Home

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.

Ice trikes…

Ice trikes…

Rick2Rick writes “Two years ago I made a recumbent tricycle for riding on the skating trails cleared on the frozen rivers here in Winnipeg. My friend built one for himself a few years back as well. Both trikes have front-wheel drive & rear-wheel steering, and they are a blast to ride!. My trike is a front-wheel drive, rear-wheel steered, recumbent tricycle in a delta configuration. I designed it so that the rear part of the frame folds in towards the front for storage. It makes it nice & compact but quickly unfolds for use. Rather than paint the frame, I covered it in “poor man’s chrome”: aluminum duct tape. Even the rims & wheel discs are covered in the tape.” Link.

HOW TO – Add 20GB of external storage to the PSP

Psp2-1-2-1-1-1-1Steve writes “While I love my Playstation Portable as a both a game machine and portable media device, one of the biggest limiations is the fact you’re limited to the storage on the memory stick. Even with a 1GB stick, after you drop on a movie or two, you’re really limited in what you can store on it compared to an iPod.” This how-to shows how to use custom firmware on the WL-HDD 802.11g drive enclosure to add a built in webserver. By using RSS feeds, you can stream content directly from the drive to the PSP. Link.

HOW TO – Apply textures on individual object surfaces in virtual worlds…

HOW TO – Apply textures on individual object surfaces in virtual worlds…

SlhowtoThis is a pretty fun “first:” here’s a how-to on Instructables on applying multiple textures to a single object in the virtual world of Second Life. The process is very simple and can greatly enhance the appearance of objects you build. There are lots of how-tos and in-world help for building things, but I think Instructables works for both atom- and electron-based Makers particularly well. Link.

Survival Research Labs at Fringe Exhibitions, LA…

Survival Research Labs at Fringe Exhibitions, LA…

SrlNew SLR! Saturday, January 21, from 6 – 8 PM in LA. “This exhibition will feature the newest addition to the SRL machine family- the Sneaky Soldiers- near life sized, remote controlled army of revolutionaries. Also included in the exhibition will be large-scale documentary images, and the premier of the video from SRL’s recent show in Downtown Los Angeles. This video features the first invasion of the Sneaky Soldiers. The SRL commentary on the art of war debued a Sneaky Soldier emerging from an 18-foot tall wooden Trojan horse to face danger from large-scale destructive robots enduring the pain of flame and damage through a hail of sparks and projectiles.” [via] Link.

Lego Hacking: The GumBrix…

Lego Hacking: The GumBrix…

Thumb F9Ecb286Fb9774D33197B8F87345B0Df-383Derek writes “The gumbrix came about because so many of my robot projects required the kind of rapid prototyping that Lego really excels at, yet required more in the way of control electronics than Lego was capable of. With a maximum of 3 motors and 3 sensors, the Mindstorms kit was not really capable of the more complicated control strategies that I was interested in.” [via] Link.

First homebrew game for PSP v2.5! Tetris…

First homebrew game for PSP v2.5! Tetris…

Tetris4876-724526Fanjita writes – “Just a small thing, really, but I’ve ported my Tetris game to the GTA exploit, and have it running on a v2.50 PSP. There’s a small technical glitch that means it doesn’t run yet on v2.60, I hope to sort that out ASAP, before I release a version that will run on any firmware that can run GTA. So – no release yet, but it’s imminent. As well as being the first homebrew game for v2.5 and v2.6, it will also be a good test of the improved GTA loader that will be used to launch the EBOOT loader. Sadly at the moment this is still for US and EU versions of GTA only, my attempts so far with the German version haven’t worked correctly, but I hope to change that soon.” [via] Link.

Mindstorm Pong

Mindstorm Pong

PongAmazing video of an RCX robot using vision command (or a derrivative) to play pong on a real screen. Jmarco writes: “I have designed a Mindstorm Robot who plays Pong game. It have a Webcam, and it’s controled through Infrared with the laptop computer. There is not trick. It truely plays itself!” [via] Link.