Hacker Friendly

Check out this retro home-brew 7cm oscilloscope. It was beautifully designed and executed, down to the mahogany housing and exposed CRT.
I like this engineer’s attitude:
The choice of tubes is somewhat arbitrary. The EF91 would be very suitable in all three functions, since among small-signal pentodes, it is unusual in having suitable characteristics for providing a […]

 

Yesterday was 2nd annual Seattle Power Tool Race & Derby at the Georgetown block party. It was a fantastic day full of speed, danger, and grinding metal. Two 60′ tracks of plywood and two-by-fours were the proving ground for dozens of insanely creative racing machines made from modified power tools.
Hackerbot Labs entered four […]

 

Finally, a camera for your esophagus.
The PillCam™ ESO video capsule is specifically designed to view the inner lining of the Esophagus. The capsule is equipped with miniature cameras on both ends and is about the size of a multi-vitamin, which can be swallowed easily.
Three sensor arrays are strategically placed on the patient’s chest and connected […]

 

Eric and I have been talking about building a human pong machine, using a laser beam to project the ball and a camera (or ultrasonics) to track human movement for the flippers.
Looks like someone beat us to it. But rather than using a laser, they’ve got a couple of projectors and multidimensional bipedal tracking. […]

 

Physicists at the University of Utah are developing a way to produce electricity from heat by making sound. Heat is forced through a cylinder or ring, where it heats up the air and generates a sound wave. The sound then comes in contact with a piezoelectric device that produces electricity as it vibrates. They […]

 

Ars Technica reports that the Supreme Court has invalidated Teleflex’s patent on a self-adjusting gas pedal in KSR v. Teleflex. The Supremes ruled that the Federal Circuit court that heard Teleflex’s appeal did not appropriately apply the test for obviousness. The obviousness test says that an invention cannot be patented if a “person […]

 

Meet the Monster Smart Car: an unholy mashup of a Smart ForTwo and Unimog.

“DaimlerChrysler has always had an unusually large range of off-road vehicles - from the M-Class to the G-model and the Unimog. One look at the smart forfun2 (pronounced smart forfun to the second) and you see straightaway that it is based on […]

 

What happens when you combine a Lego NXT robot with a Wii controller? WiigoBot the perfect bowler, of course.

 

This is an old one, but a good one: A linear pastel timekeeper Flash clock.

 

Over on cre.ations.net: Painting with Light. It reminds me of the famous Gjon Mili photos of Picasso from the 40’s.
Only with more of a sense of humor.