AvE shows us that you don’t always need a complex expensive setup to drive industrial equipment. A simple Arduino setup is shown here to perform some simple stepper manipulation. The Arduino is connected directly to the Stepper driver which handles all of the complex microstepping etc. All the Arduino needs to do is enable it, chose a direction and pulse some steps at it. The result is a nice
Pop bottles normally find their way into the trash or recycling but if you have some time you can make some interesting rockets with them. The 2 stage water rocket above was launched to a height of 864 feet. This one quick to build the rocket portion, most of the bottle work is for looks and a bit of stable flight purpose. The neck of the bottle
There are lots of uses for MOTs (microwave Oven Transformers).  The guys from Make it Extreme have come up with a great new use. Convert them to a Heavy Lift Magnet. They take a number of transformers, chop the top off the laminated core and weld them to a heavy base plate. They are then wired to a common power source and the surface of the transformer that will touch the
This Gesture Controlled Lamp is powered by Raspberry Pi. An infrared camera is connected to the Raspberry Pi allowing the system to monitor for wand movements since the wand has an IR LED build into it. OpenCV is used to decipher the wand movements. There are a few simple gestures that are recognized to magically control the light. Via: Make “After a recent trip to Universal’s Wizarding World
We have seen Paper Airplane making systems in the past, this one is super fast. Taking a stack of paper and jamming it through a set of rollers bending and folding as it goes makes for a very fast plane machine. The use is great, stack it full of flyers and fly them at your targets. Doing this from a tall building might be lots of fun! Via:
Instead of going out climbing wall or the movies this virtual experience system can provide you a variety of experiences in one facility. The user uses VR for the immersive visual experience and physical objects for the tactile environment.
Mark Nesselhaus is building a computer the hard way, by using handfuls of transistors and cardboard. “Attempt to build a computer using cardboard and brass paper fasteners as the base material for all of the logic circuits. Why? Well, the cardboard is free as my workplace puts it in the dumpster and I do not have the funds to buy better material. All of the electronic parts thus far
