Collaborate Disseminate
Alright, everyone has 30 seconds to get all the jokes out of their system before we proceed with a look at this 3D printed wooden ball polisher. Ready? Theoretically, making …read more Continue reading Have a Ball with This 3D Printed Sphere-Making Machine
Breathing exercises – in which a person takes slow, deep breaths – have been shown to reduce stress and anxiety. Focusing on breathing in this manner can be difficult, however, which is where the PAWS “breathing ball” is designed to come in.Continue Re… Continue reading PAWS ball helps calm people by breathing along with them
Since Galileo began observing celestial objects with a telescope, an almost uncountable number of improvements have been made to his designs and methods. Telescopes can now view anything from radio …read more Continue reading Portable Telescope Rolls Anywhere
Rugby is a chaotic game at the best of times, so it can be difficult to gauge when illegal actions such as forward passes occur. That’s where a new “smart rugby ball” comes in, which is packed with sensors that record its movements.Continue ReadingCate… Continue reading Brainy ball keeps tabs on rugby games
When we first caught a glimpse of this ball juggling platform, we were instantly hooked by its appearance. With its machined metal linkages and clear polycarbonate platform, its got an irresistibly industrial look. But as fetching as it may appear, it’s even cooler in action.
You may recognize the name …read more
Continue reading Robotic Ball Bouncer Uses Machine Vision to Stay on Target
Disco balls take a zillion mirrors glued to a sphere and shine a spotlight on them. But what if the ball itself was the light source? Here’s a modern version that uses addressable LEDs in a 3D-printed sphere that also hides the electronics inside the ball itself.
Check out the video below to see the fantastic results. It’s a Teensy 3.6 driving a whopping 130 WS2812 LEDs to make this happen. (The sphere has the highest surface area to volume ratio!) There’s even a microphone and an accelerometer to make the orb interactive. Hidden inside is a 4400 mAh battery …read more
Continue reading Disco Ain’t Dead: Blinky Ball Makes You Solder Inside a Dome
[James Bruton], from the XRobots YouTube channel is known for his multipart robot and cosplay builds. Occasionally, though, he creates a one-off build. Recently, he created a video showing how to build a LED ball that changes color depending on its movement.
The project is built around a series of 3D printed “arms” around a hollow core, each loaded with a strip of APA102 RGB LEDs. An Arduino Mega reads orientation data from an MPU6050 and changes the color of the LEDs based on that input. Two buttons attached to the Mega modify the way that the LEDs change color. …read more
Continue reading Gyro Controlled RGB Blinky Ball Will Light up Your Life
[Snille]’s motto is “If you can’t find it, make it and share it!” and we could not agree more. We wager that you won’t find his Roball sculpture on any shopping websites, so it follows that he made, and subsequently shared his dream. The sculpture has an undeniable elegance with black brackets holding brass rails all on top of a wooden platform painted white. He estimates this project took four-hundred hours to design and build and that is easy to believe.
Our first assumption was that there must be an Arduino reading the little red button which starts a sequence. …read more
They lie at the heart of every fidget spinner and in every motor that runs our lives, from the steppers in a 3D printer to the hundreds in every car engine. They can be as simple as a lubricated bushing or as complicated as the roller bearing in a car axle. Bearings are at work every day for us, directing forces and reducing friction, and understanding them is important to getting stuff done with rotating mechanisms.
What first pops to mind when using the term “bearing” is probably something from the broad category of rolling-element bearings, like …read more
Take a couple of thousand steel balls, add a large wooden gear with neodymium magnets embedded in it, and what do you get? Either the beginnings of a wonderful kinetic music machine, or a mess of balls all stuck together and clogging up the works.
The latter was the case for [Martin], and he needed to find a way to demagnetize steel balls in a continuous process if his “Marble Machine X” were to see the light of day. You may recall [Martin] as a member of the band Wintergatan and the inventor of the original Marble Machine, a remarkable …read more
Continue reading Keeping Magnetized Marbles from Stopping the Music