Author Archives: James Hobson

Robot Arm From Recyclables

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A robot assistant would make the lives of many much easier. Luckily, it’s possible to make one of your own with few fancy materials. The [circuito.io] team demonstrates this by building a robot arm out of recyclables!

With the exception of the electronics — an Arduino, a trio of servo motors, and a joystick — the arm is made almost completely out of salvaged recyclables: scrap wood, a plastic bottle, bits of plastic string and a spring. Oh, and — demonstrating yet another use for those multi-talented tubers — a potato acts as a counterweight.

Instead of using screws or …read more

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Robot Arm From Recyclables

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A robot assistant would make the lives of many much easier. Luckily, it’s possible to make one of your own with few fancy materials. The [circuito.io] team demonstrates this by building a robot arm out of recyclables!

With the exception of the electronics — an Arduino, a trio of servo motors, and a joystick — the arm is made almost completely out of salvaged recyclables: scrap wood, a plastic bottle, bits of plastic string and a spring. Oh, and — demonstrating yet another use for those multi-talented tubers — a potato acts as a counterweight.

Instead of using screws or …read more

Continue reading Robot Arm From Recyclables→

Sir, It Appears We’ve Been Jammed!

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In a move that would induce ire in Lord Helmet, [Kedar Nimbalkar] has hacked together a simple — yet effective — WiFi jammer that comes with a handful of features certain to frustrate whomever has provoked its wrath.

The jammer is an ESP8266 development board — running some additional custom code — accessed and controlled by a cell phone. From the interface, [Nimbalkar] is able to target a WiFi network and boot all the devices off the network by de-authenticating them. Another method is to flood the airspace with bogus SSIDs to make connecting to a valid network a drawn-out …read more

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Can You Bull’s-Eye A Womprat With A Bean Bag?

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As it turns out, a simple game of cornhole — aka, bean bag toss — can have some pretty high stakes. If you lose a round playing on this Death Star trench run cornhole table, the Rebel Alliance may pay the price.

Designed and built by [Hyperdynelabs], the table is set up to play a number of audio clips from the movie with accompanying light effects. Details on how it was made are scant, but there are at least three strips of RGBW LEDs — two that run the length of the board and one inside the exhaust port — …read more

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Take A Bicycle Tour Anywhere In The World

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Imagine yourself riding through the countryside of Tuscany in the morning, then popping over to Champagne for a tour in the evening without taking a plane ride in the intermission. In fact, you don’t have to leave your living room. All you need is a stationary bicycle, a VR headset, and CycleVR.

[Aaron Puzey] hasn’t quite made the inter-country leap quite like that, but he has cycled the entire length of the UK, from its southern point to its northernmost tip. The 1500km journey took 85 hours over the course of eight months to complete.

CycleVR is actually a VR …read more

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Take A Bicycle Tour Anywhere In The World

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Imagine yourself riding through the countryside of Tuscany in the morning, then popping over to Champagne for a tour in the evening without taking a plane ride in the intermission. In fact, you don’t have to leave your living room. All you need is a stationary bicycle, a VR headset, and CycleVR.

[Aaron Puzey] hasn’t quite made the inter-country leap quite like that, but he has cycled the entire length of the UK, from its southern point to its northernmost tip. The 1500km journey took 85 hours over the course of eight months to complete.

CycleVR is actually a VR …read more

Continue reading Take A Bicycle Tour Anywhere In The World→

Fidget Pyramid with Help From a 2500 Pound Robot

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Depending on whom you ask, fidgeting is an unsightly habit or a necessity for free-form ideation. Fan of the latter hypothesis? Well, why aren’t you making yourself a fidget pyramid?

[lignum] sculpted his fidget toy out of a chunk of 2000 year old bog-oak using hand tools and a little precision help from a Kuka KR 150 industrial robot arm. A push button, a toggle switch, a ball-bearing, and a smooth side provide mindless distraction on this piece.

Two plates of 1.5mm aluminium — also cut using the robot arm — are used to attach the button and toggle to …read more

Continue reading Fidget Pyramid with Help From a 2500 Pound Robot→

Fidget Pyramid with Help From a 2500 Pound Robot

Posted on by

Depending on whom you ask, fidgeting is an unsightly habit or a necessity for free-form ideation. Fan of the latter hypothesis? Well, why aren’t you making yourself a fidget pyramid?

[lignum] sculpted his fidget toy out of a chunk of 2000 year old bog-oak using hand tools and a little precision help from a Kuka KR 150 industrial robot arm. A push button, a toggle switch, a ball-bearing, and a smooth side provide mindless distraction on this piece.

Two plates of 1.5mm aluminium — also cut using the robot arm — are used to attach the button and toggle to …read more

Continue reading Fidget Pyramid with Help From a 2500 Pound Robot→

3D Print Your Next Dwelling In A Day

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What’s the shortest amount of time in which a 400 square foot home can be built? A few weeks? Try a fully printed structure in 24 hours for a little over $10,000.

This radial residence was materialized out of concrete in Stupino, Russia by [Apis Cor], and six collaborating companies, as a prototype. As opposed to traditional — such as it is for tech largely in its infancy — assembly of pre-printed or fabricated pieces, the building was printed as a whole, with the printer removed by crane before finishing the rest of the construction. It features a bathroom, hallway, …read more

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Burn Music On To Anything!

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If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again. This is especially true when your efforts involve a salvaged record player, a laser cutter, and He-Man. Taking that advice to heart, maniac maker extraordinaire [William Osman] managed to literally burn music onto a CD.

Considering the viability of laser-cut records is dubious — especially when jerry-built — it took a couple frustrating tests to finally see results, all the while risking his laser’s lens. Eventually, [Osman]’s perseverance paid off. The lens is loosely held by a piece of delrin, which is itself touching a speaker blaring music. The …read more

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