This is a bed shaking alarm clock on steroids! This is even more jolting than my Fire Alarm Bell Alarm Clock! It uses two sources of air, a huge air compressor under the basement stairs and air from the car compressor. A computer controls a valve which starts bed shaking action. See the video below where it is tried out at a radio station.

Thanks for the tip Stagueve.

Playing music using steppers is lots of fun, we have seen lots of stepper motor music in the past but this Super Mario tune sounds very nice.

Via: Adafruit

"The sound you’re hearing is coming entirely from the motors. The motors are screwed into some pieces of aluminum from an old project to help them resonate. I’m taking requests for other songs to play. Currently, the information for the song is stored on the Arduino. Plans for implementing a realtime MIDI stream are underway. Eventually I’ll be able to plug in a keyboard and play the motors as though I were playing piano."

This Rolling Apple Power Mac G4 Cube hack will allow your computer to tell you how it feels. If you are over working it could turn and roll away. That would be a great concept but the guts of the mod take up the entire inside of the box. It still looks real cool to see a computer case driving around on a table!

Via: The NXT Step

"This creation utilizes all of the default electronics from a LEGO Mindstorms NXT set. Crammed into the iconic Apple Power Mac G4 Cube’s famous "8-inch" (acrylic) cube are a LEGO NXT programmable brick, 3 interactive servo motors and all 4 sensors: touch, sound, light, and ultrasonic. It operates in 2 modes:

1. Autonomous mode – relying on its sensors to interact with its environment
2. BlueTooth remote control mode"

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This Greenbox project is a beautiful way to save energy. Not only does it dress up the charging area but it also saves you money. When the phone is removed the wall wart charger is electrically disconnected.

"As a design exercise, I have built a phone charging station that makes unplugging very easy and instinctive (with affordance playing a big role). So easy you don’t even notice it unplugs automagically. The design is made from cheap and available materials, and was a great fun to build on a rainy day. "

Thanks Alberto

This Arduino based Timelapse Photography Rig that Aonomus built is a great idea that will let you dig out your old digital camera and get a bit more use out of it. The Arduino microcontroller monitors a potentiometer and changes the time delay between pictures based on the dialed in value. There’s a LCD screen that shows the number of pictures taken and the delay between pictures. Finally to get the work done a servo moves back and forth enough to press the capture button on any camera. When Aonomus isn’t making microcontroller based projects he is playing with fire (literally).

With a few buttons, an LCD screen, an Arduino and a ioBridge, this project allows you to gather information locally and from the internet for instant display. In this example a local temperature sensor displays the local temperature while a internet based service used to get the temperature from another location. An online financial site is used to gather stock prices so that when you are in the kitchen far away from the stock ticker on your computer in the office you can still see how much money you are loosing in the stock market. The best thing about this project is that there is no computer in the loop. The ioBridge is doing all of the internet data gathering. A fun project that could be done by adding a servo motor to the system would be to have a face smile when the stock price rose and frown when it dropped.

"I wanted to combine these two worlds with a sample project – maybe it will inspire you to come up with something better, spark some ideas that you have. I have my arduino measuring my outside temperature here in Pittsburgh, which is an analog input scaled to Fahrenheit. At any moment I can press a button and get the temperature on the LCD screen – no Internet required. Since I have been planning a work trip to Atlanta, I also wanted to compare my temperature with hot-lanta’s. So, my project solves that. Using the "weather command", I am able to get the weather anywhere in the world by zip code or city name."

The Nevada Lightning Laboratory were recently trying many experiments, such as what would happen if you flew a small radio controlled helicopter between two Tesla coils, could a small vehicle big enough for one person be powered using a Tesla coil. Watch the videos below for the cool answers.

"We’ve done a number of things using Tesla’s original schematic, and have been able to transmit and receive considerable amounts of power. The 1:12 Scale Prototype Towers. These twin prototypes serve as an accurate scale model of the proposed full-scale 12-story Lightning Lab design, allowing detailed study the complex dynamics between two phased, coupled, high voltage resonators. The twins have already revealed many interesting abilities, including a unexpectedly strong tendency to couple power wirelessly, over sizable distances. We studied this peculiar ability in greater detail, and published a paper at the 2008 North American Power Symposium."