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Building stuff! That does stuff!
yalborap
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, some of you might read things like Make Magazine.
Some of you don't. Which is a shame, because their blog and their magazine show some crazy awesome shit.
Then there's stuff like Instructables, which shows MORE crazy awesome shit.
In short, people are building kickass stuff.
This is the thread to discuss that. Show crazy shit you've made. I want to see it. Others want to see it. Robots, machines, programs, whatever, you've got pretty much free reign.
Sadly, I don't have anything. Why, you ask? Because I don't have that right mindset. Which is the second part of this thread. Helping those of us stuck in a consumer position start making crazy awesome shit. Any advice on that front?
BEGIN POASTING.
Some of you don't. Which is a shame, because their blog and their magazine show some crazy awesome shit.
Then there's stuff like Instructables, which shows MORE crazy awesome shit.
In short, people are building kickass stuff.
This is the thread to discuss that. Show crazy shit you've made. I want to see it. Others want to see it. Robots, machines, programs, whatever, you've got pretty much free reign.
Sadly, I don't have anything. Why, you ask? Because I don't have that right mindset. Which is the second part of this thread. Helping those of us stuck in a consumer position start making crazy awesome shit. Any advice on that front?
BEGIN POASTING.
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Yeah, those are insanely simple. I've done one or two. Mainly because it's five minutes of work and I had a coin battery lying around. The LED I tore out of a McDonald's toy.
I'm building a projector currently from the help of www.lumenlab.com, so that I don't have to pay 2000 dollars for high def cinema and $300 for a replacement bulb.
I'm also really big into the victorean era/steampunk design style, and I'm working up plans to design a study at my next place of residence, complete with an oak bar, library stack bookcase with ladder, bear skin rug (fake, but very realistic), and coal stove/fireplace (actually an electric heater)
That is awesome and I envy you, sir. I envy you SO MUCH.
It's a scooter you drive around with a wireless camera transmitting to your sunglasses.
We laugh because now the whole thing has been replaced by a 20 gig ipod that plugs directly into the stereo and is easier to use.
edit: interesting side note, that guy is now the project leader for the adium IM client, for all you mac/linux users.
Why are you so awesome?
I had nothing to do with that, just saying it was cool to mess with.
However, if you want to do something cool for a project, you can pick up a mini-itx motherboard from mini-itx.com, they are made by via (epia) and they have onboard graphics and processors, about 1 ghz, nothing too fancy.
Here's the fun part.
They're exactly 6x6 right? That happens to be the exact dimension of the old NES console, and some of the screw holes line up perfectly. That little black strip has built in vents, and where it goes down the back is the perfect width of a 40mm cpu fan, so with a dremel, and a little patience, you can build a cpu in an NES case and use it as media center for your TV for around $350 in parts, maybe less.
there's some good tutorials on make, oldschoolsystems (if it's still up), and mini-itx.com
Okay, that seriously is awesome. I'm jealous now.
Battle.net
got that nice 22 inch dell widescreen monitor just going to waste running your computer?
talk to this guy
bidding ended on that item, but it's part of his store.
you gut your monitor and connect the FFC (firm, flexible cable) to the new controller, and instead of just VGA, you get VGA, composite, svideo, and ntsc tv coax outputs, all for $81 shipped. So now you've got a 22 inch lcd tv. It works with pretty much any lcd monitor, but the catch is that you have to buy the part from the guy to get his attention, and on the off chance his controller won't work for your system, he'll refund your money.
beats the hell out of paying $500 for an lcd tv.
if you've got an old laptop, and you just want a spare monitor, no tv, you can also get a vga controller board for around $50 shipped, but why not pay the extra $30?
I've seen these done. Sadly, I am too low on cash to make one. I mean, a friggin' 360 game breaks the bank for me.
The only problem is that the cardboard sono tubes I used for the perches tend to break, since my fatass cat likes to drop from the top tier, hitting the next two tiers on her way to the ground.
And a python program to replace the serial number generator our software guys gave me, because I couldn't copy the result of theirs to my clipboard.
That's pretty much it for things of any utility.
yes, and the russians still use pencils and save millions
hurt, that's sweet man. I remember seeing how much those were when I had a cat and I was like "hell with that, I'll just make one"
but I ended up just letting the cat stay on my couch at all times.
They just used a pencil, haw haw.
I actually contemplated selling them for profit, but I live in an apartment. Also nearly impossible to ship, and I only know so many people who are as insane about cats as they should be.
Recently I built a carpeted cat box for them to snuggle up in at night, which looks a lot better heh.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
Anyway, in order to pull off this schedule, I had to take two hour lunch breaks and still get off work by 5:00. Which meant I had to get up at 5:00 in the morning. My wife, she didn't get up until 6:00. Lets not get into why she didn't do anything with the cat. Lets do get into the fact that I needed a way to wake me up at 5:00, without disturbing my wife sleeping next to me.
I started by tearing open an alarm clock and pulling the two wires out of the speaker. I taped these two wires to my arm and let the alarm go off.... Nothing. Too weak. So then I opened another alarm clock, this one a bit beefier, and tried the same. Still no go. I think it had around 0.5v running on the wire. I measured it, but I don't remember the result.
Now I have two broken alarm clocks with no speaker. So I took one of the alarm clocks and ripped out the transformer - the one that steps down the voltage from 120v to 9v. I flipped it around so that I would be stepping the voltage up instead of down. I stuck the speaker wires from the other alarm clock into the "output" end, taped the "input" end to my arm and gave it a go.
El Zappo. Perfect. The shock was really minor, perfectly tolerable without scaring the shit out of me. But the wires were... Uncomfortable. So I soldered these two wires to a couple of pennies, sewed them into the band of a wrist brace and I was all set. Set all that up, and I had me a shock clock to wake me up without disturbing my wife. At bed time, I would pull the wires out of my night stand, plug them into my alarm clock, strap it on and go to bed. I gave myself a good 10 feet of wire so as to not rip anything out of the wall or off the nightstand.
I didn't like being wired to it though (too many thoughts of strangulation, or lightening hitting the house and killing me, stuff like that), so I ordered a wireless transmitter kit from some electronics shop. I had everything set to make a wireless version of the clock, with the clock transmitting a signal to a shocker I would wear strapped to my arm. Never bothered, though. I lost interest after I didn't need to use it any more.
The only thing I've ever made was that elmer fudd rabbit trap, and it works. :P
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Dude they have these at furniture stores. I'll try to find a link for you, they are awesome.
Well the dog sure as hell didn't like that solution, and took to pissing all over the house. So our options were to lose the cat again, or clean up pee every day (I voted for 'get rid of the dog' but apparently that option wasn't on the table). Time for another solution!
I went to the Home Depot and bought a shit ton of PVC pipe and chicken wire. I made a nice big cage out of the PVC pipe, 6'x6'x3', and surrounded the whole shebang with chicken wire. Then I made a "tunnel" to connect the doggie door to this cage. A few industrial tent pegs and bungie cords, and viola! An inescapable dog run that can be used for peeing and going outside and not peeing in the house.
The dog still pees everywhere. He's a bastard.
This is fucking epic I have to make one
There are more pictures online, but my friend has them on his forum account there, and I feel like some things there are NSFW. Might post more later when I'm at home. It was featured on collegehumor.com at one point as well. Later, I built a giant cardboard trojan horse with friends and left it in the middle of a populated area of campus the night before classes started.
Take all the guts out (and don't kill yourself doing it - there is a capacitor inside with about eleven billion volts that will kill you if you do it wrong). Go get some thick acrylic plastic, mold it into a shape to fit inside (determine the inside dimension first... Maybe use styrofoam or something) by using a hand held blow torch to *slightly* melt it and bend it into shape. Seal that off, hook up some lights and pumps and tubes and junk, and boom! Fish tank of awesomeness.
A common use for such a thing would be to tear out the actual monitor, pop an LCD screen in the front, and toss a mini-ITX rig into the back. Great for LANing older games.
You could also do a jukebox, or a computer arcade cab. Or experiment with one of those composite/s-video to VGA converters and build a little booth for your old consoles/system link play.
This is a very good point. Be CAREFUL. You touch the wrong thing, your ass is up against the opposite wall and you're figuring out which religion got it right.
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When I took my hardware course, the book had a section on repairing CRTs. The first part of it was basically, "Don't". The rest was, "If you must."
Proper capacitor treatment consisted of leaving it unplugged for several months. Then opening it up, getting a screwdriver with a rubber handle, and very carefully prying the little rubber suction cup thing up, at arm's length, with your face turned away and your eyes covered while praying fervently.
There was a Kerry rally on campus that summer, and they brought LARGE cardboard cases of water bottles. So after the thing was over, we made off with a ton of giant boxes. I think we layered them together three-thick in my friend's dorm room, and stuck them together with spray-adhesive. Cut out the two sides, then cut a long edge strip to go between them. Made a ton of smaller "L" flaps of cardboard to glue around the edges for support, and spray painted it yellow in the yard outside (7 cans, if I recall) while grilling some treats. It started to rain while the shit was still tacky, so we had to carry it inside and back up to his room, where it stayed for a day or two, and released terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad fumes to the point where you couldn't really breath in his room very well.
I think we took it out 2 or 3 times before it fell apart. Most people enjoyed it. One dick punched it. Lots of tiny kids thought it was a giant wheel of cheese ("Daddy, it's cheese!" "No honey...").
The suit was hot as shit to wear though. But I'll post more pictures tonight, I s'pose.
[edit] Also, not sure this falls in the "stuff that does stuff" category. :shrug:
Those are some way cool projects.
I got as far as rigging a webcam to track finger inputs on a chunk of plexiglas and scoot the mouse around a little, but kinda dropped the ball finishing mine. One of these days I'll put some legitimate effort into finishing it.
I had a bunch of other crap written up, but Tofystedeth says it better.