Alien vs. Predator Chess Set
DeviantArtist “Joker-laugh” built this amazing AVP chess set which has recently been wowing the geek blogosphere. He doesn’t say much about the making of the pieces, but on the creation of the board, he writes
Fun & Games
The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Drum Controller Parts Harvesting
Today’s dumpscore included a Guitar Hero drum controller. I don’t have any use for it as a controller at this time, but I’ve been curious what is inside this category of devices. There were also about a half dozen guitar controllers for various game systems, but I wasn’t as interested in those today.
When I got home, I cleared off the table and grabbed a screwdriver. A half hour later, I had a nice neat pile of the electronic parts, and the rest of it was stashed away in the recycle bin. There was some neat telescoping tube in the stand, but I don’t have an immediate use for that stuff, and don’t have enough of it to create a storage category for future use.
Cubelets Modular Robotics System
Cubelets are a robotic construction system from Modular Robotics. Using color coded cube modules, a maker can create a robot from snap together pieces that contain sensors, logic circuits, or “actions”. When attached together, the modules communicate via i/o built into the connector. Cubelets seem like they’d be the perfect introduction to robotics because you could easily get started creating robots without having to pick up a soldering iron.
Steve Lodefink’s Pinewood Derby Racer
Photos of Steve Lodefink’s cool Pinewood Derby Racer
Converting Condemned Trees into Bikes
A short film about Bill Holloway and Mauro Hernandez, of Masterworks Woodworking who “salvage condemned city trees, then build beautiful bicycles out of them.”
Lego NXT Camera Platform
Members of Chinese Mindstorms site CMNXT made this excellent platform for controlling a camera. [via the NXTStep]
iPad Controlled RC Car
Wannes Vermeulen created an iPad app to control a modded RC car, complete with a remote point-of-view camera: I used two servo motors attached to the original remote control of the car to adjust speed and steering. These are controlled by an Arduino Uno, which gets the accelerometer data from the iPad through a socket server on my laptop. I also fitted my old Android smartphone to the car, which uses an IPCam app to stream the video to the iPad. The “camera”, the iPad and the laptop are connected to the same Wi-Fi network to share their data.
