Collaborate Disseminate
Brushless motors are fascinating devices that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but you’ve probably never seen one in the form of a free-spinning shiny metal egg. Created …read more Continue reading A Spinning Egg For Your Thoughts?
Let’s be real, nobody needs a tiny motorized escalator for their desk. But now that you’ve seen it, can you really say you don’t want one of your own? The design …read more Continue reading Up Your Desk Toy Game With This 3D Printed Escalator
Magnetic levitation is a beautiful thing to watch. Seeing small objects wobble about while seemingly hovering in thin air never gets old. If you want something suitably distracting in this …read more Continue reading Building a Levitating Turbine Desk Toy
This thing right here might be the coolest desk toy since Newton’s Cradle. It’s [Stephen Co]’s latest installment in a line of mesmerizing, zodiac-themed art lamps that started with the water-dancing Aquarius. All at once, it demonstrates standing waves, persistence of vision, and the stroboscopic effect. And the best part? …read more
Continue reading Kinetic Lamp Sheds Light on Scientific Principles
In 1994, Weezer famously said that “you take your car to work, I’ll take my board”. Obviously, for the office-bound, surfing is simply out of the question during the working day. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun with a desk toy inspired by the waves.
The …read more
Newton’s Cradle was once upon a time, a popular desk toy in offices around the world. For [TecnoProfesor], however, it wasn’t quite flashy enough. Instead, they built a simulated version with flashing LEDs. As you do.
Rather than relying on the basic principles of the cradle to make it work, …read more
Continue reading Simulated Newton’s Cradle Makes A Flashy Desk Toy
If you’re like us, you probably spend more time browsing Reddit than you’d like to admit to your friends/family/boss/therapist. A seemingly endless supply of knowledge, wisdom, and memes; getting stuck on Reddit is not unlike looking something up on Wikipedia and somehow managing to spend the next couple hours just clicking through to new pages. But we’re willing to bet that none of us love browsing Reddit quite as much as [Saad] does.
He writes in to tell us about the handheld device he constructed which lets him view random posts from the popular /r/showerthoughts sub. Each press of the …read more
Continue reading Burn Some Time with this Arduino Reddit Browser
Earlier, we had covered setting up an AS3935 lightning detector module. This detector picks up radio emissions, then analyzes them to determine if they are a lightning strike or some other radio source. After collecting some data, it outputs the estimated distance to the incoming storm front.
But that only gets you halfway there. The device detects many non-lightning events, and the bare circuit board is lacking in pizzazz. Today I fix that by digging into the detector’s datasheet, and taking a quick trip to the dollar store buy a suitable housing. The result? A plastic plant that dances …read more
Continue reading Storm Detector Modules: Dancing in the Rain
Thanks to the general miniaturization of electronics, the wide availability of cheap color LCD screens, and the fact that licensing decades old arcade games is something of a free-for-all, we can now purchase miniature clones of classic arcade cabinets for about $20 USD. In theory you could play these things, but given they’re less than 4 inches in height they end up being more of a desk novelty than anything. Especially since it seems like most of the effort went into making the cabinet itself; a classic example of “form over function”.
Unfortunately, if you want to buy these little …read more
Desk toys are perfect for when you don’t want to work. There’s a particularly old desk toy called the Newton’s cradle. If you don’t know the name, you’d still recognize the toy. It is some ball bearings suspended in midair on strings. If you pull back, say, two balls and let them swing to impact the other balls, the same number of balls on the other side will fly out. When they return, the same number will move on the other side and this repeats until friction wears it all down.
We think [JimRD] might be carried away on procrastination. …read more
Continue reading Newton’s Cradle for Those Too Lazy to Procrastinate