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Using a screwdriver to start your car
[Hahabird] uses this screwdriver to start his car. Despite what it may look like, only this particular screwdriver will start the ignition because it still uses the key lock. What he’s done is alter the screwdriver to act as an extension for the key. It’s purely aesthetic, but you have to admit it looks pretty gnarly hanging off of the steering column.
The hack merely involved cutting off the unneeded parts of the key and screwdriver. With the shaft of the tool cut down to size he clamped it in a vice and cut a slot into it using a hack saw. From there he headed over to the grinding wheel and smoothed out the sharp edges.
The key itself had the handle portion cut off and was thinned on the grinding wheel to fit snugly in the screwdriver slot. To permanently mate the two pieces he used a torch and some silver solder.
[via Reddit]
Filed under: security hacks
High voltage Thor’s Hammer: Mjolnir at 80,000 volts
[Thor's] hammer, Mjolnir, is pretty freaking awesome. It can only be picked up by [Thor], he can use it to fly, and probably the coolest part, it can summon lightning. After watching the first movie, and goofing around with the guys at ArcAttack, I had this idea that I could stuff a tiny tesla coil into a mjolnir and end up with a really cool prop.
At this point, I had to make a decision. I was either going to go portable and live with small arcs, or make this a stationary piece and hide a giant tesla coil in a base. It would have bigger arcs, but I couldn’t carry it around. While I may re-visit the stationary version at some point, I ultimately decided I wanted to be able to wander around and play with this thing.
I had seen some videos of [Staci Elaan] showing off her battery-powered coils and I really liked her results. I figured, with her experience, she could probably do a better job than I could on getting the most bang out of a small package. She was happy to be involved and delivered a small 12v powered coil for me to work with. I should also point out that the coils [Staci] makes are usually donated to educational groups. This woman is awesome.
She had built this big flat head on it, with the initial plan being that it would be the front “face” of the hammer. It didn’t really work out that way though. I ended up having to increase the size of the head a bit and change the orientation of the coil. I experimented with different types of foam and you can see in the “making of” video what I finally ended up using. The blue insulation board you see in the pictures melted way too easily.
After the hammer was all constructed, and ready to film, we shipped it to California. As you might know, Hackaday is connected to a studio there, now called inside.com. When it arrived, it had suffered a tiny bit of damage and the arcs were a bit smaller. They had gone from roughly 4 inches down to maybe 3. We filmed a few videos and had a ton of fun. Unfortunately, I learned a month later that all the footage for [Thor's] hammer was lost.
I had them ship the hammer back to me in Missouri, and this time it was very damaged when it arrived. I modified the design a little bit, re-assembled it, and tested it out. The arcs were still roughly 3″ when going to another piece of metal and I was finally going to be able to share this project. I cobbled together a quick costume out of a t-shirt, some foam board, and hot glue and now you see the result!
For those who would like to learn more about the coil itself, you can find the circuit and an entire lesson on solid state coils here(pdf 8MB).
Lets jump into some pictures!
[Staci] supplied pictures of the various parts of the coil during construction. Keep in mind, she didn’t have a lot of time and I asked her to get this done pretty quickly.
The Boost converter:
The controller card:
The HV coil:
RF inverter:
This was all initially going to fit in the handle, but I gave her the wrong dimensions. It ended up being millimeters too wide. It now resides in the head of the hammer with the coil.
The initial design that was way too melty and didn’t work very well:
The final design, big but functional:
The whole time, I was scared someone else would beat me to the punch. It is such a simple idea. I think a stationary one that could do arcs of several feet would be fun to see as well, but I’ll have to save that for another time.
Filed under: classic hacks, Featured
Ruggedized Rainbow Box
Nick Poole, a technologist for SparkFun Electronics, built this beautiful Arduino-powered rainbow box: Recently, I had the opportunity to see Phil Lapsley talk about his book “Exploding the Phone,” a history of phone phreaking. When I found out that he was coming to give the talk, I was reminded of [...]
First to File? Nah, First to Blog!
Like most people out there, I sometimes have more ideas than time to implement them. So instead of keeping those ideas locked in a notebook somewhere unaccessible and not serving a purpose, I’m going to release them into the world as public domain in the hope that they might inspire, or at a very minimum keep an idea from being patented. You can do whatever you like with these, except for attempting to patent them yourself. It is my sincere hope that by releasing these ideas, more awesomeness and excellence will be brought into being.
Charge Your Smartphone–With Fire!
If fire wasn't the first thing invented, it was probably the second. The human race has had a long relationship with fire, and now you can use it to charge your smartphone, GPS, or anything else that you can connect to this thermoelectric generator using a USB cable.
Pipe Cleaners Make for Elegant Zoetrope
Usually the most challenging and time-consuming step in building a zoetrope is positioning the individual still figures just right so they animate smoothly when it's turned on. ITP student Sanniti Pimpley found a way around this by crafting her ballerinas from easily pose-able pink pipe cleaners.
Resin Casting: Going from CAD to Engineering-Grade Plastic Parts
Plastics are not just ubiquitous, but extremely versatile: some of them are incredibly stretchy, while some are hard as nails; some are crystal clear, and others come in all colors of the rainbow; some can survive extreme temperatures, and yet others can stop a bullet mid-flight. Michal Zalewski walks us through his simple process for casting plastic parts for use in high-tolerance engineering applications.
A Micro-House Inspired by a Prison Cell
Plenty of small homes and small interior spaces take their cues from boat and airplane interiors, however this is the first I'd heard about where the inspiration for the design came from a prison, and expertise from the prisoners.
AM tube radio restored and given MP3 playback too
This AM radio looks a bit like it did coming out of the factory. But there are a lot of changes under the hood and that faceplate is a completely new addition. The project really is a restoration with some augmentation and [Michael Ross] did a great job of documenting the project.
The Kenyon radio was built in 1946 and uses vacuum tubes for the amplifier. Considering its age this was in relatively good shape and the first thing that [Michael] set out to do was to get the electronics working again. It involved replacing the messy collection of capacitors inside. He then cleaned up the tubes, checking for any problems, and put the electronics back together to find they work great!
He cleaned up the chassis and gave it a new coat of finish. The original dial plate was missing so he built a wood frame to match a dial scale he ordered. The bell-shaped brass cover hides the light that illuminates the dial.
He could have stopped there but how much do people really listen to AM radio these days? To make sure he would actually use the thing he added an Arduino with an MP3 shield. It patches into the antenna port via a relay, injecting modern tunes into the old amplifier circuit. Catch a glimpse of the final project in the video after the break.
Filed under: digital audio hacks
Mac Mail(Box)
Italian designer Francesco Mugnai posted a great collection of 22 unusual mailboxes, of which seven geeky favorites are shown here. The Power Mac G4 takes the cake because of its double entendre. Suddenly snail mail has all new appeal. The X-Wing mailbox below was made by MAKE community member Craig [...]
Introducing the Fenn, a Touchy-Feely Robot
Ian Danforth has created a robot he hopes change how people, mainly children, think about and interact with robots. It's called the Fenn. Ian, founder of Embodied AI, has written a children's story about our contact with an alien planet and the creatures who live there. The Fenn is the robotic embodiment of one of those creatures. Ian and the Fenn will be at Maker Faire Bay Area this month.
DiResta: Photo Book
In each bi-monthly episode of DiResta (every other Wednesday at 2pm PT), artist and master builder Jimmy DiResta (Dirty Money, Hammered, Against the Grain, Trash for Cash) lets us into his workshop, to look over his shoulder while he builds whatever strikes his fancy. On this episode of DiResta, Jimmy gets all crafty and makes a quick portfolio by cleverly folding up photos of guitars he's made
“Spongebob Squarepants” Music Composer Builds a Bubble Machine
From the creative mind of Steve Belfer, who composed music for the animated TV show "Spongebob Squarepants," comes this awesome homemade bubble machine. The video that shows it in action is, of course, accompanied by Belfer's fun and quirky tunes.
Joey Hudy: One of 10 “Smartest Kids on the Planet”
Last month, Super Awesome Sylvia, one of our favorite young makers, was selected to show off her WaterColorBot at the White House and meet President Obama. Yesterday, Joey Hudy, another young maker and MAKE regular, was named by Business Insider as one of 10 smartest kids in the world. Wow.
DIY laser cutter built to make stencils
It was time for some new T-shirts so [Andreas Hölldorfer] built a laser cutter. Wait, what? That’s the excuse he’s going with, and in the end this scratch built laser cutter did come in handy by cutting stencils to use when decorating his garments.
The first thing we thought when looking at the cutter is where’s the tube? [Andreas] didn’t use a CO2 laser, so this ends up being rather low-powered. The cutting head is a 1W blue laser diode which manages to slice the three-ring binder separator pages he’s using for the stencils. The two-axis machine is mounted inside a wooden box to protect his eyes while it’s cutting. He plans to add a drawer later on so that the cutting bed will slide in and out to swap out material for the next project. He already does a lot of 3D printing work and had an old RepRap driver board on hand to use for this projects. He designed and printed the red mounting brackets which make all of the junk-bin components work together. Not bad!
If you’d like to try this out on a smaller scale try using optical drive parts for the axes.
Filed under: laser hacks
“If You Come, We Will Build It” – Crowdsourcing Hardware Ideas
Ouya is a new kind of game console for the television. It is open and allows any creator to develop games. Ouya's Tim DaRosa will be at the Hardware Innovation Workshop (May14-15) talking about how they got started. Central to their development process was getting feedback and suggestions from backers, partners, and the media about their console. Tweaks and improvements such as adding an Ethernet port, renaming of the buttons, and changing the cross-style control pad were all products of this process.
Component of the Month: Op Amps
Each month this year, we’re exploring a different electronic component, delving into what it is, how it works, and how you use it in projects. Last month we covered resistors, and before that we looked at batteries. This month we examine operational amplifiers, often called op amps. An op amp [...]
Life meter gives a real life measure of video game health
This hack makes the virtual real by displaying your video game character’s health meter as a column of illuminated water.
The build video, which you’ll find embedded after the break, is really quite remarkable. The column is a clear piece of pipe anchored at one end by hand-tightened plumbing drain fittings. This allows [Bfayer] to attach a flexible bladder which he constructed for the project. An actuator pushes a hinged board up against the bladder to raise and lower the water level in the tube.
Alone that’s pretty impressive, but [Bfayer] went the extra mile and then some. He uses a four-way fitting at the bottom of the meter. One fork connects to the bladder, another allows air to be injected using an aquarium pump. The bottom of the fitting has a clear window so that an RGB LED array can shine into the water which was doped with highlighter ink to pick up the colored glow. To pull the whole thing together he coded the custom control interface seen above.
[via Reddit]
Filed under: classic hacks
Pitches with Prototypes: Open Clock Project
Next in our run-up coverage for the MAKE 2013 Hardware Innovation Workshop is Craig Bonsignore's Open Clock Project. Bonsignore is a biomedical engineer with more than fifteen years of experience designing, developing, and analyzing cardiovascular implants. And he's fed up with badly designed alarm clocks.
DIY Robot Building, Circa 1956
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