - mostly counters and registers, and a few AND gates and inverters.
Pictures of the project's progress are at http://www.alioth.net/pics/nixies/nixies.html (two pages of photos - the working project is on page 2). I've also kept a journal of building and learning in my Slashdot journal.
The hardest part of it was probably getting the 170 volt switch mode power supply to work correctly (mainly getting it to regulate) and not put so much noise back into the 5 volt supply to cause latches and registers to lose their values. Some help from the NEONIXIE-L group on Yahoo was invaluable here, and I now have a decent 170 volt supply.
I'm now learning how to make things with microprocessors, and once I've done some breadboard experimentation, my next project is to build a logging weather station for the glider club, using a Z80 processor, a flash EPROM, some RAM and probably compact flash for mass storage (not that it'll use a lot of it!), and a small graphics LCD module for display. Currently, I'm at the stage where I've breadboarded a very basic Z80 system that can output values on a crude output device. But it works!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Well, being a chemist, making a few new molecules in my undergrad thesis was a very cool thing to do, of course now I have to do it all the time, but every once in a while you make something really cool.
The coolest thing I've probably built is still the car thing I stuck together years ago out of technic parts, with a moving engine block and weird cantilever suspension. I lost it somewhere :(
You built a period into your son? How freudian of you. I hate to see what you put into your daughter.
Before there were mountain bikes. I built a fat tired low geared 10 speed in the mid 70s. Had to cut and rethread the spokes to make a rear wheel with a box frame config so caliper brakes would work, then build caliper mounts for the brakes, etc, etc. I was doing a lot of off road bicycling then and kept destroying regular skinny tired wheels and got tired of it, so set down and heavily modified a one speed bike. It was gosh darn spiffy, tell ya what, every biker who saw mine wanted one. There wasn't anything on the market like that at the time, that I was aware of anyway. I've built other stuff I was proud of, but they were more in the biological field, I called them living sculptures, using wired together trees, etc, but the bike was the most hard-tech thing.
I didn't want to pay the what, $200 for a 16MB memory expansion card (box) for my Sinclair ZX-81 computer and somehow imagined that my time to create it on my own would be worth less than $200. Too much partying, I know.
.1" perf board (yes kids, chips really did use pins on .1" centers...God I feel old...).
I ordered 16Mbx1 chips from someplace or other - might've been the local electronics store (emember when they had those? No kids, I'm not talking about Best Buy...), got the National Semiconductor databook and had a look into what it'd take to get the RAS and CAS lines hooked up, etc.
Since I was living in a college group flop in Columbia, S.C. and was close to broke anyway, I didn't want to get into printed circuit boards and so I made the whole thing on blue
This is where the problems set in. First, I was not the greatest at soldering, and didn't have much in the way of soldering tools anyway. These skills would not set in for a few years. Besides that, I was using point-to-point wiring on a device that could potentially be affected by impedance issues, propagation delay and the lot (yes, even at the maybe 1MHz they were clocking this processor).
I managed to saw down a PCB connector I found at a Radio Shack or someplace into something that would fit onto the back of the ZX-81 and managed to jam in a chip of breadboard to make a key so I could get it on straight.
I got the whole thing assembled, plugged it in and...well, it didn't quite work. But it did, kinda.
I think the memory was recognized, but didn't work quite right. I wrote some machine code to do a memory test and page through the thing. I could store and retrieve values, but not reliably over time. Probably some refresh problem. I never did get it to work, deciding instead on gainful employment and purchase of a 2MB chip which I hacked into place on the motherboard.
This is pretty much the closest I've gotten to building completely from scratch for things more complicated than a power supply or op amp circuit. I usually have recipe schematics to go by on other stuff, or hack on top of existing circuitry (like the 64MB memory expansion for my Atari 400...).
It's designed for use on Amateur Radio frequencies, specifically between 3700-4000 Khz and uses basically the same technology as broadcast transmitters from the early days up to the 1960's.
1 46.htm
Here's a Coral link to it:
http://www.mymorninglight.org.nyud.net:8080/ham/6
The best part about it, is that I built it entirely from stuff that was headed to the scrap heap!
There are other interesting or unusual things I've built, which can be seen by following the links. In one especially unusual project, I used the analog circuits from a fried SoundBlaster card, and a CD drive as a modulator for a tube-based, low-power AM transmitter. Combining 2000's technology with 1950's. It worked, too!
Willie...
I built an Igloo once, that was really cool.
Sorry...(ducks)...
I built a 16' bong that utilized an electronic switch to open the chambers and 3 pc case fans to help propel the smoke. The bowl was an expensive tuba mouthpiece which held nearly an 8th of weed. I don't know if there are other former stoners here who would back up my claim that sometimes smoking leads to arts and crafts time.
Anonymous Coward: "This is slashdot. Accuracy is second class citizen here, unlike King Bias."
I built a custom casket for my grandfather when he passed away. We both loved carpentry and I felt that it was my way of honouring a great man who taught me everything I know about something I love doing. To this day I still miss building stuff with him....
I made a self supporting geodesic sphere out of french fry pick forks (the little two-prong ones).
I once built a super-sweet ride, but I never got to really enjoy it, as it's prohibitively difficult to generate 1.8 jiggawatts of power.
...building something that I think is pretty cool. :)
Basically, I'm finishing off a degree in Digital Arts (went back to university after working for a few years), and my final piece is going to be an interactive VJ set, using a P5 virtual reality glove, an old QuickShot II joystick (harvested from one of my Commodore 64s), a Thinkpad 240X (lovely machine, that - perfect for coding at all hours of the day), and a couple of Mac minis (ideal rendering machines for this sort of thing...). I'm hoping to have it all ready for February: if any of you will be in London at the time, gimme a shout, and I'll send you directions to it
http://xkcd.com/313/
Been working on a list of my biggest inventions and intellectual property items that flopped in a big, big way. My coolest inventions and IP flops are:
But my all time coolest thing I have built, and my biggest tech flop, is one I called an abtaser:
Abtaser
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I think the coolest thing I ever built (or designed and programmed) was a self-contained turntable system for an automated monorail part transport system. The thing had multiple stop points that could be programmed, automatic homing, and built-in accel/decel ramping. Used a mini handheld pendant to program the stop points - you could literally walk under the thing and see the alignment as you made your adjustments.
To the best of my knowledge, it is still in production at Caterpillar today. It was designed and built in 1998.
The second best coolest thing I ever built was some software for interfacing a Linux based PC to an Allen Bradley ControlLogix PLC. The real cool bit is knowing that this software is being used in multiple production facilities around the world from making baby formula in Canada to being used in a mix simulator for the AirBorne Laser program.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Does my SecondLife inventory count? :P
Put a corvette LS5 engine in a pontiac fiero. I now have 1Hp at the wheels for every 6 pounds of car. I can put crotch rocket motorcycles to shame, and eat any "fast" car I get challenged by.
Cost me a total of $15,000.00US and a year tinkering. the car costs $350 a year to insure and takes everyone by suprise that tries to race that slow old 80's wannabe sportscar.
Biggest drawback? touchy to drive. if you sneeze while accelerating slowly you suddenly burn the tires hard, have the nose lifting off the ground and are starting to go sideways. It's dangerous for anyone that doesn't know how to drive insane levels of Hp to weight ratios.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I built a 2 tap Kegerator with a tile counter and a computer to weigh the kegs and tell how much beer is left in each keg. Check it out here http://photos.yahoo.com/melendez_21 I also installed a glass door to keep liquor cold with a black light.
About 2 years ago I decided to get into hobbie prop building. One of the first things I built was a vacuum-forming table out of some MDF an empty beer keg a bit of metal from Home depot and a home built heating element.
/ Rotocast%20Machine/
http://24.251.127.62:8088/gallery/vacformtable
I have used this thing to make several diffirent things from speaker boxes to Stormtrooper armor. It has been a blast. The latest project I have made has been a rotocast machine.
http://s14.photobucket.com/albums/a331/arsonsmith
I started by building the lego mock up at the bottom of that link then started aquaring the other parts. It has been used to make several diffirent things from replica guns to costume masks and helmets.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I build nations.
I had a welding shop at the time and I took a front seat from an old Lincoln car and attached it to a steel frame. I made it swivel and all the other adjustments were already in the seat. I had the keyboard and mouse mounted right on the chair. The keyboard would flip up out of the way to get in and out. The computer was in a cabinet with the 17" monitor on top. It was by far the most comfortable thing I ever used. I have since made another one that looks better, but not near as comfortable. (left the original 2000 miles away.. no room in the truck)
Just about everyone that saw it thought it was pretty cool.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I built a Linux which runs as a Windows screensaver. You can get it here.
I designed and built a windmill:
the diary that shows you how it was done
Old-timers used to do this routinely, but for relative noobs like me, linuxfromscratch.org nothing beats the joy of rolling your own distro, boot-strapping the compiler, etc. I suppose, those old-timers still find joy in doing this.
My brother and I once built a machine out of the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit that could make peanut butter and jam sandwiches. We also built a rudimentary photocopier. It was pretty sweet.
Well, I didn't actually see the end of the project, but we got a lot of it done. It was an awesome design, carbon fiber shell, aluminum frame and cool prop.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Well, I rebuilt it in front of the sheriff's house in battle mountain on Nov. 3.
Duct tape, paper clips, electric tape, a broken Linksys switch, and a 486, FTW!
/ Ghetto_Router_1.html
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/articles/howto
I've built a few things I really liked:
1. Building an airplane (200+mph 4 seater version of a Burt Rutan design)
2. Flamethrowers (the response time of the Culver City police department to 40+ foot flame mushroom clouds is 5 minutes)
3. TankCams - I've explored the crawlspace under my house from the comfort of my living room via teleoperation.
4. A couple of neat costumes, this year I was written up on slashdot about my Aliens walking forklift costume.
5. An inertially coupled autopilot for R/C planes I built years ago as a cheap UAV so I could send a plane someplace, take pictures, then have it fly itself back, all without crashing.
There are lots of cool things to do out there, I'll be dead when I stop working on them. Instead of being a "remember that time back when I was held the football record at Polk High" thread, I hope this thread focusses not just on past accomplishments, but also mentions things people are still actively doing, otherwise it'll be terribly depressing.
I'm working on a regeneratively cooled LOX/Kerosene rocket engine.
When I was 15, I built a Z-80 computer from my own design. I entered it in the science fair but the judges thought it was a kit so it got disqualified. I guess I did too good of a job wire wrapping it. I'll never forget the experience of hand-entering the bytes for my "operating system" into the EPROM burner at the local computer store. Needless to say, it didn't work the first time...
Before there was 5.1, 7.1 etc, there was Dolby Surround. I thought I could not or want not afford buying a Surround Decoder, so I built one together with a friend. Everything was made using discrete components, OpAmp's and so on. The craziest part was the audio delay for the rear channel. We built it using only 74-series TTL logic, no micro processor or DSP. You could even change the amount of delay by turning a potentiometer which was connected to a A/D converter, the output of the A/D converter was used to control the size of the ring buffer which stored the samples. The bad thing was that in the end it sounded not very good because it was only 8-Bit.. lol. It was a good project, it took us forever and we learned a lot. Today I would just take a DSP kit and code my surround decoder.. no need for soldering anymore.
While I was a Junior/Senior at Everett High School, (Lansing, Michigan), I built a tunneling scanning electron microscope. We originally followed/used a kit from the University of Muenster in Germany that I had learned about from Slashdot. Unfortunately, the documentation sucked, the circuit board was etched incorrectly and there was a design error. Furthermore, the control software was written is visual basic and was nothing more then a toy.
;)) to support accelerated Nanotechnology development and commercialization while also encouraging applied and basic research. Michigan State University and the surrounding universities are home to world class researchers and students working on Nanotechnology and Nano-Biotechnology. It has been decided that it is time the state began to leverage that asset to create a bright 21st century future for our citizens.
With the help of a electrical engineering group at Michigan State University we overcame the problems and I decided to modify the original design to use GXSM, a powerful open source electron microscope software package that is Linux only. This required adding a sranger digital signal processing board and stepping up the input/output voltages for the piezo crystals. Amazingly, almost all the work was done by myself or fellow students, MSU only guided us in understanding the circuit diagrams, making small adjustments, fixing the errors in the plans and designing/building the stepping circuits for my modifications.
I have some really great memories, spending all day in the basement lab I had set up, eating pizza while skipping all my classes with permission from the principal, "accidentally" burning my long time enemy with the soldering iron, ripping a chunk of my finger off jumping a network wiring cage to connect the main computer to the internet.
Working with the electronics and science was very interesting, but the most valuable experience came from lobbying for the funding from local government, assembling a team of fellow students to work on the project and starting a Nanotechnology elective class to actually use the damn thing. Eventually, former State Senator Virg Bernero (now Mayor of Lansing, Michigan) convinced BioPort (the company that makes the Anthrax vaccine) to provide the majority of the funds.
The project eventually inspired local university and government leaders (I wouldn't stop bugging them
I'm 19 years old, and thanks to the Slashdot article "build your own electron microscope" I've actually become something I'm proud of. I've built a tunneling scanning electron microscope, lobbied for funding and government support, founded a Nanotechnology class at Everett High School with help from a amazing science teacher who now is inspiring the class to even greater things while developing a soon to be accredited curriculum, hired as a contract consultant by a company in silicon valley, been sent overseas, all expenses paid to a nanotube conference in Japan by the same company and I now work at M.S.U. as the only employee in a new Nanotechnology supporting office at the college of Engineering. (There is also some other stuff I'm not allowed to speak of.)
I've met very important people from NASA's JPL, IBM, Oxford, Harvard and founders/pioneers of Nanotechnology.
In my free time, I lobby for the creation of a Michigan Institute of Nanotechnology, which will become the center of Nanotechnology in the state, facilitating the cooperation of private industry, research, academia and government to create jobs, businesses, breakthroughs and secure a portion of the world economy for ourselves. It already has a extremely wide and powerful base of support.
Not bad for someone who graduated with a 2.5 GPA.
A couple of years ago I built an air cannon for the purpose of launching mountain lion scat at prey species, as part of my study of prey responses to cues of predation risk. My first test-firing of my dog's turd (using a foam coffee cup sabot) launched it's payload >200 m towards a house on the next street (I hid rather than verify the point of dookie impact). Imagine, if you will, the joy of recreating the primal thrill of monkeys hurling their excrement through the bars -all under the guise of science, of course. Alas, the seals in the sprinkler valves blew out after a dozen firings and I reverted to the low-tech slingshit to complete my experiment. Now if I would just finish writing the Ph.D. instead of posting to slashdot...
Six years ago, back in the ninth grade, I built a LEGO Mindstorms robot for the school science fair. It was very simple, and I made it one afternoon while bored. It cut bananas.
I'd peel the banana, and using a huge knife I tie wrapped to a piece attached directly to the motor axle it'd slowly move along the length of the banana, dropping the weight of the knife onto the banana several times, chopping it into small pieces.
It actually won first place too!
It's actually kind of unimpressive, but then again, so is my life...
For years I have been trying to produce a decent imitation of Guinness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness I could never get it right, especially the mouth feel. The choice before me was to give up or invest some serious money in special dispensing equipment. Unlike most beers which are pressurized with carbon dioxide, Guinness is pressurized with nitrogen through special nozzles (when it is served on tap at least).
I decided to throw a half bottle of my homebrew in the blender (a full bottle will overflow). It worked great, the taste and texture were pretty much bang on. Of course such beer has to be consumed immediately because the oxygen in the air will ruin it in a matter of hours.
Naturally, I wondered if I had found a panacea for all kinds of stout. Dragon stout went into the blender next. OMG it was awful. Bleah.
Anyway, I ran through my remaining stock of stout quickly so, after racking some wine this afternoon, I'll be starting my next batch with the happy knowledge that I will enjoy drinking it a lot.
I've also built hundreds of gadgets but they are unimportant when compared with being able to produce a decent Guinness substitute.
BTW, a great place to check out other people's projects is www.makezine.com
Either the 20' tall 2"x4" trebuchet that I built with some friends over the summer or the "crane" device we built out of 4" PVC (about 8' tall) to bring all the desks in the school up onto the roof of the gym for our senior prank. Trebuchet probably pulls out the win simply for the flaming, explosive tennis ball potential.
It's not exactly *built*, but I'm still proud of it.
Back in 2001/2002 or thereabouts, there was a film festival in the art department. I spent several weeks making a nonphotorealistic (cartoon-style) demo reel. I wrote some PHP scripts to generate the RIB files, wrote a pair of shaders (for cel-color and edge generation), and generated a couple of megabytes of scene description to feed into BMRT. (I even wrote a shader which made that red-yellow-and-blue Pixar ball, the one in the lower-right here, procedurally. I think I saw the Pixar version of the code at some point, and mine looked nothing like it.) I mostly used quadrics to render all sorts of things, like legos, bouncing balls, arches and the word "fin" at the end. (I found a bug in BMRT's rendering of certain quadrics' normal vectors, which became moot as Larry Gritz had stopped supporting it at that point.)
I ran the edge rendering on one machine and the cel-color rendering on my friend's down the hall. I wrote a GIMP-Perl script to composite them all together, then I think I used Adobe Premiere to smush it together with a copy of "Invention No. 4" and export it out to DV tape. It played in an audience full of art students, they applauded appreciatively, and I was very, very pleased with myself.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
When I was six I "built" this bitchin' clock by sticking two metal thingies into an Idaho Russet.
Throughout high school, I was forced to do Science Fair projects. I picked MagLev's. I did experiments, wound my own coils, did a bunch of different tests and moved my project along in different phases during freshman to junior years. Senior year I was able to get a mini grant and order from Scientific American for some rare earth magnets. It was not as automated as I liked, but I had built stepping logic and used my own coils to at least show things are possible. If you've been to Epcot there is a demo which was very close to what I built in my senior year. I can't say they were equivalent. I was very depressed once I saw it, but then again I was only 15, and it was Disney, they had all the toys.
Fast forward to college. Senior project and after taking all the courses in logic, programming, processors, etc I then found out what I could use to make my toy work. So, I spoke to my advisor, he loved the idea. I spent that summer winding coils with 26 gauge wire. I made a length of track two feet long and I it used 48 coils. I used sewing machine bobbins as the sizing. I cut a 3/4" pvc pipe so that I could slide in each coil and get to the leads. This gave me four sections of track, each with 12 coils. The coils were wired in series so that we had a pattern ABCABCABCABC. The logic I built would pulse the A group at 12v, the B group at 9v and the C group at 6v. This created a "wave" that would "push" the train in the desired direction. To go the other direction, all you had to do was flip a DPDT relay and switch A with C.
The brains were provided by a Parallax Stamp 2. This thing was great. I could have multiple inputs and outputs to make everything work. I used som buffers to make sure I didnt kill the chip with draw and I used logic to drive transistors that tripped 12v relays for the juice. When working, the train could go one direction or the other, depending on how the coils were energized. Since the track was only 24" long, I used optical led sets to detect where the car was. These inputs were fed into the stamp. Based on direction and track section the car was on, the group of 12 coils were the car left was turned off, and the section the train was about to enter was turned on. Of course, there were always two sections on so if the train was in section 2 going to section 3, then the stamp knew to switch off 1 and turn on 3, leaving 2 running. The car was pulsed slow, so it had time. Was not as smooth as I liked.
Had to use a huge power supply, 12v 30a, tho I think it only used between 8 and 10. I still have it on a shelf behind me. Maybe one day I'll dust it off and see how I can improve on it. It blew away everyone else's project. Once I started the car rolling, it would happily go back and forth all day long. It was stable (temperature wise) and if you ignored the clacking relays, it was fun to watch.
It is not the coolest thing I've ever worked on or designed, but in terms of what I put into it and the fact it was my brainchild, I'm totally thrilled with it to this day.
So there.
Yup. A yurt.
It was actually a pretty geeky project, too. I designed most of it in Maple.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The coolest thing that I have built recently was actually a Van Derr Graff Generator. I know a lot of people have built these things, but I think mine is kind of special. It is only 2.5 inches tall. I built the base out of a Code Red Pop Bottle cap, the shaft was cut from a G2 Gel Ink Pen, the belt is from an eye glass cleaner cloth, the motor is from a Radio Shack Zip Zap, the collector is from a pop can that was cut and shaped to be a ball, and the brush is actually a stripped piece of speaker wire. The whole thing runs on 1 AA battery. I'm currently looking for a higher torque, less RPM motor to replace the current motor with and switch over to small rubber bands for the belt. That should greatly increase my static output.
The really sad thing about all of this? I'm an English major with Religion and Philosophy minors...
JLJ
I'm building my own Ethanol Still (mirrored from tripod). A little bit of corn mash (or beer) and out comes E-100 Ethanol Fuel.
Previous to that, I built one of the first carputers (the DashPC) back in 1999 (it was slashdotted 3 times).
My next project is to make our new project car run on my own homemade E100. It's a 1995 Ford Festiva that gets about 50 MPG right now.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
A couple of my fellow math major buddies and I built a trebuchet over the summer a couple of years ago out of an old swing set, an alumnimum broadcast radio antenna, and some feed bags. The arm (which was made from the two antenna segments welded together... it was basically C-channel) was 11.5ft long and the sling was adjustable between 5-7 ft long. we had cement bags in feedbags for counterweight.
We managed to fire it three times. The first shot a brick backwards 12ft. The next shot a gallon jug of water 3 ft forward. But the third shot a gallon of water 103 ft downrange. The jugs expode on impact... it's pretty cool. We were going to up the weight from 200 to 600lbs. but the feedbags had shredded covering everything in chunks of cement. My parents are still trying to get me to take it out of their yard.
I invented an automobile engine that operates on tap water instead of gasoline. But the oil companies suppressed my invention, and I have been hiding from them ever since. I also invented a personal defense shield against the aliens that only requires commonly available tin foil. It works with just about any hat.
Well, I helped design and build what was the third fastest (public) computer in the world three years ago, System X. That was pretty cool. I'm still not done with doing stuff like that yet. ;-)
A clutch alignment tool for a nissan that had no pilot bearing.
Though a lot of people think it's that incense burner I made from a pringles can.
Managed to get my hands on an air compressor, some pneumatic valves, some pvc pipe, and sautered some opto-isolated triacs. Then wired pinouts to a printer port, and wrote a java proggy that took in xml scripts. I could then simulate automation with some motion detectors going into the port, the program processing what to do, and a signal being sent to the triac, which would trigger the valve to open and move a series of levers, which would make a corpse popup, play sounds, turn on lights, etc. You can check out the pics of it here: http://www.bapudi.com/yabbse/index.php?board=7
Technically my dad build it, but I helped him. I was 8 years old at the time. it could lob small lawnmower engines. and once without his knowledge, we used it to destroy a tree fort some other kids built.
when i was about 8 years old (probably even younger but i don't want to exaggerate), me and a friend of mine started to mess with things like batteries, lights, small electrical motors, and so on...
we would open things like toy cars or tanks and play with what's inside...my dad had a lot of old telephone receivers (with working microphones and speakers) in the attic and other cool stuff.
one time we used a motor from a toy car and something from the same car which looked a lot like a propellar and strapped them on to some other plastic toy that was hollow inside so it floated.
the remote was a light switch with batteries taped to the bottom.
we've tested it once and it kept going in circles...i know it doesn't sound like much but we did it when we were very young and these are the reasons I am now in my first year at a technical college studying electronics and telecommunications.
In my Analog Electronics course a partner and I had to build an audio amplifier capable of delivering 1A to an 8Ohm load. If any of you are EE, this was quite interesting: we used a combination Darlington Push-Pull configuration. We hooked it all up for instructor verification...filled lab room with the sweet sweet sound of the Beatles, "Eleanor Rigby". It was quite loud and crisp :-)
When I was about 7 I built a Santa-Claus-Detector... We used to hang our stockings in our own rooms and "Santa" used to come during the night and fill them. When you stepped on it a very loud ring signal was emitted. I almost gave my mum a heartattack.
As an engineer, I've had a hand in some pretty cool things but on a personal level, one of the things I still recall fondly is building a hovercraft from scratch for a 10th grade class project.
I ended up using a tarp with holes spaced about half an inch apart attached to a particle board to create a plenum chamber. One leaf blower to a hose through a hole in the board to fill the chamber. One more leaf blower for propulsion. The whole thing was about 1.5m by 2meters and was just enough to hold myself up. Was a bitch to control though.
Back in the early 70's myself and my friend had a contest to see who could come up with a clock radio. These were real Rube Goldberg devices and the more extra features they did the more points we got. Both of our designs pretty much took up the whole space underneath out respective beds. Since we lived in the same apartment complex it was easy to check out each others designs. He would come over to my parents house and check mine out and I would go to his parents house and check his out. Stealing ideas was just fine. We robbed our electronic parts boxes. Mine used a wind-up alarm clock that pulled a string to engage a old radio tuner to make connect with a battery, this in turn engaged other devices such as a motor with a weight on one side connected to the bed for a magic fingers effect. A large 15 inch speaker give you a nice thump to the bed frame in time with the music. Each bell on the alarm clock was wired to a buzzer wired to one bell and a light wired to the other bell. The striker was connect to a battery and when the alarm went off it would alternate between the light and the buzzer.
Of course they were accidents waiting to happen and I am surprised we never burnt our respective apartments down. But hey for 12 year olds back in 1973 it was great fun!
Back in the early 90's I had a Commodore Vic 20 computer with a few games on it. To play some of those games I also had a simple 2-button, 2-axis joystick. I didn't like it so I took it apart to see how it worked. Then I stripped out the wiring and re-built the joystick into a high-density Styrofoam block which I hand cut and shaped so that it's cross-section was shaped similar to that of an airplane wing. Then I replaced the joystick switches with mercury tilt switches like those you find in your average home thermostat. The end result was a very easy to hold and use, tilt sensitive game controller. Want to go left, just tilt it to the left. 1 button under each thumb, and a whole lot of fun that I used for years to play all my games on that machine. I think it's still in a box in my parents basement somewhere. Oh, and I was about 10 years old at the time.
- James
Your self are living in one of my own collection of home built reality simulators. I'll give you credit for being the only one of my simulated worlds to develop a reality simulator inside your simulation.
Greetings,
Your Lord and Creator.
P.S. If you think that's strange you should see the 4D Holo-presentation I got the other day attatched to a subspace mail message. It's from a giant lizard like creature who claims that I am living on a planet in a miniature universe he carries in a little marble on his keychain....
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I built a giant light-up periodic table for my high school chemistry teacher. It was 4'x8', used 1/5 mile of wire, couple hundred Christmas tree lights, etc. The control panel allowed her to light any element or series/families of elements. There was also a magnetic "trends" arrow that you could write periodic trends on. Took 5 months to build on my own, learned a lot, and blew several transformers in the process. Junior year of high school... wow that was a while ago.
A buddy of mine and I in high school entered one of those King of the Hill competitions where you had a list of household items you could use to build a machine, and a set of objectives to accomplish.
There was a tie-breaking rule -- if no objectives were completed, whoever got furthest up the hill won.
So, figuring that nobody's machine would work perfectly, we built a car that ignored every objective but was lightening quick and used all of the allowed mousetraps to either propel itself or flip the other car over.
Our plan worked flawlessly, and in the last round we knocked the over car almost completely off the hill.
I see it as the ultimate engineering victory -- finding the easiest/cheapest way to accomplish a task in a competitive environment. Although I do think the organizers were a bit disappointed that we won.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
http://johnbokma.com/pet/scorpion/detection-using- uv-leds.html
:-)
Also because people are impressed when I demonstrate it
+1 witty retort
When I was in the 8th grade, I took a junior engineering class where we had to make a hot air balloon out of tissue paper. My balloon had 160 holes that needed to be patched since the damn cat wouldn't stay off of it -- it was green and white with black dots. Most of my classmates expected it to flop over dead after taking off from the fire vent. It flew a good mile outside of the school before it crashed landed on a neighborhood street. When we got back to the class, I was the winner even though my hot air ballon was "kludge" -- it flew when it shouldn't have.
Similar in format, but nowhere near as polished, as this. Working on a LWB two wheeler. At some point in the future, a full carbon fiber frame trike will emerge from the garage.
My son, the boy wonder, built a hovercraft at age 9. Leafblower, plywood, plastic sheet.
We're geeks. That means the next thing we build will be the coolest thing ever. Everything that we've built before is working boringly well. It's the debugging, swearing, kicking things around and getting your wife/GF started on the "calm down, you'll do yourself an injury" that is guaranteed to make you worse that is the adventure.
Next exciting project: An NMEA multiplexer - already have the schematic designed and the sample ICs from the good folks at Maxim, just waiting on a trip to the local emporium for a packet of ferric chloride. Last boring, working, finished project: A charge regulator for my outboard's silly AC output.
As an aside, I wonder how Linus would answer this? Would it be "that kernel thingy that Andy Tanenbaum said was a flawed design" or "my homemade electronic arse-kicker that reacts to people trying to commit half-tested crap"? I think we have a right to know...
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
I once built a fridge, it was pretty cool...*drumroll*!
/Kristofer
Thank you very much, I'll be here all week.
Ps. the "please type the word in this image" word I got today was condom.
Various stuff I build while having to much free time at university.
(Or taking too much free time.. well..)
- Entire 4bit CPU out of TTL parts (~60 ics)
- Complete 32bit Computer on FPGA
- Various semiconductor solar cells. I wish I could find an apartment where they'd let me keep my chem lab.. na..
I have the manual abilities of a gorilla, so hardware has not been my thing. I did my share of hardware as a kid, i built an FM radio transmitter (and operated my own unlicensed pirate FM station transmitting to like, half a block), my own stinky bomb using hydrochloric acid, wrote my first computer game at age 11 (a text based adventure) and my first 2d graphics game shortly after that. As a teen / young adult the stuff i am proud of are more on the software side: a serial port text chat and file transfer program between an amiga and a PC, some cool 2d demos on the amiga and PC, LOTS of electronic music on the amiga, built a small beowulf cluster at college and "invented" XML as a way to serialize objects in files before i knew XML existed.
What i have realized is that my creativity has been declining with time. That, or my ability to be amazed by my own "inventions".
moi
@@
Is this an attempt to gather cool, profiting, un-copyrighted projects & patent them under your name?!
I'd tell you my project, but I hadn't copyrighted it & it's a duck that lays golden eggs!
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Bloody hell, that company must consume well over half the world's supply of Allen keys.
And now I'm stuck here :( Damn!
...that drilled holes correctly on random PC boards, no a priori knowledge of the layout required (1976)
Kidney (dialysis) machine, using Hospal's "artificial kidney", using 8048 w/2K of code (1977).
Demand controller for home electric power, dial in your desired power bill each month, using a COP402 4-bit processor, no interrupts (1979).
Requirements capture and aspect viewer, now owned by Rational/IBM (1996)
Lots of others, but these were coolest because they seemed "impossible".
BWilde
the 327 that I put in my 1969 ElCamino. The car started out as an SS 396, but I built a 327 that just blew the 396, along with a lot of big blocks from Chrysler and Ford, away.
It was balanced and blueprinted. I ported the heads, modified the distributer, put a highly tuned 700 cfm Rochester Quadra-Jet on it, and ran aluminum roller rocker arms from Crane along with a Crane cam and solid lifters. I used a Judson magneto whose output started where the coils of the day ended and the output graph was a straight line going up at approximately 45 degreees to rpm's well past what my engine could safely turn to make sure the fuel got burnt every time. (That engine never misfired, but a weekend of rat racing it would burn up a set of plugs enough that the engine would lose its "crisp" sound.)
The power band started at 3500 rpm and ran to 7500 rpm. Estimated horsepower was in excess of 430.
I put a 400 Turbo with complete B&M rebuild behind it that hooked to the engine though a medium-high stall speed torque converter. The amazing thing about this combination of car and horsepower was that if I kept my foot out of the throttle I would get about 18 miles to the gallon, and yet I could blow the doors off most of the "hot" cars of that day: The 'Cuda's, the big block Camaro's, the big block Challegers, the big block Mustang's, the 351 Cleveland Torino's, etc.... when I would "rat race" on Saturday nights.
There were a few of the guys who had highly modified big blocks that I couldn't take, but even then they didn't blow my doors off either. That was one screaming engine and a very fun car to drive....I could powerslide it sideways for a city block. It's a rush just remembering it.
I helped design the largest single-structure building in the world (at least at the time), and am sitting in it right now.
While there are other geekier things I have done in my life, seeing this building completed is pretty darn cool.
Too bad we focus on failures of projects rather than successes, but I guess that is the driver for continued innovation...
I only weigh 289 lbs in my underwear.
For my senior design at UCF we designed and built systems for a pair of satellites. I was the team lead for the ADCS team (attitude determination and control system) which had 3 other seniors in it along with me. We ended up deciding which sensors to use and creating all of the control algorithms for the satellite. We finished the class by creating a satellite simulator which allowed the users to see how the satellite behaves when the sensors are moved using a laptop computer. Other teams on the project built the frame, a sample thruster, the power control system for the solar cells, and a stereoscopic camera system. The whole project was for the Nanosat-4 competition hosted by the US Air Force.
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
My senior year of high school I built a Tesla Coil that shot 27" sparks. It ran off of a 15kV/30mA neon sign transformer (so my max spark length should've been 36": 1.7*Math::sqrt(xfmr_kva) is a quick and dirty calculation that fits the data well). I built an MMC for that coil for the first time.
I'm building my second coil right now, five years later. I spent the whole of college (and the year I took off to live in Ireland) focused on programming and math, and not so much on the physics that I had loved playing with during high school. Now that that's all behind me (well, there's still at least a master's to go, right?) I can play again. So I'm constructing the MMC to handle a big old 220 military radar transformer (current best guess, still waiting to hear back from Raytheon to confirm) now, and this is going to push my second Tesla Coil. This MMC should provide 0.037uF at 19.2kV. I don't know how much current this transformer can handle, but assuming 300mA it could generate 124" sparks.
Finally, next week it is possible that I could pick up a transformer capable of doing ~15kV at 1.5A. For 255" max sparkage. Not sure, but if I get that transformer I'll either have a dominant new 'favorite thing I ever built' or a dramatically shortened life span.
-josh
-knewter
the computers on the above link, still using them. Eric
Life is a gift. And my Karma couldn't possibly be 'Positive'
Back (a few months) before those guys built their airsoft sentry gun, I made one as well.
Except mine shot foam discs, and was intended as a toy for our cats.
Basically, I took a toy from toys r us that had a motion sensor and shot foam discs. I then mounted it to a PTZ base for a webcam, and mounted a camera on it. I used the motion tracking software that came with the base so that it would follow the cats around, and it would fire based on the movement. I also had it tied into a web interface, so I could control it (and fire it, it had an IR controller that would make it shoot) remotely.
At one point, I even took off the IR filter and added an IR lamp so that it would work in the dark too.
My hardware hacking begain when a friend ask me to solder some memory on to his motherboard for him. I did this by Piggy backing 32K dynamic ram chips on the old TRS-80 model 3 motherboard to get 64K without buying the upgrade module. Did the same for my TRS-80 color computer.
I built a real time BW video digitizer for my TRS-80 color computer, a D/A convertor board with two 8 bit D/A converters to run my laser light show system.
Built a very simple Z-80 microprocessor board.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
Is a snow-hut. It was so cool, it was sub-zero ^_^
urd
I invented the internet.
Geez, that sucked. I hope someone eventually used it.
While several large parts were pre-built, I did the design and building for a 75 gallon saltwater aquarium with 20 gallon sump.
Cool parts? Moonlighting, from a cold cathode tube designed for computer cases, and the complete sump for filtration.
Most things were automated (lighting was on timers, water loss due to evaporation was replaced by an automated switch), so the final result was self-sustaining for the most part.
The "this is completely mine" was the external Durso.
In all I estimated that I did about 200-300 hours of research and designing, and about 200 hours worth of construction and set-up on the tank before I ever added a fish.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
That's no the coolest thing in the world, but it's fantastic to put in practice many theoretical things learned at school. The machine is based on computer vision and other artificial intelligence techniques... and that's the greatest part for us: we needed to save money, so we made ourselves the complete software instead of buying a pre-designed commercial system (we had enough time for that). The stuff with cameras, PLC's, sensors and more sensors, controlled by a self-designed software is the best way, I think, to *really understand* many things... and it's really really funny!
I build a lot of stuff.
It's easy to make a coilgun. You take a cardboard tube, like wrapping paper comes on, fill it with 1/8" welding rod of various lengths so it's solidly packed at the bottom and only maybe 1/3 get all the way to the top. You wrap an *enormous* bundle of transformer wire around the base, where the rods are solidly packed -- like 400 turns of 18 ga wire. You point it upwards, and put a ring (best if aluminum, okay if copper, so-so if steel) around the tube and slide it down to the bottom. Then briefly plug the coil into the wall. The ring will shoot off the end like a gun. For extra credit, use a 2N2222 transistor driving the coil of a big relay, and you can interface it to your computer to optimize the AC on time. Double extra credit for adding a big capacitor to tune it for maximum oomph. Mine will put big dents in 3/4" plywood.
It's pretty easy to make a spotwelder. I used Kurt Bjorn's design, with my own construction techniques (ie scrap lumber) and the same transistor-and-relay interface that I use for the coilgun, so I can time the welds. It welds stainless steel like butter. I wrote visual basic and C programs that have lookup tables so I can tell it that I'm welding 14ga stainless wire and it'll know the right on-time to get a good weld. (Eventually this will be part of a LEGO-based welded chainmail making machine.)
But I think the coolest thing I had a hand in was a laser system at a now bankrupt place. We were drilling thousands of tiny holes at once, by firing a large beam (10cm x 10cm) through a multi-lens element. The beam had to be perfectly perpendicular to the lens. We had an alignment tool that consisted of a 1024-element CCD and a laser diode, that we'd shine off the lens and see where it bounced against the CCD, so we had a precision of 1/2048. (Error is doubled because of the reflection.) It wasn't sufficient -- and we'd paid $4000 for the device. Well, the laser went through 7 mirrors before it got to the lens element, and the top of the lens element was flat... so I put a front-surface mirror on it, to reflect the beam directly back the way it came, and put an index card over the laser output, with a hole punched in it. So the laser goes through all the mirrors, hits the reflecting mirror on the objective lens, bounces *back* through all the turning mirrors, doubling its error with each bounce, and you see a nice spot on the index card where the reflected beam is. You visually align the spot with the hole in the index card, and you then have your lens perpendicular to the beam to an accuracy of the diameter of the hole divided by (the beam path length * 2^7). More accuracy than we needed, for a cost of a front-surface mirror (which we already had), a paper punch, and a recurring cost of index cards (because they burst into flame after about 20 seconds.)
Right now I'm working on making a solar concentrator that'll boil water and drive a steam engine, since I have no shortage of sunlight and at high altitude water boils quickly. It's way cheaper than solar cells and it'll go "fphoof! fphoof! fphoof!" as it runs. It'll be awesome.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Very low tech but, I once built a surfboard that had some interesting/strange qualities. It was a tri-fin short board of pretty much standard width, length, thickness and rocker but with my custom shape. I built it from an ordinary foam blank with 3/16" redwood stringer which I purchased from a local surfboard shop.
Any surfer knows that it is not easy to paddle a short board out to the line-up and even more difficult to paddle into a wave unless you are in just the right position. This board paddled as if it were a longboard, never missed a wave and was the fastest board I ever rode. Family members and friends of different sizes surfed it and all said the same things. We studied this board in an effort to determine why it possessed its special qualities but were never able to come up with anything. Even exact copies of the board did not surf the same.
The board was stolen, or winked out, at Sunset Cliffs in San Diego in the mid 90's, never to be seen again.
I build the robocup small-size league robot.
...and in junior high, no less.
In junior high I was always trying to come up with something cool for the science fair. In grade seven, it was a polarimeter for monitoring stress. In grade eight, it was a cloud chamber. In grade nine, I built a fully functional van de graff generator, only 15cm high. I had a plan for "The smallest van de graff generator in the world!" but made a mistake in measuring, and actually made mine slightly smaller.
That thing was fantastic. Still in my parents basement, somewhere.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
a tesla coil out of a polaroid camera ;)
I think you begot your son, not built him.
For a graduate class at Georgia Tech, we built a system called ScheduleNanny that used a combination of GPS + user schedule to build an adaptive correlation.
The system could learn and adapt to a user's schedule and build a mapping of that with the user's location using the GPS.
We also saw some funky emergent behaviour, where the system would build its own internal mapping as a function of where you were (e.g. the bathroom or the bus-stop got tagged as a destination to be at, during certain time-frames).
And if you're interested, here's a formal paper on it.
Not quite finished, but still very cool.P laneID=58
http://www.mykitplane.com/Planes/planeDetail.cfm?
Between a Circuit Cellar Zigbee contest and my senior project for mechanical engineering at Cal Poly, I designed and built a radio controller that operates a fun little boat that shoots 1/4" ball bearing in an attempt to sink other ships . Of course, the other boats are also firing back, but that's the fun of being in a Big Gun Club (and yes, they really do sink). I'm currently getting the next rev of the boards ready to be made, and I hope to have a new boat ready for next April.
I was part of a project in school to build an automated launcher for my professor's Lightcraft (It's a cone shaped aircraft that uses a laser as a propellant. Google it to see how it works. Pretty interesting). Anyway, I built a tachometer with an IR LED and a photodiode, using a microcontroller for the logic. It was pretty elegant. Anyway, when you say it like this: "I built a launchpad for a laser spaceship", it sounds much more interesting.
'Those are my principles. If you don't like them, well. .
twitter.com/scld
Another option would be an 8031-based design.
Microcontrollers also tend to have architectures better optimised for bit diddling and display driving.
Pining for the fjords
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
I didn't build it all myself, I was just on the team, but we made a rig that simulated the Matrix BulletTime effect using 32 $20 Mattel Barbie digital cameras. The cameras were mounted on foam core and corrugated plastic, arranged in a big circle, and we used truck mirrors to get a wide angle effect. All the cameras were wired to a central triggering circuit, and we used a garage door opener as a remote control. You would go into the center of the circle with your friends and some props, do something crazy, and hit the remote. The cameras would fire --- then all the pictures would be sent to a printer which would print out a flip-book on cardstock so that you could see a low-tech animation of yourself spinning around doing whatever.
Here's some propaganda about the project.
Well, I've recently been planning on building a particle accelerator (nothing big, maybe a couple hundred keV). Unfortunately, due to time and money, it will probably get as far as my rail gun. So, my actual project at the moment is just a cloud chamber. I figure I can build it for less than 20 bucks and I can use an old smoke detector to produce the particles to be detected. Maybe I'll build a simple Helmholz coil to deflect those particles too.
The coolest thing I actually FINISHED was a small condensor for a helium refrigerator. I packed as much fine-gauge copper wire into a small copper box that I milled from a solid copper block about 1 cm on a side. It actually had a measurable effect, bringing the temperature down by at least 25%.
The 383 wouldn't allow for the stock oil cooler, and the transmission needed additional cooling for the duty cycle. All the 'kits' available don't consider the packaging requirements of a Corvette. There WERE no kits to do this.
Dad ran a hydraulics supplier for years and when he found out the budget for AN grade fittings and hoses, he convinced me that industrial hydraulic pieces and parts would be superior at 1/3rd the price.
Design in the ability to bypass the oil cooler in cold weather and the system has outperformed my wildest expectations.
It's a bittersweet reminder of my father, who died about 8 months ago, but it's a GOOD memory too.
Now I'm learning to turn metal (restored a South Bend 1964 Lathe), I'm sure cool things will come of that.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Fairly simple and programmed in assembly language, but it did what I wanted it to do! I still have it on display at home!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
In high school I took a dry cleaning bag and made balsa wood cross bars to hold the bottom open. A few birthday candles on the cross bars to provide heat and light during flight. Fill with hot air over the BBQ, light the candles and let it go after dark. It will rise up a few hundred feet and slowly drift across the sky blinking and flashing, then suddenly disapprearing when the candles go out. In ~1970 I did this in Ottawa and stopped traffic all over the west end of the city.
I made two working telephones completely from scratch, the coolest part were the microphones:
they were essentially the bottoms of paper dixie cups, I crammed powdered coal into them with electrodes at each end and taped them up. Ran a current into them. As you spoke, the sound waves compressed the carbon allowing the current to run faster or slower through the carbon.
Worked great. Wasn't too sensitive so it didn't pick up whispers and stuff.
does a k'nex roller coaster count?
For my final engineering project in college, I stripped the RF electronics out of an E-Maxx electric monster truck and replaced them with an OOPIC-R board using bluetooth as the wireless communication medium. I added two pan/tilt camera mounts to the front and back and then wrote a GUI in Visual Basic for the vehicle that used an Xbox 360 controller to drive the car and control the cameras. I never got the back camera to work, but the car worked like a charm. Only problem I had was I didn't program in a system to tell the car to stop if it went out of range - that was a fun discovery. I was running it full blast (this thing would do about 40mph, was ankle-high, and weighed 15lbs), when I ran out of range and it veered to the right and slammed full-on into the underside of a police vehicle. It scared the shit out of the cop and wedged the car so far underneath that I had to use a jack on the police car to raise it high enough to get the car out. The original title for the project was Unmanned Land Assistance Vehicle, but it was changed to Assault Vehicle after that. The project is over now, but I'm looking for input on the code if anyone is willing to help. I'm going to be posting it on the OOPIC support group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oopic within the week, I'm just trying to properly document everything right now.
Zooom!!!! It's a little ankle-breaker I tell ya!
The best thing I could think of is something a friend of mine (not me) built. He's a bagpipist, and also a music engineer, and he built an interface for a remote control car that accepts midi information from an electronic bagpipe.
It's pretty cool - accelerates or decelerates based on how much air you're putting through, and different notes steer the thing. I think he won some sort of contest for the thing this year.
p.
free music
No, really, I mean it. I'm 100% serious about it. Worth the hassle? HELL YEAH.
The NES Alarm Clock!
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
A BBQ smoker from a trash can
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Potato Gun.
150yds on a quick shot of aerosol...
Even smelled like french fries after a couple shots..
My modded T23 Thinkpad running Linux!
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
I had a desperate urge to scan stuff in about 1988. I glued a hyper-bright red LED (illumination) and a 1mm plastic flexible light guide (detector) into an old printer ribbon case. The light-guide went into an IR diode connected to a single Op-amp schmitt trigger lash-up on breadboard. The output connected to the Ring-In pin on the serial port of my Atari ST. I wrote my first ever bit of 68000 assembler (Mmm. All those addressing modes!)to get the printer to micro-step along each line, reading state of RI before doing a micro form-feed. It worked first time and I treasure the awful low-res scans that were the result of like 50 hours work.
The 'no sig' guy
http://www.greasybastard.com/index.php?page=weara
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
In high school my junior year ('65) I built a system that displayed electromagnetic radiation from lightning strokes on a CRT. I had little money so built it from old TV and surplus parts. Three foot loop antennas oriented N-S and E-W picked up the signals and displayed them on a scope tube. The whole thing was vacuum tubes, I think around 8 or so. That was pretty cool but not all I wanted. The next year, I contacted IBM, who helped me with schematics of flip flops and other logic implemented with transistors (wow!) and I made a recorder that would write the signals on paper charts so I could correlate them with the next day's newspaper reports of distant storms. The recorders were constructed of old speakers with the cones removed but the voice coils still in place, recording pens on long arms that magnified the motion of the voice coil, and a coffee can driven by a clock radio movement that moved a sheet of paper under the pens every 12 hours. I ran it a whole year and tracked storms as far away as Lousiana from my house in Minnesota by the lightning they produced. It was pretty neat. I also tracked some tornadoes that I recognized by the almost continuous lightning they produced. It was lots of fun and I won some awards at the science fair.
It also got me a college scholarship to get into a physics program, which I wouldn't have gotten any other way. So, now you know how I came to be spending my Saturday afternoon typing into Slashdot.
My Senior project for college involved building a modified PS2 controller. We called it the DualHack as a pun on DualShock. It did a lot of cool stuff.
1) Variable-speed rapid-fire, for those games who test their input to see if rapid-fire is being used and disqualify the input. I had plans for changing the rate slowly, like say instead of 3 frames all the time, it could be 2 frames sometimes, and 4 frames other times, so that way it's not constant. I had four modes of rapid fire; off, semi-automatic (fires when you press it), fully automatic (fires until you turn it off full auto), and one-shot (fires when you press and hold the button, and then goes to the off state when you release the button). One shot was good if you needed to rapid fire once, but didn't want to turn semi-auto on and off.
2) Real-time macro recording up to 127 buttons per macro, with macros assignable to all buttons. If a game was scripted (Megaman Anniversary Collection), you could record yourself playing it, and then play that sequence back. It kept all the pauses between presses, and it kept the length of each press. Also good for fighting games, or recording the cheat codes for GTA3. My partner made a GUI that you could use to hand-tweak your macros, save them to a file, and load them later. I also had plans for implementing analog stick rotation macros, since some games ask you to rotate the analog stick as fast as you can.
3) Button Mapping allowed you to reconfigure the pad however you want. Let's say they give you no way to make use of R3. Make R3 square, or something like that. Or let's say they made jump triangle for some god awful reason, and you prefer jump to be x, but they don't let you configure that. You could manually map jump to x. I played a prank on my partner and switched the dpad and face buttons (triangle was up, up was triangle, etc). Boy that was interesting.
4) Throttle. Stole this from a joystick and stuck it on the controller for racing games.
5) Motion sensitive steering. My project was done during the 04/05 school year, before Nintendo told anyone about the motion sensitive Revolution controller. I stuck a 2-axis accelerometer on the back of the DualHack, and made an alogrithm that mapped the current orientation of the controller with respect to gravity onto the left analog stick's horizontal axis. It was pretty sweet. I even hijacked class once; before the professor showed up we had it set up, and he just watched and played through class starting, and then we just gave up and messed with it all class.
This was all accomplished with a PIC 18F452 microcontroller and two buttons. Most aftermarket modded controllers put the buttons on the top, where the thumbs have to use them. This was annoying, because the thumb is already used to hit the majority of buttons.
So I stuck my buttons underneath, where the middle finger rests when holding the controller. This way you could press the auxiliary buttons in combination with any other button on the pad.
I also had four types of button presses. A single press, a double press (like a single click vs. double click), a long press (like the long press you use to force your computer to turn off), and a hold press (like the shift key - it would modify the button that you press if you're holding it down while you press the next button).
Sure, with the extra buttons using a finger that never had to hit buttons and the various types of presses for each button, it was way too complicated for the average newb. But I loved it.
:(){
Since my retirement I've taught myself the Verilog programming language (yes, Verilog is a programming language regardless of what hardware designers will tell you) and designed FPGA hardware implementations of the following:
:-) Besides, I did this primarily as a learning exercise for myself in lieu of spending my time watching brain-dead TV programs, etc.
1. Lenstra's Elliptic Curve Method (ECM) of integer factorization.
2. Fermat's method of integer factorization.
It turns out that the ECM design was far too large to fit into any existing FPGA, so I now have two different FPGA development boards running Fermat's factorization method on RSA-704 and RSA-768 respectively. Yes, I know the Sun will engulf the earth before either FPGA development board comes up with an answer, but they both display a lot of pretty colored blinking lights while doing the calculations so they make a great conversation piece - Har.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
coolest and then some: the mach12e - and a part of the construction was the destruction. enjoy!
try a google search or gis "the mach12e" or "the machine" - or follow the link below:
a poppy-link to the mach12e (insert echo here)For me it was a giant magnifying glass: http://www.johnperkins.com/images/FresnelFullyAsse mbledRearViewThumb.jpg I was bored one summer.
The coolest thing I was ever involved with was first robotics. It is an international competition between highschools. Each high school builds a robot that competes against other schools. The thing is, you don't know what the robot's job is until 8 weeks before the competition so time is scarce in making everything work.
First Robotics
I was a mentor for the programming part. It's pretty intense for the kids, as they need to learn a new language (c++) as well as program the thing.
This teams highlights video give a pretty good idea of what it's like here
That's hard to say - the most recent thing you build like the Steampunk Stratocaster I just finished always seems the coolest right then.
The heaviest thing I ever built was a Schoolbus to RV conversion
and if number of links on the intarweb count toward coolness the Retro Cellphone Handset is the coolest.
Jake von Slatt.
The Steampunk Workshop
I did my part for the construction of Concordia station, up on the high Antarctic plateau. About 5 years of thinking and development followed by 4 summers of construction in terrible conditions. My part was to survive the first winterover there, and it wasn't that easy with -80C temperatures ! And year certainly out of the ordinary, now where do I sign up for Mars ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
i built a drum robot in school with a couple of friends. Probably the highlight of my college career. The next coolest thing was having it featured on slashdot! Many of you had lots of neat and interesting things to say about it, and me and the other developers thank you for that.
I built a Farnsworth fusor. CLear above background neutron signature and everything.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
I once won a stupid kewpie prize at a fair that was an image of The Beatles' Rubber Soul album cover laminated to some cheapass particle board. Upon getting it home, I took a compass & marked a circle on the front of it, then divided the perimiter into twelfths, drilled a hole through the center & carved out the back to attach a clock mechanism. My Beatles Rubber Soul clock still hangs in my bathroom.
Back in high school I made a really huge bong out of 1 liter soda bottles and aquarium tubing.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Slashdotters don't have parents. They reproduce by fission (which would mean that he did the whole design).
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
a boat, now I know a lot of people build boats, but this was made of old firewood and a tarp, would seat about 6 or 8 people to go fishing, here it is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETot3n5jkJY
It cost less than NZ$70 which is under US$50.
My latest build is my new still, complete with reflux, fractional column and a very efficient condenser, that cost less than US$35.
Yes, I specialise in making them cheap!
That's hot!
[sig]
In the summer of 1988 my two biggest hobbies were Radio-control airplanes and modifying my 1969 Firebird.
I was interested in putting a skywriting system on one of my RC airplanes. The kits were expensive so I looked into the methods used by the old-timers on real airplanes. A common DIY method back in the day was to pump a 50/50 mixture of diesel and transmission fluid right into the engines exhaust headers. My first thought was "Forget the airplane, this would work on my car!" I ran down to the hardware store and bought some brake lines(metal tubes threaded on the end), fuel hose, 1-gal Gas can, etc. Then I ran to the wrecking yard and pulled the first electric fuel pump I found. The whole project was easily under $20 at the time.
I drilled holes in all 8 exhaust headers of my Firebird as close as I could to the manifold and tapped them so I could thread in the brake-lines. I ran them all back to the electric fuel pump, which then lead to the gas can. I filled the gas can up faithfully following the 50:50 Diesel/Tranny-fluid mix and set out to test it on some abandoned logging roads.
On the drive there I was thinking about what I might need change to improve it. Would the fuel pump be enough? Will I need to slightly constrict the shorter hoses so the mixture reaches all the headers simultaneously? Will I need to adjust the mixture?
The first test worked so ridiculously well that I never bothered optimizing anything. Thick, white smoke filled up both lanes of the access-road nearly to the tops of the trees. I had to wait several minutes for the smoke to clear before I could drive back through it..
I used it responsibly for the most part (if that's even possible) but you just can't have something like that when you're in High school. I remember one friend borrowing my car at lunch and completely shutting down traffic for about 10 min. on the highway in front of our High-school. Another time I was at the movie theater parking lot and a crowd of "popular kids" from school begged to see it. I revved the engine and fired off a "small puff" while parked. Two police cars showed up when the saw the 300' "mushroom cloud" over the theater and I had to convince them that the rings were going bad but the car only smoked "sometimes." Yet another time a "friend" hit the switch when I wasn't looking at a stop light in downtown Portland. I looked back to see what all the honking is about and I see no cars, no buildings, just a while cloud. The rest of that story is a calamity that I don't care to elaborate on. I will say that nobody was hurt, though.
I dismantled it after that and never made another. The fun/stress ratio wasn't even close to being worth it.
The spring of my seventh grade year, I often woke up to the front yard full of trash. Some sort of animal was getting into our trash every night. My parents designated me to clean up the yard when this happened. It got very old very quickly.
On the third straight day of picking up old food cartons and other nasty crap, I built a booby-trap out of fishing line, pulleys, nails, screws and old wooden blocks. When a tripline was triggered, the wood would swing and hit the animal in the side (not hard—these were light wood blocks) and hopefully scare it off for good. It was my own design, and that was kind of cool.
At 5 a.m. the next morning I awoke to a clatter and a yelp. I looked out the window to see a big dog running away in terror. My old wood blocks trailed from the fishing line that the dog had gotten wrapped around his hindquarters.
Our garbage cans were never violated again.
Like many kids in the 1960s, the coolest thing we could get our hands on was Estes model rocket engines. I particularly loved to make "boost gliders" which were devilishly difficult to build right. They were complex because they had a large rotatable wing. During the boost phase the wing was retracted parallel to the main tube, but after the rocket burned out, the propellant module ejected and the wing would rotate out to a configuration like an aircraft. The idea was that the rocket would shoot upright to maximum altitude, then the wing would deploy and it would fly in a flat spiral, then land close to the launch site. If you did it wrong, it would go up and then fly off in a straight line off to the horizon, never to be seen again.
The best rocket I ever made was a scale model of the BOMARC, one of the first cruise missiles in the US arsenal. I spent weeks making sure every detail was perfect, it looked beautiful, even the paint job was polished to mirror-like perfection (very difficult for a 12 year old kid like me to achieve). The aerodynamics looked good, although scale model kits were notorious for poor flight qualities since sacrifices were made for the sake of accurate design. But I managed to static test the rocket until it worked right, this was done by attaching a long piece of string to the rocket's center of gravity, then whirling it around at the end of 20 feet of string, watching its flight dynamics until you puked from dizziness. A little trim balancing here, a little added weight there, and everything was perfect.
In fact, so perfect I didn't want to launch it. I hung the rocket from my bedroom ceiling, where I fondly gazed at it every night as I lay in bed. Eventually I decided I had to see it fly. But to minimize the risk, the first flight would be a small rocket engine, I didn't want to shoot it up 2000 feet and maybe never see it again, a small 200ft flight would be sufficient. Whenever I set up my launch pad, all the neighborhood kids would suddenly show up to watch the launch. 3..2..1.. blastoff! It popped up, the engine ejected, and the BOMARC flew in a perfect spiral about one block in diameter. All the kids started chasing after it, back and forth, as it lazily spiraled around up out of their reach, I laughed and laughed. I stood right by the launch pad as the rocket started coming down, it looked like it would land almost at my feet.. and it DID! And then one of the kids chasing it STOMPED right on top of it, smashing my beautiful rocket to bits! Dammit!
I think I gave up building rockets after that, my heart wasn't in it anymore.
Oh yeah.. I do recall building one cool rocket, once I was an adult. I found out that ultra high performance engines had come on the market, I think this was the late 1970s. No more wimpy Estes D engines, these were E, F and G engines. I heard there was a 2 stage rocket kit that would break the sound barrier, so I ordered one. IIRC, it was a G engine with a D on top of it. No sense in buying more than one set of engines, this kit would go up thousands of feet and come down miles away, I'd never see it again. The fins were made of composite balsa plywood, regular plywood would just break apart when it hit the sound barrier. The fins had to be epoxied carefully to the body tube with perfect fillets, construction details were crucial, the kit instructions said that the slightest flaw would cause the rocket to break up and smash INTO the sound barrier, rather than through it. It also recommended not painting the rocket as the least imbalance (i.e. more paint on one side than the other) would have an adverse effect.
So I built the rocket, and my friends got together so we could launch it. We had to find a big field because you were supposed to stand at a specific distance away (~250 ft IIRC) so you'd be in the right spot to hear the faint sonic boom. We brought a long tape measure to mark off the distance precisely. I only had 20 feet of wire to run to the electronic igniter, so we drew straws on who would launch, the poor sap who pressed the button woul
I'd say a battlebot. My team competed in season five. Next up would be the catapult some fellow engineers and I designed and built to launch a rubber chicken for a contest. That chicken got some good airtime, darn near ended up in the next zip code. We won the contest.
I built a memory extendor for my TI-85 calculator.
The most difficult aspect of finishing the project
was finding a manufacturer that was willing to ship
me 1 PLCC socket for the flash chip.
The final device was about the size of a domino, connected
to the serial port, and provided an extra 1MB of storage
for a special assembly operating system.
That reminds me of a joke:
A scientist goes to God and says, "We don't need you anymore. I can create a human from nothing more than a handful of dust."
"Alright then, let's see," God replies.
"No problem," says the scientist, and he bends over to scoop up some dust.
"Hold on," God interrupts. "Get your own dust."
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Okay, my big question is where is this "spoon" thing I keep hearing about?
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
for Caltech's Ditch Day.
When I got my video shortly after they were launched, I was extremely frustrated when on a totally fresh battery I was unable to watch a movie 2 hrs 17 minutes long. So I made a 3 cell LiPoly external battery pack and put it in an altoids case which I velcroed to the back of my iPod. I made the cord that connected the pack to the dock connector interchangeable so I could also use it to charge my cell phone. Final product held about 3 amp hours, good for about 6-7 hours of video, and only added about 50% more weight to my iPod/case.
A mathematical model, to help a friend to win a transportation contract with a big big company. The contract had its value doubled, my friend is earning U$ 7 million free, and I got a new car as a gift. Each two years he can renew the contract again.
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2003/wright_fly er/
A lot of people were involved in this. I'm not sure it was the coolest thing each of them ever built, but it was defenitely the coolest thing I've ever built, more for reasons of where it was built than what it was. It never flew, but we did get it higher than the Wright Brothers ever got theirs.
We ended up firing a 100g mass through a ply wall 4m away (That's metres, not miles). The original specification was to fire a single screw a distance of 2m. Big iron blocks, chunky capacitors, relays (We welded about 6 of these shut when we didn't do the maths right), optical sensors and a PIR mounted to the front of the barrel to make sure it was clear to fire. Timing of things like the triggers (Each magnet had two capacitor banks, one wired each way to invert the field) was run from a small bit of Python.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I didn't finish it though, and now what I had built has been torn down. I wanted to test what would happen if you lived for a while in greater than one G of gravity.
The studio contained an amusing amalgam of cobbled-together home audio equipment, homebrew signal processing etc.
The station itself was recognized as one of the best radio stations in town by people who care about such things, but that's mostly due to choosing good people and letting them do what they wanted to on air. For that matter, the people aspect was really the most amazing thing about the radio station engineering.
See it in the movie Making Waves by Michael Lahey - not at Netflix, unfortunately.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Instructions:
1. Get some PVC pipe
2. Locate a 50% solution of H2O2
3. ????
4. And there it is.
Layne
FPGA!
Made a ID card system for a laboratory which you needed to place hand on sensor. If your card was wrong/forged it gave you an electric shock. =)
In one of my earlier high school science classes, I was in a class competition. The goal was to keep a beaker of water as hot as possible overnight, with the water starting at some rather high temperature like 80 degrees Celsius or something. The devices had to be no bigger than a certain volume (ours was a cube about 20cm on a side) and had to be completely self-contained, but it could use whatever means necessary to have the water end up at highest possible temperature. My team of four were in the "hot" competition. Most of the teams just used various kinds of insulation, but we decided to also have an electric heating solution as well. Our final design had two 'D' batteries stacked in each of the corners of the box, connected in a circuit with a heating coil to be placed in the beaker of water. My most significant contribution was the idea of using a spring from a pen as the heating coil instead of whatever other wire we were using, because it had a much higher resistance. We then had various kinds of insulation like styrofoam and the expanding kind that comes out of an aerosol can, plus tin foil directly next to the beaker to reflect the heat back. We ended up with the highest temperature water in the class, though our heating system had stopped functioning by the morning. We figured that the beaker must have boiled over and shorted the circuit, but it may be that the batteries just ran out. Also notable was the team that came in second place: they had a somewhat scary design that heated the water through a chemical reaction which, although I forget the details, I know involved bleach.
Long time ago. The department bought this thing for monitoring free-tissue transfers and then discovered that someone would have to watch a wildly twitching needle all night long which didn't help. I found am A/D converter for my Sinclair Spectrum, built an interface box with a couple of op-amps and range switches and wrote the monitoring software in a mixture of Z80A assembler and Sinclair Basic. I didn't know a thing about programming when I started, let alone about OOP but the end result was fully commented, was full of neat traps for errors and out of bounds conditions, was self adjusting and very modular. Screen output was graphical and it even had a teaching routine. Best of all, it eventually worked flawlessly and saved quite a few flaps.
Even today, the code still looks clean and elegant and the box worked better than it's modern commercial equivalent.
In high school I made a hovercraft out of a leaf blower and an inflatable mattress. Worked pretty well, actually. http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/photo/15382923 99060169935hsxPIY
Recently I made a V8 coffee table.
http://rides.webshots.com/photo/153828885806016993 5PREfKK
An attack helicopter is the coolest thing I ever built. Okay, a few thousand other people helped a teensy bit.
In college, I built a satellite that fits in a soda can, and a remotely piloted vehicle to fly on NASA's KC-135 "weightless wonder."
I built an alarm for a door, including aluminum foil contacts, from scratch one day when I was home sick from junior high. 20 years later my Mom still occasionally comments on the juxtaposition of coming home and having the alarm I built go off when she opened the door, then looking over and seeing me watching an animated disney movie.
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Back in highschool I made a car stereo for myself using a pentium 133. It took forever to get the infrared receiver working, but the little 4x24 text LCD didn't have drivers at all :-) I wrote them in assembly. Yes, I'm a sad, sad, nerd.
:-)
But if you think that's bad, while in an internship during college, I used the name of the company I worked for to make me sound important so I could order samples of various chips. I ordered a 100 MB NAND flash chip, an mp3 decoder (had all the analog->digital stuff built in: booyah!), and a few little stone-age microcontrollers and made an mp3 player from that. It sucked, to be honest, but it's still an accomplishment
For an undergrad senior project, long ago, we built a furnace that could melt glass or metals in a common household microwave oven. Yes, metals, with no resulting plasma ball blowing out the klystron.
It melted copper quite easily, and I'd guess it exceeded 1500 C for brief moments, as the refractory insulation sometimes melted in parts.
When I was a junior in collage (Texas A&M Corpus Christi), I built a 5 1/2' lofted queen sized waterbed. I used 10 4"x4" posts to hold the bed tray up which was contructed of 2"x4"s layed sideways and spaced six inches apart. I had already done all the calculations as an assignment in a sophomore physics class and determined that the structure would handle upwards of 3500 static pounds; more than enough. I was so secure in my work I put my computer (i386) desk under it (after layering the tray 7 times). It stood for over 3 years as I graduated and got my masters. The bed tray only bowed in the middle 1/2 inch. It also stood up to plenty of 'random force vectors' caused by 'motion in the ocean'.
I design and build guitar amplifiers for fun. My highest accomplishment so far was a three-channel preamp. As a rule I reuse the power amp between preamps (50W 6L6 tubes) except when I build low-power ones. Interestingly enough, for any complex (i.e. more than one channel) mass-produced amp it's cheaper to buy the original version most of the time. It doesn't seem that way when you're just starting out though. And if you're thinking about building yours, here's a word of advice - output transformer and speaker are two most important parts in any amp. No matter what you do in electronics before output transformer, the transformer defines at least 60% of the amp's "character" for any given gain. Don't buy Hammond output transformers if you want thick, smooth distortion. They're hi-fi, you won't get it.
a huge ramp.
accurately define good according to a criteria and seek it out.
I've been a huge fan of Blue Man Group for years, and I've been building PVC pipe musical instruments as a hobby for the past four years. I keep kind of a log and post instructions on my web site, http://www.bmgconstruction101.com/. Try making your own!
As a kid, I was interested in pro audio. Later I would end up working about 9 years in the industry. I had built several speakers, but they were unimpressive since I couldn't afford good components.
In the 80's the CD horn (constant directivity) was gaining acceptance. Old PA speakers used exponential or radial horns for their mid-hi output. These horns, like the tweeter on a consumer speaker, produce a "brighter" sound on-axis than off-axis. That is, they cover a wider angle at lower frequencies, and gradually narrow at higher frequencies. (In the case of radials, this is only true vertically).
This behavior is bad in both home and PA speakers. For PA's, it defeats the goal of delivering a uniform experience to each guest.
Some papers in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society showed how to design a CD horn which solves this problem. I spent a lot of time analyzing the commercial horns; many were compromise attempts at CD, because CD horns are big. By measuring photos, I could extract the geometry.
First Attempt
I designed my own horn. It would be taller than most comparable commercial units used in cabinets - about 12" wide by 9" high. I made a male mold by slicing the design into layers 3/4" thick and cutting them from plywood. Then I plastered the stairstep into a smooth surface, sanded and varnished it till it was glossy. I bought polyester resin, fiberglas cloth and roving. Applied plenty of mold release to the male mold, and laid up the horn.
When the resin had cured, I found it was impossible to extract the male mold from the horn. I now had a large, heavy, completely useless amalgam of wood and fibreglas.
Second Attempt
I had built the male mold ruggedly, hoping to make multiple horns with it. Starting over, a I built a flimsy hollow male mold of masonite, with plaster providing the radiuses transitions. Again, I sanded and varnished. I made the trickiest part out of wax, casting it in a special mold. Since this part was so hard to dislodge, I planned to melt it out of the final horn.
This time it worked. I destroyed the masonite mold pulling it out. I heated and ejected the wax portion. I bolted on a JBL 2426 compression driver - a fairly nice 1" exit driver. I had built an electronic crossover, but couldn't get it to work - the opamps would float up to the v+ rail. So I used a graphic EQ as a XO and paired the horn with a previously built cabinet for bass - crossed them at 1600 and dialed in the "mass corner" eq. CD horns need an eq boost above their "mass corner", around 3.5k where the mass of the diaphragm creates a low-pass filter.
Results
The driver/horn combo sounded awesome. Really clear, airy highs; sharp attack on percussion, and none of the "honk" you hear in cheap PA speakers. My fiberglas work was horrible; very heavy and fully of air bubbles, with a rough backside.
I designed the electronics for doing the only binaural cochlear implant experiments ever done. The implants were two entirely different models, with entirely different interfaces, and I got to get them to present sounds with different delays to learn about how time delays affect our perception of speech and of location of sounds. The people who wear these have artificial hearing: they are actual cyborgs, and I got to rebuild their electronics.
The second coolest was a redisign of their cochlear implant for a blind person who wasn't getting any benefit from the normal design. Since they were also quite blind, it was their only way to communicate normally with anyone, and they were very thrilled to be able to hear speech for the first time in years. No other model of implant could have been rebuilt that way, and it was difficult to make safely, but well worth the effort.
1. Terraced garden in front of my parents' house. Laid out the design, foraged (along with my dad) discarded railroad timbers (i.e. ones that had rotted out or whatever), and replaced an ugly old cinderblock wall with a set of nice wooden terraces.
:)
2. Cubic compost enclosure made of wood and wire mesh (because the rats will eat right through plastic), with a hinged top and a hinged side. Built it with my daughter, who was about 5-6 at the time. (I'm a longtime slashdotter, and my wife is even smarter than me in non-geeky stuff, so our daughter can do just about anything.)
3. At some point in school I took some basic ways of making paper airplanes and made variations, seeing how different I could make derivatives look. So I've got a paper airplane design that is basically mine - never seen anyone else make it.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Probably the most impressive stuff I've done has been in software:
In terms of hardware hacking, I've built a couple of cartridge dumpers for the Intellivision, and assisted in reverse engineering some of the system's hardware behavior. I also interfaced the Intellivoice peripheral to my PC (via the cartridge dumper) and used that interface to reverse engineer the Intellivoice. I wrote the world's first working emulation of the Intellivoice from that reverse engineering. And then there were a couple fun projects I did as an EE student that I thought were pretty cool as compared to what the rest of the class did:
(There's some more, but you'd have to be an EE to appreciate some of the cool hacks we did.)
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
When I was in engineering at Penn State University, I spent a spring break constructing a really cool, fairly complicated, motorized vechile out of laser-cut acryllic. I used AutoCAD for the design. Here are the pictures: http://open.izrm.com/~jason/tank-images/
** cement is fed into a spinning mold by a complex feeder (my part of the project) that rolls on small train rails, then put in to a steam room. 4 hours later you have a pipe outside the mold "curing" in the sun.
Pre-college...the coolest thing I ever built was a guitar. It was a kit, and it worked...I felt like a God, but then I realized I was a little boy with no real experience in life. So I went to college. Everything I built in college was very cool at the time, be it a compiler from scratch, a uC in VHDL burned on an FPGA, or that synthesizer that used new sound generating algorithms and used 1/4 of the memory of production digital synths, and was just as fast. However, the coolest thing(s) I've built have to be things that happened after graduation. I made a machine that opened and closed car doors an average of 7 times a minute for 7 days straight. I had a plethora of sensors, and reporting software, etc. It's being used a major auto test facility for durability testing. At the same job, I designed and built a battery charger/discharger that could charge or discharge at 4A at 50V for an unlimited amount of time....POWER was put into this thing, it was great. I'm working on something right now, that I would love to talk about, but unfortunately cannot.
I designed the hardware (8051 micro controller based) and wrote the software for a fly by wire control system used to win the world offshore championships one year. You can see a pic of the boat and TCU here: http://www.cpanel37.gzo.com/~concis/dsn_serv.html
Probably one of the neater things that I've built was Tetris Weightlifting: http://www.tetrisweightlifting.com/ Basically a modified version of Tetris with a bunch of sensors attached to home-made weightlifting equipment that functioned as the controls. Not to mention that I was able to work on it as a project for my Masters' degree.
The Solar Death Ray!
http://www.solardeathray.com/
I actually JUST finished building a computer in an old Nintendo case. It has front USB ports, Slot loading DVD-ROM, audio/video out, and carefully placed power, network, and vga ports. I know I'm not the first person to do something like this, but it sure has been fun! I even have an ATI remote that I configured to control the Freevo menu. I also bought two SNES controllers with USB connectors from RetroZone that work great with ZSNES. The box is running Ubuntu and actually boots up pretty quick. The board is a VIA Epia 6000 Mini-ITX.
I've gotten up to a few fun projects this year.
CompactFlash in-dash mp3 player - yeah, you can get off-the-shelf CF players cheap these days, but mine's 100% homebrew, made mostly from spare parts left over from a handheld data logger project.
Temperature & Humidity-controlling terrarium - for growing highland Nepenthes, certain orchids, other plants with very specific requirements. Since the writeup, it's gone to microcontroller Peltier heating/cooling and an ultrasonic mist generator instead of aquarium pump for humidity.
PS2 Rez Trance Vibrator - as popularized by the well-known GameGirlAdvance article. They're no longer in production, so I reverse-engineered someone's reverse-engineering and (forward-engineered?) made my own.
The TrashAmp - subwoofer and amplifier built entirely out of things found curbside on trash night.
In college, I made a VCR internet-ready. Some friends and I had started sort of an underground newspaper, and as it gained popularity there was talk of running our own pirate TV programming over the dorm cable network. One of the group had access to the hub room where the coax feed to the dorms was generated (mainly from satellite tuners) and assigned to channels. Our programming was to take over the useless "information channel" (scrolling text marquees for events that had already come and gone, etc.) after midnight with prerecorded student-created shows and B movies. I had a shitload of classes that semester though and couldn't stay up past midnight every night to start playback, so I wired together some transistor drivers from the VCR buttons to the parallel port of an old 486, so that it could be remotely controlled via ethernet by a script.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
trebuchet. no joke.
Actually, it was a Xenon arc strobe built to capture bullets passing thru solid objects, such as:
. jpg
http://www.gotsheep.com/BulletEggShots002_sm.jpg
The first attempt failed, however, and the accidental discharge found myself sitting thru a drywall portion of the garage lucky to be alive.
http://www.gotsheep.com/Exploded_StrobeBoard_crop
Both were fun. I wouldn't recommend the shock thing tho.
...omg ! I have no life - I have no life ! Why !
A Chevy engine. The machine shop bored stuff out and cleaned it up, but the actual reassembly of the engine was done by me, in the shed in our backyard. It started fairly easily, but a sparkplug wire came loose and burned on the exhaust manifold which got very hot because the engine wasn't properly timed. I shut it down and the next day got it started and running normally. I think I did well because it had the really nice, quiet, smooth sound that a new car engine has. Unfortunately I ran out of money for such projects, and I had to go back to school. I sold the car and never heard back how many more miles came out of it. The most important thing I probably learned was that I can do mechanical stuff if I put my mind to it, but that I would never be really great at it. Also, there were a couple of minor injuries along the way. My best friend got splashed with gasoline due to a loose fuel line, which irritated his skin badly. He ran to the shower and was fine. Some of the skin on my father's hand got caught between two pieces of metal on the engine stand. IIRC, that required a few stiches. I felt quite guilty about having injured people around me, and I didn't get hurt. It seemed like that project was jinxed. I had a '72 Ford Torino for a while and that was a fun car. I fixed the steering and the brakes, no troble at all. I would have had the machine shop do the engine, but money was short again and it needed body work. That one was sold to a BMW dealer who had plans to take the Cleveland V8 out and put it in a sports car body. I bet that would have rocked; but I have no idea if he actually did it. I stopped messing around with cars in my early 20s, and haven't looked back... probably a good thing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
As for cool things I'm building/built... one was a 6 by 4 foot topographic US Map painted to look like a satellite photo, with 200 LEDs on it - 100 in what we considered the most interesting national forests, parks, etc, 50 in the state capitals, and 50 in interesting places we found. The project took me and the rest of my family several months of summer vacation, and was donated to the local public library after we finished. I'm currently working on an upgrade to the control system - the original was a set of rotary switches that wasn't very easy to understand and broke down after people abused one of the switches. The new system uses an ASCII capable vacuum fluorescent display, a 4x4 matrix keypad, and a small embedded x86 based single board computer running Linux and a few hundred lines of C++ I wrote to manage it, though to reduce cost I may be changing that to a 286 SBC running a replacement BIOS written in assembly language to do the entire thing. The only pictures I have of it are on the horrible hosting I had access to when I did the project... excuse the ads and other crap. http://www.ch-portfolio.i8.com/USMap.html/
Projects I'm working on right now: rebuilding the control unit for the map mentioned above, and a microcoded brainfuck processor built entirely from 74xx series SSI and LSI logic and 27xx series EPROMs. I decided to start that project because the only brainfuck processors I've seen so far are either basically interpreters running in dedicated hardware (the PIC based one) or FPGA based, which somehow seems like cheating.. (the VHDL one). Plus, I was bored.
(would be posting as kastein, but my registration is taking forever to go through)
(Front view) (back view).
With a friend, who had access to a machine shop, we made several plates, and I added the webbing and two tank straps. Another friend had the bladder custom-manufactured in Italy.
Total cost was less than $80 (without tank, regulator & console), which is not bad compared to the retail price which would be in the vicinity of $700-$800.
After many years of not doing any low-level electronics, I jumped in the cold water and built a complete drag racing timing system based on Atmel microcontrollers ... only thing pre-built were the actual light barriers and the notebook that feeds and receives racer data ... beats buying a $20k+ system ;) And has worked rather well through now 4 full years of racing @ 8-9 events per year ...
I got tired of my digital camera running out of juice, so I built an external battery pack.
Instead of two AA batteries inside the camera, I have a line running out to a plastic battery case and 4 D cell batteries. Considering a 4 pack of D's costs about as much as a 4 pack of AA's, it also saves money.
two bicycles fixed side-by-side, a starter motor from a car, and bit of gearing and rubber belts, and 15 mph up and down my street. It was my first big moving project and I was ecstatic.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
It is funny that this subject should come up as I am currently trying to get some exposure for this. The little video tells the story. I need visionaries! :-) http://www.williamhigginsart.com/
I thought I wouldn't have anything to reply with, but I just remembered I actually built a standalone cd-burner for my friend when he was drafted some years ago (Norway).
It was just an old computer with an old cd-burner (like 2x or 4x or something), linux and a shell script, no screen, no keyboard, just power. But it worked perfectly. He had in in his room and it became an instant success at the barracks. Just turn it on, put the cd and cd-r in and it starts automatically, beeping and spitting the cds out when it's done. (root was never mounted rw, so just turn it off when you're done.) Worked for both data-cds and audio, but was basicly only used for audio.
He said he alone probably burnt a couple of houndred cds during his service, pluss it was often used by others as well, never failed either. (Well, if the cds were dirty or scratchy they had to be cleaned first, but it would fail before it started to burn so I don't think it really counts..)
It was a fun project, especially because the end result worked so well.
Nice, very nice. But, I bet you could never throw the pigskin a quarter mile. *I* could.
I recently built a propane mini-forge. I used Ron Reil's design, with a freon tank as the body of the forge and a naturally-aspirated burner. It gets to about 2000 F, I think, though I haven't yet measured it. It's hot enough to forge steel and when I get around to tuning it, to weld steel.
Obviously, the coolest device that I've created is my Cold Fusion machine.
I built a trebuchet out of an end table, a 2x4, and a piece of railroad track. It worked!
A small, six nines cryogenic plant for Texas Instruments in Houston. I didn't do it all by myself, of course.
What? That one blew up? OK then, a prototype hydrogen-generating facility in Chalk River.
What? That one blew up too?
I give up - ice cubes.
When I was in high school, I built some parts for the temperature regulation system of the AMSAT Phase 3D satellite. 288 tiny aluminum parts, each about 2cm long, and 0.1mm tolerance on all measurements. We used the school's CNC milling machine, but I had to hand-write the CNC code to do the parts in four passes, because the CAD/CAM software wasn't up to it. We then we hand-polished the parts to get them within tolerance where possible. The satellite is still in orbit, it shows up in J-Track as Oscar 40, but apparently it doesn't work anymore.
Maybe not as cool as Linux, but i have made my own OS. And built a ethernet firewall with it. You learn a lot writing those things...
Powertel 2000. Turn on, Turn off, Reboot, etc. Do this all remotely via touch tone phone. Used an 8748 Intel Single chip controller. Software was developed on an Intel MDS model 230. This beast has a whopping 64K of ram and uses 8 inch floppies holding 500k each. Both still work. I still use the Powertel when I need to reboot our mail server.
As a webmaster/BOFH I needed a tool to see what services were up when people call and say "My site is down!".
::::"
The coolest thing about it is if the drive is mounted read-only, mySQL will spit out an error on one of the ports. When I see that, I know the system needs to have fsck run at the console so it will remount the drive read/write. This works on w2k3 IIS servers, too. Ironically, at work we are not allowed to use nmap, but netcat is installed on our shell server (nc).
Here it is, scan1.ksh :
#!/bin/ksh
# use netcat to port scan and see if services are running
clear
# ping
ping -q -c 1 $1
# just scan to see if port is open
echo "--- scan ---"
nc -z -w 5 $1 21-25
nc -z -w 5 $1 80
nc -z -w 5 $1 110
nc -z -w 5 $1 143
nc -z -w 5 $1 465
nc -z -w 5 $1 993
nc -z -w 5 $1 995
nc -z -w 5 $1 3389
# echo quit gets a banner
echo "--- banners ---"
echo "QUIT"| nc -w 5 $1 21-25
# fancy stuff to get a http page
echo -n "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc -w 5 $1 80 | head -5
echo "QUIT"| nc -w 5 $1 110
echo "QUIT"| nc -w 5 $1 143
echo "QUIT"| nc -w 5 $1 993
echo "QUIT"| nc -w 5 $1 995
echo ":::: DONE scanning $1
I was worrying about the problem with a musician friend of mine in early '96. One of those, "wouldn't it be great if we could do this?" kinds of talks where you imagine doing a performance with a huge machine behind you not making any physical noise but affecting audience members' physiology. A few days later, I was singing in the shower when it hit me,
'harmonics'! You can play two tones together that have a harmonic at a much lower frequency!
Long story short, I used a tone generator and laid down a series of tones on a DAT tape. One for the left channel, and a slightly different one on the right channel. When you looked at the signals together on an oscilloscope, you can see where the harmonic peaks occur and 'tune' for the frequencies you want. I went with a DAT tape because I needed
perfect reproduction. A bad tape speed or bleed from one channel to the other would mess it up. The oscilloscope used was actually a mixing program on a computer (don't remember which one now).
The harmonics created in this way are not uniform, especially in an unknown performance space. You end up with areas where the harmonic is produced and areas where two different tones are playing. As a solution to this, we did the following during the performance:
have your crowd be moving
have your speakers change distance between them
map out performance spaces ahead of time and identify 'hot spots' for
audience.
I thought I was pretty hot shit coming up with this idea in the shower. Then a friend did some research and found out that the British army employed just this method (play two tones to get an infrasound freq) as a method of crowd control in 1973. The army discontinued it's use when it caused seizures in some people with epilepsy.
Reported side effects for us (the people doing the performance) and from our first (and only) audience for this thing:
discomfort 25%
nausea 15%
paranoia 5%
no effect 55%
Anyway, that's the coolest thing I've ever built.
Not just answers, the correct questions.
I work with the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray observatory located in the Pampas of Argentina. The detectors of the observatory cover an area of about 60x60 km. Near the middle of this array, myself and a small group of colleagues constructed an ultra-violet laser "test beam" facility. Sort of simulates the signature of a cosmic ray, but traveling upward. http://casab.physics.utah.edu/clf
Physical? A tensegrity sphere. 2', from dowels, wire and screw eyes. Just because people don't believe it when they see it. They don't believe it when they touch it, and they don't believe it when it bounces off the wall intact.
Virtual? A network of voting machines (circa 1989 like they have/had in Connecticut) in Hypercard. Because was remarkable to be done with an end-user product and 1-bit graphics on an 8 MHz machine.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Now wait. You're probably all thinking "What's so cool about that? Just go to Fry's/MicroCenter/your favorite electronics dealer, buy a motherboard, case, power supply, components, etc. and you're done." That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about building an IMSAI 8080. The processor was a 2 MHz Intel 8080A 8-bit processor. RAM? You had to build a separate S-100 bus card using 1Kx1 chips to have RAM in the computer. Power supply? Here are a bunch of capacitors, diodes, resistors, a circuit diagram and a printed circuit board. Go nuts. Hope you're good with a soldering iron.
I spent several weeks putting one of these together in 1976. Once I had it together and working, well, you needed something to get your results on other than the LED panel, so I built a Lear Siegler ADM-3A video terminal. Again, the logic board was a big printed circuit board and you had a couple hundred chips, resistors, diodes and capacitors that you had to solder on it. I used that terminal all throughout college to connect to Boston University's time sharing system.
<sigh>Those were the days.</sigh>
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Nothing more fun than IEEE cameras, high power lasers, picomoters, and LabVIEW! Yes, this was something I actually designed, but I'd rather not have to work in a laser lab again. Those places scare me.
you are making X-rays!
A miniature sender for the german radio controlled clocks (DCF-77). Only using a PIC 16F84 + resonator, resistors and the antenna of a broken radio controlled clock, changed from parallel to series L-C resonator. It could set the radio controlled clocks within a short radius, and was used as a birthday gift (celebrating on the birthday, time signal was of the day before 11:55 pm, so we could repeatedly clink glasses as the date changed to my friends birthday).
Built it from scratch, put a 27" TV in it, pulled apart an xbox and wired up the buttons. Took my roommate and I about a week and a half.
Some that I am most proud of are: I built a DARPA challenge vehicle, a huge wooden sculpture structure, a 20 foot tall metal tripod with a hanging fire-pit, and am working on building a business.
But if you want to see something cool, look at my robot arm here or here
Thanks for the chance to brag a bit!
-John Fenley
Firstly, I'm surprised to see a smaller quantity and variety of things people have built than I would have expected.
I already voted "Telescope" above, but I actually have somewhat of a list of things I've built:
- A number of kites. I think the coolest one is a Nasa Parawing. A couple yards of ripstop nylon and some strong kite thread, and you've got a simple kite that will drag you across the ground.
- A weaving loom (not a real fancy one)
- A MAME cabinet. OK, so I didn't finish the whole cabinet, but I did build the controller.
- I also have the standard pile of finished electronics kits and other odd projects.
In my high school computer lab they used a piece of software called FoolProof to lock down the Macs. Limiting where files could be saved, software from being installed, control panel settings from being changed, ect.
In my programming class we routinely had to have the instructor disable this software to test our applications. So I wrote a program that looked just like FoolProof. After entering the password, clicking okay, switching the software "Off" and closing the dialog box my program would wait ten seconds...then send the password to the printer.
At the end of class I handed the sheet of paper and a diskette containing my program to the instructor.
He was less than amused.
"The difference between genius and stupid is that genius has its limits." -- Unknown
... at least as far as I know. Of course I didn't do it on my own, I only engineered the electric system.
The only real contender is the wireless transport robot control system I built this spring. It's only a pity it hasn't been used in a plant yet...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I'm working (almost done) on a debugger that lets you run and step your program backwards as well as forwards. It lets you check out the state of the program at any time. Additionally I'm working on a tool which visualizes the call stack over time. You can also save whole program runs to review them later. All of this without any code instrumentation so it runs at full speed (depending on your setup). Check it out at: www.ghs.com/products/timemachine.html (the web page really doesn't do it justice)
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Earlier this year, I worked on a project to connect a barcode scanner to a cellphone using a daughter board that connected to the SIM socket. The end result was to send a SMS message with the barcode to a database. It was the first time I had ever worked on anything to do with hardware and I was amazed when it worked. I have absolutely no training in electronics at all. The daughterboard used a pair of AVR microcontrollers. The guy producing the daughterboard, was really helpful. His site is at http://www.bladox.com./ Check out the interesting boards he produces.
It was something I built as a child, around 8 through 10 years old.
Thanks to generous relatives and a well know predeliction for LEGOS, I had am almost inexhaustable supply (more than 2 tall kitchen trash cans full) of space/moon themed legos.
Combine that with ample floor space in my playroom and a huge piece of plywood and you have the ingredients for the larges LEGO moonbase in history.
Essentially what I made was a lunar landing site by covering the plywood with moon texture lego tiles. On top of that I built, over the greater part of 2 years, a "lunar base" complete with, among other things, a launch pad, landing strip, housing quarters, energy reactor, elevated tram system, munitions dump/armory, and weapons installations to defend against land and space attacks. Not to mention numerous spacecraft.
Everything was reasoned out as well as a child's mind could and everything was designed straight from my imagination. Major upgrades came in August (my birthday) and December (Christmas) after the family got even more Legos for me. There were even major rebuilds, whether from "space attacks," sister attacks, or just revamping because of newer or "better" ideas.
At its peak I needed another piece of plywood to contain part of it. It never ceased to amaze my friends, relatives, and even my parent's friends. More importantly I had a freakin blast making it; it was more fun making and redesigning than "playing" with it.
And then, as only a child can do, I disasembled it without a thought. The Legos got tossed in the garbage cans (not to throw away but to store them) and I eventually gave them to a friend's younger brother when I was in high school.
So, yeah it was only for fun and yeah it wasn't of any use to anyone else but me, but it was the neatest thing I ever made. Sometimes I kinda miss it.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I was bored one day in high school, so I took a TI-85, the GraphLink sonic rangefinding sensor, and a turntable, and made a surprisingly functional sonar unit. Some simple calibration, and modification of the control program to display results in radial graph mode was all it took to show objects, etc, on the screen.
Seems a little silly now, but it was the first time in my life I felt like an engineer.
100keV protons, about 4uA http://www.niell.org/cyc2.html 2klbs, ~4kW Totally awesome.
As an aside, I just figured out how to use one of those green lasers to create a cool lightsabler blade effect.
You get a prism from an old SLR camera and rig it so that it spins on a tight axis creating a thin tube of light with an inch or so diameter. You'd need a thin shaft with a knob at the end to stop the beam a meter away.
On a related note,I've been wondering if perhaps one could cancel out a visible laser with another one which is emitting at the same wavelength, but with opposite wave peeks and valleys. Like a wave balancing effect in audio wiring, but I don't know my optics well enough to anwser this. It would be an interesting gadget, though. . .
-FL
In the last year of high-school, I built an electronic organ. Four octaves, powered from 12 V DC, so it would work in a vehicle. And it was built from scratch: the white keys I cut out of leftovers from the new bathroom walls, nice white laminate. The "black" (actually brown keys) were pieces of oak strips from where the wall meets the floor, also leftovers from some construction work on the house.
I drilled holes in all of these 49 keys, and used a long 4 mm steel rod as the pivoting axle, with a number of supports spread out along the length so the whole assembly wouldn't sag down. I put a long screw into the end of each key, and a steel band along the length of the keyboard, so when a key was depressed, the screw would hit this steel band and make electrical contact. Each key also had a return spring attached to its screw, and for these springs, I got them out of a couple defunct mechanical adding machines from the flea market. I also used a couple hundred washers as spacers between the keys so they wouldn't snag on each other.
The electronics were 12 small circuit boards with a 555 oscillator and a 7493 4-stage counter, one for each of the 12 different notes in the highest octave, and with the 7493 generating the other notes in the remaining octaves. There is a 2:1 frequency ratio per octave, very convenient. Each of the output were wired to a key through a resistor, so when the key was pushed down, its screw would make contact with the steel band and feed the signal from this to an output amplifier, an LM380. Chords were possible by holding down several keys in the same way as on a piano or organ, since these series resistors made the waveforms add. Square waves, at TTL level, then attenuated down to line level (about 1V peak-peak) gave it a unique sound.
The thing had to be tuned, each of the 12 oscillators had to be adjusted after the piano or other instrument at hand, but when this was done, it sounded reasonably good. There were some temperature dependences and drift over time so it frequently needed re-tuning....
It was mounted on a steel frame that one of my fellow students welded together, in the car that we had for the traditional "russ" graduation celebrations. It worked well for playing the national anthem and other music, though we were too busy with standard activities such as drinking and dancing, to have time for many concerts. We'd scavenged a bunch of speakers out of old TV sets on the municipal dump, this was long before recycling or RoHS or anything like that, so there were plenty to grab from. The LM380 had its work cut out.
I still have this whole kit around here, slightly modified to use CMOS 4040s and a tone-generator chip that I found at Radio Shack once in the early 1980s, simplifying the tuning as there is just one master oscillator now. This oscillator also has a frequency modulation option to generate tremulo...
Although I haven't played it for a while. A couple years ago, I used it to play christmas songs at my sister's house, but as they have now got a real piano, my homemade instrument is now mostly a museum piece.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
screw your bong man, me and my friends pulled off a 5-chamber bubbler! We also made waterfalls, gravity bongs (easy), simple single-chambered bubblers, and ofcourse in my ceramics class i was making around 6 bongs daily. My teachers flipped.
First thing I really remember building was a crystal radio. Pretty basic, but it sucked me into the world of electronics.
In high school I wound my own electric guitar pickup, and even made my own shielded cable. They sucked, but they were free (spare parts). OTOH, they taught me to play to my strengths, and learn when to just buy something... a valuable lesson.
Years later, I was part o a small team who build ground vehicle traffic control systems, from accident detection and rerouting systems to the system than let the city of Los Angeles monitor and control traffic during the 1984 Olympics. Some seriously cool stuff, and really rewarding.
More recently, I got back into vacuum tubes. I have designed and built several guitar amps. Even better, I helped a teenager at church learn this stuff. Together we desinged his amp, then he rebuilt an old, messed up amp of little value into something he loves.
But the coolest thing will be if I build a company to make and sell these amps, and eventually emply teenagers here and people who want to better themselves here or in a couple of other countries.
It's all under the gpl, and you can see what we're up to here:m e
http://reprap.org/
http://reprapdoc.voodoo.co.nz/bin/view/Main/WebHo
http://reprap.blogspot.com/
http://reprappers.blogspot.com/
http://objects.reprap.org/
If you want to make your own 3D printer, or borrow one of our loaner machines (once we have some), please come check us out.
My friends and I built a working, two-octave, pump-powered pipe organ out of plywood, 2x4's, rubber, and network cable. We filled an "air tank" that we built out of plastic sheeting by means of a bellows, then used that tank for pressured air to send through the pipes.
Ignorance is not linguistic drift.
Powered by a Modicon PLC, it moves a foam block through three actuators.
La I present to you, the Power Destructitron X.
Not terribly impressive to look at, but it uses three different power sources, and I built the thing with my own two hands.
It's been a long time.
So, at the age of 9, I don't how I came to the idea, but I destroyed a pair of my grandfather's headphones, in order to connect them to two coils that I had built using copper wire of an (also destroyed) AC/DC transformer. I put a rod of metal in each one of the coals, had the rods at a distance of about 4cm, then connected the headphone jack which was connected to the first coil into the radio, and put on the headphones which were connected to the other coil. And... there was music transmitted over air!
Since then I have also built a couple of much more ehm... innovative things, but never have I felt so cool as that afternoon...
Needed stuff
-- 1 Ford Mustang
-- 1 Walmart mechanics chair (the thing with wheels that they lay on to get under cars)
---- NOTE: make sure it has plastic wheels !
-- 1 Boat chair
-- 1 Roll of duct tape
-- 1 Ski rope with the handlebar
-- 1 [near]Empty parking lot (at 2am, the walmart you buy this stuff from is a good candidate)
-- 1 Full set of pads or body armor (optional...)
-- 1 friend that knows how to pay attention while they drive (NOT optional...)
Instructions
1) Duct tape the boat chair about 2/3 of the way towards the back of the mechanics chair. Having the back of the chair right in front of the back wheels seems to be a good place as it's worked for me.
2) Tie the ski rope to the back of the mustang.
3) If you've opted for the body armor, now's a good time to put it on.
4) Sit in the boat chair, hold on to the ski rope.
5) Motion to the driver to slowly start driving in circles, gradually getting faster untill they either feel uncomfortable going any faster or you look scared, whichever comes first.
6) Use your legs and feet to keep your balance & serve as emergency steering.
7) Crow like a rooster when the plastic wheels burn off and you have a 6+ foot rooster tail of sparks behind you.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Back in highschool, me and another guy built a pretty lame dataglove.
He did the hardware, a bunch of potentiometers for the fingers, A2D conversion, didn't quite get to 6DOF movement sensors so used the mouse instead.
I did the software and 3d modeling of the hand, got to learn some DirectX, though our teacher told us to use VB (ick).
What it came down to is a palm controlled by bulky array of potentiometers and a mouse which could grab and move objects in 3D.
I didn't invent the Fairlight CMI, but I, and a group of about 6 others, were given the chance to improve it and make it as good as we could with the technology available.
l
. jpg
Link on it here:
http://www.artandtechnology.com.au/tech/index.htm
Went on to work for a bigger company, but what we did for Fairlight Instruments was the COOLEST thing I've done in my career. And this is with 20 years hind site.
Done stuff more fun, but that isn't the question. Having a family (I've a wife and 3 kids, oldest 20) isn't quite the same as being world leaders in your career, even for a short time.
But, if it was up to what people look at on my web site, than this Nerd! cartoon appears to be the coolest thing I've done.....
http://www.artandtechnology.com.au/cartoons/nerd!
And your could note that the two are connected!
Adrian S. Bruce
It was a moment of weakness. Sorry
I couldn't decide between the two, so I'll post both.
My wife is really into Living Dead Dolls, and she'd been wanting a display case for them for a couple of years. So last Christmas I got some tools together and got some supplies, and I made a casket shaped shelf for them. It matches the boxes perfectly. It's flat black on all the outer surfaces (exterior, front edges of shelves) and glossy blood red inside. It came in at about 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide at the widest part.
The other one was a physics project back in my senior year. We had a choice of 4 different projects, and I chose to build a mouse trap car. About six other people decided on the same. Mine wasn't the fastest, but it went the farthest, and distance was the main goal. Everyone else wanted a quick start, hoping it would sling the car into action, aka "the hare". I went with "the tortoise." I used an old erector set, 2 CDs, to 12 inch records, a coat hanger, string, and a little synthetic motor oil. The CDs and records are obvious, and I used the erector for the body. I straightened out the coat hanger and used about 2 feet of it and "extended" the mouse trap with a hook arm, sort of like the one Doc Brown made for the Delorean in the first Back to the Future. I tied the string to the hook end, and wound it around the rear axle (where the records were, so more distance per revolution) and greased both axles. When the trap was triggered, it pulled the string SLOWLY, and moved rather smoothly down the hallway. It went about 45 feet down the hallway past two class rooms. No one else thought it was even going to go anywhere.
*slight crashing sound*
When I was younger I lived in the country on a fairly large lot. I was always fascinated with power poles and distribution, so my father helped me put in 10-foot posts throughout the yard. I put insulators on them and strung wire between, forming an electrical distribution system. I think I even put a few kilovolts on it with a neon transformer I had at the time. I still keep a full-sized bell insulator around.
I'd like to nominate this story as a top ten slashdot story of the year. It's always fascinating to hear about people's inventions or projects, and I think we could use more stories and commentary like this, it's the essence of hacking.
:-)
:-)
I don't know what I'd nominate as my "coolest" invention, but a few weeks back I got sick of buying vacuum cleaner bags (I'm owned by cats) and kludged together a canister from a dead vacuum found in a dumpster to work on my existing one using a toilet tank-bowl gasket, a piece of cheesecloth (filter), a pair of window blind clips )which mysteriously required no alteration whatsoever to lock the canister in place), silicone caulk and odd-ends parts from my junk box, + duct tape (of course). It even fits in the original case after some carving with a dremel, and seems to have improved the suction of the vacuum cleaner some; plus it literally cost me nothing but time spent. I'm rather proud of that one
Next project is to take the couple hundred feet of 1/4" & 3/8" plastic tubing I found for 50 cents at a garage sale, and adapt it to the exhaust on the shop vac so I have something quick and easy to use for blowing the dust bunnies out of computer boxes and other things like electric baseboard heaters (maintenance man by trade). I have a small portable compressor I use for that right now, but the shop vac goes everywhere anyway, and if it can do both jobs that's one less thing to cart around...
so much to do, so little time, but such fun!
Happy hacking,
snarkth
My senior design team built a motorcycle engine dyno for our school FSAE design team:
http://dyno.boxwithlights.com/
But I made a two-tone doorbell from a Dick Smith kit when I was 12.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
check out my unusual work desk installation, inspired by hoodless muscle cars.
The consensus around here is that it's all about the electric banana.
Last year for a highschool electronics project I took an 8052 microcontroller (64 pin Atmel 89C51RD2.. bloody nightmare to solder point to point) and hooked it up to an old Realtek 8019AS ISA network card. Loaded Adam Dunkels' open source uIP tcp/ip stack and webserver onto the micro and attached one of those little serial radio transmitter/reciever modules to the serial port. The plan was that the 8052 would act as a kind of access point for smaller discreet wireless PICAXE controllers to communicate via the radio modules. So you could have the PICAXEs sitting around the house, reporting simple sensor values like the temperature of your toilet seat and reporting those values back to the 8052 access point which would then act as a low-throughput webserver or somesuch. Or it could go the other way, and you might have a small PICAXE hooked up to an LCD as a stock ticker or weather thing that gets values from the 8052 access point.
:)
Pity I never got it finished in time for the competition, but yeah, I think that's probably the coolest thing I've made. My next big project is sending a homemade ocean drifting buoy across the pacific to send back weather data via amateur radio satellites, which might be a tad more challenging
garble
An EEG monitor from a Popular Science magazine. A Blue Box from an Esquire magazine (and ATT docs in the library). A Heathkit Ham transmitter, transceiver (HW101), keyer and the first electronic calculator Heathkit IC-2008-A. (The calculator still works S/N 01224) A 2kW PEP Linear RF amplifier and 4 element 15m Yagi antenna from QST magazine. (Neighbors with electronic music organs weren't happy about it but I was into DX at the time so only up at 1-5 AM) A low power AM transmitter from LaFayette electronics (and a very long illegal antenna). In 1974.
A multi-process PHP daemon ref-counting background-forking syslogging application server that reuses 90% of the web interface classes/objects. Around 5 times the performance of the mod_perl predecessor, one third LOC (compile in what you need and forget about a gazillion require lines).. yeah, pretty sweet.
It's not rocket science but it reliably enables television stations (MTV, TMF and the likes) to broadcast SMS/text message content on screen. Simple chat (including moderation, white/blacklisting) and vote remain the most popular applications but the design is so clean that we could easily do as-live-as-it-gets streams from Hubble on CBS if anyone would be bothered to buy the product and give us a week time to implement it as turn-key solution.
I built up a laser experiment that cooled some metal atoms to about 400 nanokelvin-- that's the coolest that I've ever gotten anything!
I built a radio. It wasn't out of a little set from Radio Shack. I bought copper wire and wrapped everything myself. It could pick up one station, the speaker was made out of a cup and a straw, and had two volume settings: on and off. I was still really proud of it though.
http://www.efalk.org/Miatascope
using a grenade launcher.
The coolest thing I'm building now? The robot builders of tomorrow.
Dean
When I was a teenager I was heavily into model rockets.I used to save my pennies and by 'D' type solid fuel rocket engines by the case lot. Then I'd take a few of my favorite and/or experimental 'birds' out to the launch pad and spend the whole weekend seeing how high I could get
them to launch.
I had my share of accidents; nearly setting my sisters hair on fire, one time, when a tail fin fell off a rocket at launch.
I got grounded for a week.
One launch sent a raw egg 2500 ft into the air [measured by astolabe]. None of my usual spectators
could see where the rocket had gone since it hit some low cloud. Then people started to scatter as the telltale whistling sound of an incoming ballistic could be heard overhead. Everyone panicked, convinced that they'd be killed by a falling, super-sized lawn dart. About 200 feet from the gound there was
a loud pop! and I could see a parachute. IT WAS MY EGG!!!
The rest of the rocket caught fire and started a slow burning descent into my dad's ripe barley field. Realizing what was about to happen I grabbed the family picnic blanket, sending
sandwiches and juice onto the ground. My mom was yelling 'What the heck are you doing!' (actually there were more explitives)
Then my dad saw what I was running for. There was a big burning spot
in his barley field (maybe 10-20 square feet). I ran up to it and
started belting it like crazy with the picnic blanket and finally
got it put out. The egg was found in pristine condition sitting
in the center of the smouldering stubble.
I got grounded for a month.
After many successful launches, and many more unsuccessful ones,
I felt I needed more power. I couldn't get my hands on any 'E' or
'F' series solid fuel rocket engines. My usual response to being stymied
by such a problem was to do research. Finally I found a bunch of information
regarding liquid fueled rockets. I started work in ernest!
It took me about 3 weeks to cobble together what I thought
was a reasonable design. What an aweful yet awesome piece of
garbage it was too... It had two tanks, one for fuel and one for
an *oxidizer of some kind*. I hadn't decided what oxidizer to use.
I wasn't even sure how to get one? I had lots of gasoline for
fuel though.
I had read about Robert Goddard's rocket that just used gasoline.
For the most part, my design was a copy of some pictures I saw
of one of Goddard's.
I didn't have any liquid oxygen so I thought a couple of tiny
welding oxygen tanks would do the trick.
I had been building the whole project in my dad's workshop. This place
was a huge post and beam wood and tin structure with a massive wooden
workbench. Everything was stained with oil and grease from years of
servicing various machinery.
The rocket was supported on the workbench by a huge machinists vise.
A wonder of technology, this engine was a full two feet long.
When filled with fuel it only leaked a tiny bit. I was very proud.
On the prescribed day, I fueled the engine and then decided to to a
small spark test, on the bench, just to make sure the oil furnace
igniter that I was using as a starter would spark. Then the plan
was to roll this baby out into the yard and do *static testing*.
Well, in rocketry even a small fuel leak should never be ignored.
There was a huge !woof! as the furnace igniter caught some leaking
gasoline alight. Then the flames heated some wires and caused a
short circuit. This started the fuel pump running and opened
the oxygen tank valves. There was a brief 20 foot flame and
screeming, deafening whoosh as the rocket engine came to life.
At first my thought was 'OOPS!'. Then a bit of elation 'It WORKED!!!'.
Then realization, 'The workbench is on fire!'. I felt a cold surge
of adrenaline course through my body, and in a fit of stupidity
ran TOWARD the rocket. I guess I thought I would 'shut it down'.
The rocket suddenly let loose from the vise and bounced o
In high school, it AT Physics, we were all assigned a project at the beginning of the semester. Any project as long as it was Physicsy (DOH!) Anyway, i said I'd make a cheapy hovercraft. Teacher said it wouldn't work, I said it would, so he said if I had one working in a week I would get an A for the semester.
I went to the store, got a macramé ring, a Styrofoam ring for making wreathes and such, and some balsa wood. Went home, savaged a hairdryer for it's motor. A hammer, some nails, some small screws, screwdriver, and some duct tape completed the basic ingredients.
I taped the macramé ring to the wreath, both having the same outside circumference. Nailed two 1/4 inch thick balsa wood pieces across the ring so that the mounts on the motor could be screwed the wood "planks", but the fan from the motor didn't. Then I filled in the rest of the top of the macramé ring with thinner 1/8 inch balsa wood, nailing it into the macramé ring. Plug in the motor and Voila! Nearly instant and cheap Hovercraft!
Went in the next day to class (don't forget the doubting teacher at school). Plugged it in. His jaw dropped. Put 2Kg on either side of it, still floats.
I got an A.
Epilogue. It had a nasty habit of going into a spin due to the shape and the motor. Spent the rest of the Semester during project time and at home messing around with it here and there, carving out the wreathe so that the air flow was better and did a counter spin with the airflow, added a skirt (harder than you think), and some measure of remote control.
I also purchased a gas motor so that it wouldn't need the long cord, but sliced the hell out of my hand and never finished it. It's probably still sitting in my dad workshop somewhere.
--
Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.
We recently finished prototyping a head-worn display. Enjoy.
Well I didn't build it.. but designed it.. tried to get it built (en'mass).. but got it stolen by a patent scam group.. now its on the market and you probably have one or two of them...
"THE" cooler with wheels.. (success)
it's original name was "Cool Wheels - Beach Cooler" slogan "It's wheely cool!"
Submitted the idea to a place called "THE CONCEPT NETWORK" back in the early 90's
They initiated negotiations to help get it on the market.. then after recieving my full designs, turned and wanted an exorbitant "unrealistic" amount of money to start the project.. This was all part of the scam of course..
Just like many other poeoples inventions, they took the idea.. said they would keep it confidential for 2 years.. (before this they said it would be confidential forever)
almost 2 years on the dot.. it hit the shelves..
I never recieved a penny.. 2 of the cooler handle and wheel designs are still in use...
Inventors BEWARE these type of scam groups!!!
Fortunately the forementioned patent scam group was nabbed.. is now drowning in lawsuits and is now also now a defunct company. All of the lawsuits were for stolen money, broken promises etc..
But to spite all of that.. it's cool to see them on the shelves..
but uncool to have people not believe me when I tell them the story..
sigh..
A solar car for an engineering competition. We get to compete against many other universities in the Formula Sun Grand Prix and North American Solar Challenge... The North American Solar Challenge is a 2500 mile rayce strictly on solar power. :-)
University of Kentucky, Solar Car Team
I managed the team for the last 2 years, and as a Computer Science of Engineering major, it was cool to get to help with aluminum chassis and fiberglass fabrication, programming microcontrollers, and of course the not as fun, fundraising. Lots of hard work, but I volunteered thousands of hours of my own time and it was a great experience.
I designed and built a full 3D railroad track analysis system for a company here in TX; it scans at (or better than) 0.04" resolution in all axes while traveling at 30mph. System also records GPS position and rail surface temperatures. Software backend analyzes data for over a dozen types of defects. (Up until this was deployed, the railroads still had inspectors walking the tracks with a clipboard or a hand-held pushbutton-type device.)
Check it, yo.
-John Nagle
Nagle Research, Inc.
One:
Non-Tactical Video, a system for training the sailors on the (at the time) 2/3rds of the Navy ships that didn't have NTDS (Navy Tactical Data System) computers (typically, the supply ships and older combatants).
The ships that had NTDS used Radar Video Simulators (typically from Norden, the company famous for their bombsight), which cost about $80K. I replaced it with a stock PC in an Anvil roadcase that we took aboard those ships, with a controller that did the hardware-level radar video simulation.
For it I designed an ISA card that had a 128 byte FIFO and an 8-bit parallel-to-serial TTL chip that drove a hi-speed current amplifier, and a 10-bit up-counter that drove a D/S (digital-to-synchro) conveter, with some support logic, and a program that drove it based on data it was fed over a serial port. This gave 1024 possible blips at any angle, and 1024 possible angles at which I could draw these blips.
The serial port's data came from a Hayes 1200 baud modem whose phone line input came from an RF receiver tuned to receive the information transmitted from the Navy combat systems training school in San Diego. I would hook the D/S converter to a spare channel on the ship's radar switchboard (they always had a spare channel).
Our whole setup cost about $2K each, so they had us make 30 the first run, and a subsequent run of 40 more, I think. I'd moved off the project when it got to the production phase. What i thought the cool thing was that we'd made a 20480x2048 display, but instead of cartesian coordinates it was in polar coordinates, and had a very slow refresh rate. Our slogan at the time was 'We Got Your NTV!' - Sting and Mark Knopfler's MTV tune was at the time getting serious airplay.
Oh - at the transmit end we used a military transceiver and wired our schoolhouse-side Hayes modem to the _microphone_ input of the transmitter by way of a Radioshack audio transformer (modems put out about -13dbM and microphone inputs expect a smaller signal).
The datapath was one-way, so we wrapped the data up with a 16-bit CRC, and dropped bad packets on the received end. The data was very redundant so it worked.
Two:
A 3-D volumetric display using a CNC-machined 13-inch diameter two-bladed helix, a 5-watt Krypton-Argon laser and three pairs of acousto-optical crystals. The crystals were stimulated by electrical energy applied at ~40MHz, frequency modulated by D/A converters driven by memory buffers on the controller card.
The electrical energy coupled into the crystals were translated into mechanical energy by piezoelectric effect, which set up a diffraction in the crystals, which allowed me to steer the beam in the X and Y axis. The laser's output passed through a prism.
The red, blue and green portions were sent on separate paths to these pairs of crystals, so I could pait light onto any spot in the volume occupied by the blades. The controller got a signal when blade 1 passed through the zero point (a fixed hall-effect device, and a small magnet on the helix).
My job was supposed to be simply to write diagnostic software to help the controller board designer debug the controller, but the code evolved into the principal tool used to demonstrate the display's capabilities.
The main limitation with the display was that it took about 1.3uS for one oscillation frequency to 'die down' in the crystal before the new frequency was dominant, limiting us to about 4000 'voxels' per color per revolution (the helix spun at 600 rpm, so we had a refresh rate of 20Hz, which is barely above tolerable flicker. Faster gave less flicker, but the image started to smear. Slower and the flicker became very noticable.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
A cake.
(A cheesecake, actually.)
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell
When I was a child in the early 60's, I was fascinated with Morse Code. I would painstakingly write out Morse Code charts on 3" x 5" index cards and thought that I would give them to my friends in school. Actually, since I didn't have any friends in school, I pretty much gave them to anyone that would take one. I proposed that we could tap our pencils/feet and send the Secret Messages That The Teacher Could Not Decode. This was too difficult to do without lots of study of course, but it did not stop my relentless pursuit of Morse Code.
Meanwhile, back at the Bat-Cave, I noticed that if you loosened and tightened a light bulb, it would make clicks and pops on the AM radio. Being a pre-geek, I took a lamp apart, soldered two wires to the bulb socket (while the lamp was unplugged, for safety of course). I connected the wires to my genuine telegraph key (courtesy of the Allied Radio catalog).
I reasoned that un/rescrewing the light bulb was too awkward to send accurate code, so the telegraph key would make it much more precise. I stationed my sister by an AM radio tuned to white noise, with one of my beloved Morse Code charts. She was to decode my message that I had carefully planned to send. I was going to send the same message that Sam Morse sent in 1844, "What hath God wrought?".
When I hit the first dit of the letter W, there was of course a huge blue spark/POW, as the contacts of the telegraph key welded themselves together with 15 amps of glory! I blew a breaker in the house, and two bedrooms lost power.
I did not burn anything down, but my sister came running out of her (now-darkened) bedroom exclaiming: "T! you sent one long dash, that was the letter T!"
20 years later I became a legit ham radio operator, and did code the right way. I still have the telegraph key welded into a dead short.
Prototype Chevy Tahoe and GMC Yukon chassis and suspension (yes, fabricated by hand); five years before they were in full production.
Well, this is going to go to the end of a long thread full of inane jokes, so nobody will ever see it, but...
;)
I was part of a team in high school that made something that would have worked well with the robot described here. It was a doorknob opener. It was pretty simple -- it had a loop of high-traction material that your wheelchair/robot/whatever would slide up to the door. One side of the material was fixed in place, while the other was attached to a reel. When activated, a small, very geared-down motor powered by a nine volt would reel in the material, causing it to both tighten and pull on the knob at the same time. You back up to open the door, then deactivate it and it releases the knob.
One of the seniors did most of the work, though, so I can't take too much credit
"What is the difference between a Ponzi Scheme and an Investment Bank?" -- Jon Stewart
When I was back in middle school we had to group up and design a structure, out of paper, which could hold the most weight (measured in encyclopedia volumes - scientific, eh?) The caveat was that you had a limited amount of paper, and you couldn't just lay flat sheets of paper on the table.
We designed a 7 column structure, with a flat paper on top. The structure, looking rather flimsy, not only was the leader of the class, it was one of the only ones the professor had ever seen which could support an entire encyclopedia set, including both index volumes. We were quite impressed with ourselves.
1999-2000. Wireless networking wasn't ubiquitous, as it is now. The company I worked for had a dead spot in its new wireless network. But no one could identify which access point was failing. I programmed an application that displayed the current access point, its signal strength, and its MAC address. The application also beeped when the handoff was made between one access point and another. Equipped with my application and a list of the MAC addresses for each access point, the malfunction unit was found in a few minutes.
In the late 90's I was part of a team that was hacking Lava Lite (R) lamps. We built a system that converted SGI Indycam (digital camera) images of Lava Lites into cryptographic seeds of a pseudo-random number generator. And while classic lavarand has been replaced by LavaRnd (directly generating random numbers using lens capped webcams), it remains one of my favorite hacks / creations.
chongo (was here)
Hey, funny you should ask, I've just completed my first nuclear react
NO CARRIER
My first home-built PC was a CP/M (precursor to DOS, still the basis for Windows), Z80 machine with 64K of ram and 2 241K 8 inch floppies. A local University (which I was attending) had a bunch of these and I glomed onto a PC board (no mask on it) with hand drawn traces and no chips, resistors or capacitors. I soldered all of them on then spent 2 months debugging things like traces that were too close and had capacitance between them. I bought the chips, resistors and capacitors, a raw transformer, a fan (all from places like Jameco), had a custom aluminum case made at a local machine shop, added an H-19 (vt52 clone) terminal and I had the only personal computer off-campus owned by any of the CS students. It only cost me about $1700 too (a commercial version of the same box cost $4400 without the terminal).
I did my homework using Microsoft FORTRAN (back when they were just a compiler company) and really hit gold when Borland released Turbo-Pascal v1 for $29 (advertised in Microcomputer magazine).
I have much better PC's now, but still miss the heavy horsepower sound of those Siemens 8 inch floppies moving the heads when doing disk I/O.
d4,...,Nf3, or maybe I should use a Ratfaced Mcdougal?
Back in the DOS (and then early Windows 3.x) days I looked after computers for a university department that spanned 12 buildings. At the time most companies had either a static Menu.bat file or EXE (e.g. AutoMenu) that displayed a list of applications users could type in at the DOS prompt and then after an application ended, came back to the Menu.
.COM file -- you had to hex edit it to change how long it counted down for, from 1 to 250 seconds.
I had issues like virus scanning (almost no one ran scanners at the time), data backup, disk and network integrity checks to take care of and got tired of travelling from building to building all the time so I wrote a Menu.bat that used errorlevels and a tiny countdown timer
If the user pressed the letter of a program, it returned the EL, I trapped for that and the program launched. If the timer counted down to zero, it returned the character you had designated -- trapping for that allowed me to branch into "other things".
Eventually the system could do remote updates, automated distributed backup, disk & file scanning, email checking (used NuPop and a custom also DOS-based mail ap. I wrote) and even reconnect itself to the network. Combined with command line R&R reports, this meant the power could go out yet the next morning the daily reports needed would be sitting in the printer's output tray.
I also added events that displayed upcoming holidays, company functions and eventually would show birthdays (day & month only) for 3 days ahead (to cover long weekends), and this proved to be one of the most "high touch" (i.e. personally coolest) things I did as it gave recognition to everyone from the lowest position on up. People would stop and wish you happy birthday that you normally never talked to. I personally got and gave more birthday recognition there than all other jobs combined.
The system had become a true information leveller and I think about it whenever the next carefully crippled version of Windows is about to be released. No wonder DOS was kept so limited -- who knows what you could accomplish if it wasn't.
I come here for the love
I wrote a poem that motivated an angel to consolate me. Thank God.
I've built combat robots for battlebots--well, was on a team that built them, I'll hardly take all credit for myself. I haven't been involved for some time now as I had to move for college (though now that I have my own car I could make the commute again... hmm.) Our team has built, among others, Cyclonebot, probably the most electronically complex 'bot ever fielded (excepting perhaps Mark Setriakan's creations), and Ziggy, a recent Superheavyweight champion.
For me, and by far and away the least cool thing posted, I guess, compared to some of the other things (I like the police response time to 40 foot flame jets! ROFLMAO!!! ;-), but I'm pretty stoked with my mobile recording studio.
;-), but it's rockin'!
A secondhand iBook G4 933, Audacity 1.3.2 beta (Garage Band is too bloated to use for live multitrack), 1x Griffin iMic, 3x Sony Singstar audio adapters, an 8-way balanced to unbalanced buffer board and a 4-way USB hub aggregated in AudioMIDI Setup. Total cost (excluding mics and cables) AU$1000 (About US$730)
Still sorting some levels calibartion issues (the kick drum looked like I'd run it through the guitarist's Marshall! Ah, the magic of EQ in post
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Sorry, but not much beats the sheer fun of making your own gunpowder, thermite or nitrocellulose and watching it go up.
surface to air missiles using model rockets and gunpowder.
i was never brave enough to actualy use the pvc shoulder launcher.
...but as a kid I used to dabble in cells and wires and stuff....I made this game where you have a wire frame that's convoluted with bends and spirals, attached to cells and a bulb and then a looped wire with a holder. You have to pass the loop ever so carefully from one end to another without the bulb lighting up (the loop touches the wire and completes the circuit). Not an original idea (I saw something like this on TV) but I was amazed at how something that can be so much fun can be so simple to make!
Also, when I started programming (few years on) I managed to make a simple file splitting utility and a little later, a program for changing the colours of bitmap files, in Turbo Pascal, and I was so happy and proud at that, (of course, I later discovered freeware versions of both on the web that were quite superior to what I had made) but that really meant something to me.
Trebuschet with 16' throwing arm that can throw a 10ft bowling ball 300 feet, made with authentic roman construction methods (hardwood pegs instead of nails, glue, etc)... came in first in TX state latin 3d art competition.
8' sailboat (PDRacer.com); mine is Hull #68
Pot still (for distilling water for my iron, of course).
Aluminum foundry & casting setup.
Homebrew beer.
Cigar Box guitar, now converted to a banjo.
moox. for a new generation.
A slightly larger than average go-kart built entirely out of wood. Still trying to decide on some of the design elements (motor, etc.) but it seems to be coming along nicely. It seats 2, one passenger situated directly behind the driver, with all the fixin's including power steering and a stereo. I'll have to start a site dedicated to it's progress one of these days.
...by doing what any extant life form is capapble of doing: reproduction. You must be so proud. I guess if it makes you happy, that's a good thing.
Blar.
Along with a few partners, we've managed to build a vehicle that can consistently produce over 170 db of sound pressure. The catch is that the car had to be modified to a point where it would not be drivable ever again. As it sits right now, the vehicle has no seats, no seatbelts, no mirrors, no interior door handles, a steering wheel which is only in place long enough to move the car to and from the trailer, and around whatever venue is it being transported to. The throttle, brake and gear selector are only accessible through a removable panel in the reconstructed dash, which gets sealed up when we compete or test the system. The vehicle itself has been completely reinforced, with a floor receiving 4" of concrete beneath 6" of solid wood, doors filled with expanding foam and then built out with wood and fiberglass, windows which have been removed and replaced with 1" plexiglass, including the windshield which was split into three sections. The rest of the rear section of the vehicle (the enclosure for the woofers), is solid wood with some fiberglass.
We managed to do this with only 4 12" woofers, each with 3 voice coils. Each voice coil gets a dedicated 1400 watt RMS amplifier, for a total of 12 amps and just shy of 17,000 watts of power. 16 golf cart batteries sit in a custom battery box in what was formerly a trunk. 8 6-volt batteries and 8 8-volt batteries are connected in series-parallel, putting the system at 14.77 at a full charge.
The whole contraption weighs about 5-6000lbs, making it a royal PITA to trailer around. But in it's defense, it has been both a Canadian record holder and a world record holder, and has served as a great advertising platform for the sponsors that have picked it up.
Two kind of silly, but useful devices:
1. In the early 70's I had a portable stereo tape deck which did not shut off at the end of a cassette tape. After a while I noticed that tapes were getting munged at the beginning because the tape would stop, and the capstan pin would sit against the rubber roller until someone shut it off, and that left a dent in the roller, which then stretched the next tape every rotation until the dent in the roller relaxed. We made a circuit which monitored the output from the tape deck, and after 30 seconds of no sound, it would pull a solenoid down which pressed the OFF button. Worked great.
2. In 1989, before the one-cup coffeemaker craze, I would often lament the waste of time, sugar, and cream when I would pour a cup of coffee from the office pot, add the mix-ins, and then taste it, discovering that the coffee was too old, and thus bitter. I went to radio shack and bought a magnetic window alarm sensor and a multi-function stick-on clock-timer. I wired the clock so when the battery was connected, it was in timer mode, and started counting time. Then I connected the battery through the sensor, which detected when the water reservoir cover was closed. When someone made a fresh pot, they would open the cover (disconnecting the battery), pour the water in, and close the cover (reconnecting the battery). The timer would be reset by the power outage and start timing the age of the pot. I found that anything over about 15 minutes was not worth drinking.
The perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer -- debuggingrules.com
"Debugging" by Dave Agans - the perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer.
It looks like it's about 20:1 for actual responses, so I'll add mine.
I built an Elecraft K2 (more pix). Mine looks pretty much like the one in the picture.
A couple of weeks ago I went to Amsterdam and used it on Saturday and Sunday and got my radio to signal to Bulgaria, Russia, Italy, Montenegro, Poland, and England. (OK, some of these were also with another kit, a handheld KX1, but it's smaller and took only a weekend to build; more info, magazine article with more pix)
I was the primary programmer for a plasma arc furnace designed for NASA. We drove a 25,000 degree plasma torch in 3D and a 6 inch crucible for pouring exotic metals. The gadget also had forced water cooling and a massive air pump for holding the internal pressure anywhere between .01 and 100 atmospheres. Very Cool real time project.
At one point we had a leak in the water cooling system so the torch refused to ignite. The mechanical engineer on the project disabled my safety interlock and proceeded to blow up a $100,000 torch head. Like I said very cool project.
But you did give me a chuckle!
In electronics class , worked fine , fun building.
Oh I will have children, but not until I've made my mark in my professional career as well as academics.
If you have the kids first, you never get the rest of it.
Blar.
The coolest thing I ever built was an adding machine made out of K'nex that used binary logic gates. It was five feet long, but could only add two bits! (The amount of friction made it impossible to add more complexity.) I would have posted sooner, but I waited until I could upload a video of it to You Tube. K'nex Adding Machine
Around the same time, I also built a K'nex Rocket car.
If you think that is easy, check all the arithemetic required to make one that is actually in tune.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.