Theo Jansen is an artist who makes wild animated, wind-powered robots that seem to have a life of their own. Once you set them up on a beach and let them go, they undulate, slide, and coil across the sand like some sort of steampunk gazelle.

3D printing service Shapeways is now offering two Jansen designs for sale, including a propellor-powered motor for getting your beest to move.

You can purchased the pre-printed beests for about $100 and the propeller add-on for $40. They are about six inches long. Jansen will update the designs as he perfects his larger beests and upload them as they change.

You can pick up your own beest here but sadly I can’t find a 3D file so you can print your own at home.

If you want to recreate what it was like for hobbyists before the advent of the integrated circuit, this clock is for you. This thing uses “215 discrete transistors, 518 diodes, 472 resistors and 101 capacitors on a massive 10″ x 14″ printed circuit board” to recreate something that 1960s-era James Bond would shut down at exactly the 007 mark to prevent the world from blowing up.

You can pick this kit up for $239 with the Nixie tubes and $199 with standard LEDs. You can also purchase a handsome plaque, suitable for wall placement in your electronics den.

Warning: Don’t buy this if you’re a fly-by-night solderer. As the creator notes:

This kit is for advanced, experienced builders. You need to have an oscilloscope, a voltmeter, and an inquisitive mind tempered with patience.

Product Page via retrothing

This must be the day of Kickstarter projects. This project turns an original Gameboy into a unique music instrument complete with analog controls and a stereo/mono switch. While this may be of use only to hard core knob twiddlers, but for $174 you can get a fully modded Gameboy and 6 volt power supply so you and your band can add some boops and beeps to your latest song.

The kit actually “improves” the Gameboy audio, adding controls for Cutoff, Resonance, Bypass, Envelope Follower. This is obviously some hardcore chiptune action so I won’t pretend to explain it. Here is how the creator describes it:

The filter can operate in mono mode, effecting the entire signal from the Gameboy. In stereo mode, the clean signal from the Gameboy is panned hard left, while the filtered signal is panned hard right. This allows the performer to selectively program what elements of their audio will pass through the filter.

The Envelope Follower allows the filter to be automatically animated by the dynamics of the signal. This is particularly useful for imparting filter characteristics to resonant basslines.

You can have the creators mod your own Gameboy for $160 and buy the kit for $90.

Project Page

If you’re in the market for a stable storage medium for all of your important documents, you might be in luck. The TR-01 paper tape reader allows you to read old (and new) paper tapes right into your PC. The system can read the tape as quickly – or as slowly – as you can pull it through the reader. The video above shows some cute tricks you can play with your tape including counting in binary, walking the LEDs, and creating a cute light show for you and your buds.

The kit cost $180 back in 2008 – the project page is here – and it looks like the creator, Mike Davis, is still selling some hardcore retro hardware. I asked him if he’s still selling the TR-01 and haven’t heard back, but I’m sure he can ramp up production once EA decides to release the hipsterized paper tape version of Battlefield 3.

Sadly, there is no paper tape writer so you probably can’t convert your family photos to 8-bit so future generations can find the tapes, pretend they are confetti, and then throw them away after spilling coffee all over them.

UPDATE – Mike confirmed he can still feasibly make them if there’s demand:

Yes, I’m still selling them. I haven’t listed it because I only had parts for 1 unit and sold it to someone who’s been waiting for a while for one. I will be ordering some more opto devices next week. If you don’t mind waiting, I can list the TR-01 if you are willing to wait a week before it can be delivered. It takes a bit of work to get them built and tested. I do it myself, on my wife’s kitchen table.

via Retrothing

The Kenbak-1 apparently predates the Altair and is the earliest “personal” microcomputer in existence. To use it you flipped a bunch of switches and watched the lights. A PS3 this definitely wasn’t.

A tinkerer named Mark Wilson recently rebuilt a mini version of the Kenbak using an Arduino board, timing chip, and some memory, allowing him to add realtime clock functions and storage to what amounts to a very smart Lite-Brite.

Not long after discovering the Arduino it seemed to me it could be a fun project to re-create an early computer, one with just LEDs and switches. I looked at things like the Altair 8800 (1975) but it has 30+ LEDs and 20+ switches and seemed like too much work. Then I stumbled on the KENBAK-1 (1971). Perfect! Only a dozen LEDs and 17 switches.

The wee computer looks almost like the original but is considerably smaller and costs much less than the 1970 price – $4 for parts as compared to about $750 in disco dollars. The handsome case and front panel probably cost a bit more to manufacture but look accurate. However the Arduino guts are most definitely more complex than the original machine and have essentially been dumbed-down to emulate the old Kenbak.

via Retrothing

Ground Control to Major You: for a mere $300 you, too, can send a satellite into space. How? Well, a young man from Ithaca, New York (it’s gorges) is planning on sending a box of tiny, self-contained, solar-powered radio transmitters into space – about 300 in all – and watch them as they transmit from near orbit. Like a murder of tiny space crows, the Sprite satellites will peep out their location and – for $300, your initials – as they circle the planet.

From the project page:

Sprites are the size of a couple of postage stamps but have solar cells, a radio transceiver, and a microcontroller (tiny computer) with memory and sensors – many of the capabilities a bigger spacecraft would have, just scaled down. This first version can’t do much more than transmit its name and a few bits of data – think of it as a shrunken down Sputnik – but future versions could include any type of sensor that will fit, from thermometers to cameras.

Once the satellites are in orbit amateur radio operators will track them using the Genso project. These little guys only have basic functionality right now but the creator wants to add thermometers and other sensors in the next generation.

The Kickstarter project will fund at $30,000 and there’s still a way to go. However, it may be worth it if you want to fly your very own Sputnik.

Project Page

This project on Thingiverse is just about amazing. It’s a complete lock and key set made entirely using open source plans and a printed on a Makerbot. It can only be opened using the right key (or, given it’s made of plastic, a lighter) but it’s the engineering that clearly counts here.

Again, all items are printable except for the springs which I removed from ball-point click pens (thankfully my wife is still putting up with disassembled pens around the house). This one is a little more complicated but it still works and makes a good desk oddity. If you were to glue the “Top”, “Retainer”, and “Lid” in place, the only way to get this lock open without the key would be to break it. But, what is the fun if you can’t take it apart?

You can even build a unique key for every lock but filing down the internal pins. Why would you want to build one of these? Because you can.

Doot doo doot doo doo doot! Hacker Retrobrad created a handheld console that displays Super Mario Brother in a very special way: each sprite is reduced to one pixel. The console, called Super Pixel Brothers, includes all 20 levels as well boss fights.

The game is played on an 8×8 mutli-colored LED board and to hit enemies you need to position your single-pixel Mario over their single-pixel heads.

He’s including the full how-to and schematics on his site and he’s thinking about selling the actual PCBs so you and your plumber brother, Luigi, can recreate your adventures in a decidedly low-bandwidth fashion.

The kit also allows you to build your own 1-pixel version of SMB using a converter, a trick that many of us will probably want to emulate in our copious free time.

via Retrothing

An automatic scribbling machine sounds less than useful, admittedly, but it’s really just the style of line created by this motorized drawing machine. It’s reminiscent of ASCII art, in which heavier characters are used to create darker tones; in this case, the more jiggle added to the drawing platform, the more ink is put on the drawing surface. It’s kind of mesmerizing.

Check out the video (there’s another here):

It’s put together from mostly off-the-shelf parts (Arduino-powered, naturally), though it’s far from simple. The process uses vector graphics and turns it into a tone map, and given a known starting point for the pen, it “prints” by moving the pen along rows and adding jitter to darken the “pixels” to whatever degree is necessary. It looks like it has about four discrete tones it can make — not the greatest range, but in aggregate it works quite well.

You can read how it was put together at the creator Alex Weber’s blog, and he has also put the source, documentation, and so on up on Github.

When a man is proud of his hobbies, women notice. Nowhere is that more apparent than in this thread on RCGroups where a dapper young gent, from the comfort of his lounge chair and protected by VR goggles, approached a comely young lass with his RC Tonka truck and, we can only assume, married that same lady in a ceremony held under a sylvan glade alongside her beaming parents.

Or maybe not.

Anyway, this dude drove this:

Traxxas Summit chassis, vintage 1978 Tonka Body NIB, GoPro HD onboard camera with pan/tilt and headtracking, two-way walkie talkie, rear view mirrors, windshield, GI Joe w/kung fu grip, Barbie, 12V motorcycle horn, lights and much more.

On the beach and tried to pick up the ladies. In a way it sort of worked and in another way it didn’t. Watch on.

Potentially NSFW for bikinis, but it’s Friday.

via Nowhereelse

Mitchell Feinberg is a photographer who specializes in taking beautiful photographs of very expensive things. Cars, luxury goods, wristwatches, that sort of thing. He shoots on 8×10 film, which is expensive enough that you generally want to get it right the first time. So he shoots test shots on instant 8×10 Polaroid film to make sure the exposure and focus are right. At $15 a pop, 7 or 8 test shots per photo, and dwindling supplies of the Polaroid film itself (though the Impossible Project is looking to remake it), it became evident to Feinberg that he couldn’t continue doing things that way.

So what did he do? No, he didn’t buy a Leaf or Hasselblad. He decided he’d commission the world’s biggest color digital back. After some haggling and assurances that yes, he was serious, a prototype was put together in Februrary of 2010 and the production unit delivered in early 2011.

He calls it the Maxback. It’s fully 8×10″; for comparison, Hasselblad’s best digital back, the CFV-50, is 36.7×49.1mm. Feinberg says the largest available backs are about 4.5x6cm. Here’s a comparison to show you how that compares with the Maxback:

Yes, quite a difference. The interesting bit, though, is that the Maxback isn’t designed to produce many pixels. In fact, this whole enormous sensor only puts out a 16-bit 10-megapixel image. It’s a 10-megapixel image of the highest quality, of course, because of the quality of the lens and the size of the pixel wells, but still not big enough for high-fidelity printing on posters, magazines, and so on.

He takes a few shots with the digital back (which he had engineered to fit his large format setup exactly), then simply switches it out for the 8×10 film when he’s satisfied.

The cost was… well, I’ll let Feinberg explain: “The development and production of two backs (I wanted to have a spare) was equal to the cost of a good size house – before the housing crash.” So we’re probably talking half a million dollars.

The thing is, he was spending $50,000 on Polaroids every year. He hopes it’ll pay for itself, and now that the design and testing is done, the cost for making more should be “in the low six figures.” So he might be able to fast track breaking even by selling a couple to other large-format photographers with money to throw around.

An interesting, if expensive, solution to the problem, and the result is impressive to say the least. If you have a minute, check out some of Feinberg’s shots — you might recognize a few, but there were some beauties in there I hadn’t seen, especially in the Esquire wristwatch spread.

I love that floor, too.

[via PetaPixel]

Are you the kind of person who would love to have an animatronic Gary Coleman on your shelf, his pudgy face cursing like a sailor at your guests while you roller skate around your basement wearing a skin-tight rubber suit and sing reggae-infused Coldplay covers? If you said “Absolutely!” then read on.

This DIY shows you how to make googley eyes that move, a real, working mouth, and eyebrows. A microcontroller handles the servo controls and ensures that your creation reacts more like a robot and less like something out of the Hall of Presidents.

You can see the plans on Pyrolectro so you, too, can make a strangely staring POTUS out of motors, cardboard, and wire. The full tutorial includes sections on all of the pertinent parts. Here are two examples of working faces below.

This cool Kickstarter allows you to build a working speaker using plasma energy. It’s a little esoteric, but here’s the deal: this is a little kit that contains everything you need to play music using a plasma arc. If that doesn’t seem like your idea of a good time, you might be reading the wrong post.

That said, here’s how it works: for $40 you get the bits that make the arc vibrate and for $80 you get all of the bits, including a power supply and flyback transformer. The kit was designed and built by StudentRND a group of cool kids in Seattle who, along with volunteers, build wild technological artifacts. This looks to be one of their first Kickstarter projects and they requested $2,000 to build a few kits and support their mission. They’re over their minimum, so the project will get funded and you will be able finally play Smoke On The Water using a tiny plasma arc.

Even if you’re not down with shooting electricity through the air, StudentRND seems like a great organization and they’re clearly having fun with science, which is something I can definitely get behind.

Project Page

The folks at Makerbot made a bust of Stephen Colbert and gave him a copy when they appeared on his show a month or so ago. Not content to let it just moulder in the shop, they decided to attach it to a weather balloon and send it up over Long Island. The resulting video and images are striking: the Great Eagle himself in flight high over the salty waves of the Atlantic, overtopping the great spires of American Democracy, and soaring unfettered like a plastic bag in American Beauty.

Watch the video to see the eagle soar. Thor bless small plastic busts of comedic actors playing conservative pundits and Thor bless the US of A.

Matt Richardson created a wild Arduino system that mutes a TV whenever a name or other keyword is broadcast on TV. It uses the closed caption track and an IR blaster to grab what’s currently playing and then mute the TV for 30 seconds – or more – depending on the current topic.

The project uses the Video Experimenter Shield, Lady Ada’s IR tutorial, and some basic code to scan the captions for keywords.

The best thing is that the product actually works quite well, muting the TV as soon as Kim Kardashian is mentioned, even in passing. It may make for an excellent election-year project for folks who may or may not be sick of certain politicians.

Project Page

via BB

While I may have created some sweet spaceships in my days constructing LEGO, I never guessed how serious people would get with their blocky creations. Guns, computer cases, even a Tetris-playing device and a robotic hand. So I shouldn’t be surprised that someone has created a CNC mill with their Mindstorms NXT set.

It looks a little bit shaky, I have to say, so I doubt we’re reaching micrometer precision, but a few stabilizing blocks and it’d be more than sufficient for creating the occasional figurine or 20-sided die.

Incredibly, this isn’t actually the first CNC mill to be made from LEGO — by a long shot. In fact, the CNC tag at the LEGO Mindstorms community has several, going back to March of 2008 (there’s even video). There’s even an egg-decorating device using CNC principles. Sure, why not?

[via Make]

I tend to think of Defcon as a sort of massive free-for-all, with thousands of hackers all trying to be the one that replaces the speaker’s Powerpoint slide with a skull and crossbones, that sort of thing. In fact, it’s just a bunch of people who like to fiddle with stuff — whether it’s security, hardware, code, or what. It’s the people who tend to not just think “I wonder if…” but who then say “Maybe I’ll try it.” And in this case, they’ve even got the public good in mind. If only we could say the same about congress!

Rafael, an Israeli defense contractor, makes the Firefly, a wireless camera that can be launched from a 40mm grenade launcher. The trouble with this system is that 40mm grenade launchers aren’t particularly easy to come by, they’re illegal for private citizens to own, and cost a fortune. A pair of hackers is working on a replacement that could cost under $500, putting this useful tool in the hands of local police forces, rescue teams, and curious civilians.

Instead of using a grenade launcher, Vlad Gostom and Joshua Marpet are using a 37mm flare launcher — something you can buy at your local bodega. Well, maybe not that close, but they’re around. They designed a custom payload for launch: at the apex, a parachute will deploy and the camera will begin transmitting an image of the area directly below it to the operator. This could be really helpful for seeing briefly the other side of rubble or other obstacles, though there are of course packbots and throwable cameras for that as well.

The prototype still a bit buggy right now and their goal height (250ft) is just half of the Firefly. That said, at $500 it costs a fraction as much and was designed by two guys who thought it would be cool, not a high-tech defense corporation. A little polish and it could be a real product. My suggestion? Kickstarter.

TechWorld highlights two other projects, one a rather shabby but cool flying surveillance station, and the other a simple solution for ad-hoc communication between phones. The latter could be used by people trapped by debris to communicate with each other or rescue teams, no cell signal required.

It’s nice to see these positive and interesting projects coming out of Defcon. I may have to drop by next year if I can build up the courage.

If you’ve always wanted to play air hockey in real life and couldn’t shrink yourself down enough to stand comfortable on a regulation table, this may be a solution. It is a DIY hoverpuck that uses a motor, propeller, and a puck-shaped case to create a real air hockey experience at full scale.

Don’t want to waste your life building this thing? If you’re a teacher you can pick one up here and use it for physics experiments. I’d suggest actually doing it yourself, though.
Project Page

If you are the kind of person who needs to shoot a little wad of potato at someone moving in slow motion, this may be the gun for you. It uses a twist of tubing, a Zippo, and some water to create the ultimate in potato-attack technology.

The full DIY appears on Instuctables, but this thing is pretty basic.

Of note: some very dire safety warnings that I don’t want you people to ignore:

I also want to start by re-iterating his safety warnings as this device has risks related to fire, steam, pressure, metal-work, and projectiles. I recommend wearing eye protection during all steps and using common sense. I accept no liability for any risk in the manufacture or use of this device. Do not attempt to use power tools if you are not familiar with them and I don’t recommend anyone under the age of 18 attempt to manufacture this device without competent adult supervision. Don’t touch the barrel for a few minutes after it has been fired as it
becomes extremely hot. Also, the soot will stain clothes/skin. Be careful with this thing guys.

Soot: the silent soiler.

Project Page

If you’ve been wildly despondent at the death of the Polaroid, there is still hope. This DIY “instant camera” by Niklas Roy uses a simple digital camera and printer to take and print images. Here’s the bad part: the camera has no memory so it prints out the image in front of it line by line for a process that takes three minutes total. That means you have to sit perfectly still for your portrait.

My ‘Electronic Instant Camera’, is a combination of an analog b/w videocamera and a thermal receipt printer. The device is something in between a Polaroid camera and a digital camera. The camera doesn’t store the pictures on film or digital medium, but prints a photo directly on a roll of cheap receipt paper while it is taking it. As this all happens very slow, people have to stay still for about three minutes until a full portrait photo is taken.

The full source code is available here and you can basically recreate this thing with Niklas’ instructions. Amazing, fun stuff.
via Technabob