Bradley Rigdon who owns Print To 3D shows us how he can print a cool bearing with his 3D printer. This printer is a bit different than the Makerbot that we have featured here before. His Dimension 3D printer uses uses 2 types of material, one that makes the structure of the item and a second material that can be dissolved after the model has been printed. See the videos below for an inside view of the system. The last video illustrates the power of having a dissolvable second plastic material, a functional Rubik’s Cube like game is printed with no assembly needed!

Bradley is an avid RC hobbyist, he shares some video of his collection here and here.

I have seen some other face tattoos before, some simple and others were quite elaborate. But this one is quite funny since this Permanent Eyeglasses Tattoo doesn’t look like a tattoo.

People getting a tattoo on lower back is more common than getting one done in or anywhere near the facial area.

Via: SandU

How luck are you if you can find a CNC machine like this one for a few hundred dollars! That is exactly what happened to Dave Kush of BuildYourIdea.com.  It wasn’t a fully functional machine so like any huge machine like this that’s sold as is who knows if it will take $10 or $10,000 to get it up and running again. Well thankfully Dave designs stepper drivers so he has more than a step in the right direction in resurrecting this beast. You can read all about the Shizuoka ST-N 3 Axis CNC Machine Rebuild here. After looking at what this beast can do I am glad that I started with my Fireball V90, but look forward to move into something bigger in the coming years!

“Well, I finally found a good deal on a piece of vintage Japanese iron: the Shizuoka ST-N 3 Axis CNC milling machine w/ Bandit control circa 1970′s. The machine itself looks like it hasn’t been used all that much and has been sitting idle for the last 10 years or so in a machine shop up in the California foothills. Apparently the machine was parked due to a bad axis and was given to the machinist to store in his shop. Time passed and the original owner never returned to claim his iron. Now, the machine shop is struggling so the owner is selling off some of the equipment. I found his ad on Craigslist for two machines and decided to drive up for a look. The AN-S model, which is in nearly showroom condition is much too big for my use and weighs in at 4500 lbs. But the ST-N model is 3000 lbs and is easier to move around with a small forklift. I made the owner a ridiculous offer hoping that he would laugh or just not respond. Time passed and he accepted my ridiculous offer. Now I’m on the hook to get this beast out of his shop and down into my garage.”

In colder climates the indoor temperature is not always ideal for things like aquariums. This is especially true these days when most people have smart thermostats that turn down the temperature when there is no one in the house or everyone is sleeping. So what can be done to solve this issue? Well You can purchase a heater for the aquarium but what is the fun in that? Instead why not monitor the temperature and control the localized heat yourself. That is exactly what this LEGO NXT Aquarium Temperature Control byPlastiBots is doing.

“How does it work?

Pretty simple really.  dSwitch allows you to programmatically control a 120V (also available in 240V for other countries) outlet to switch a power source on/off as desired.  The NXT is programmed to monitor the temperature using the LEGO temperature sensor and the dSwitch NXT-G block is used to turn the light on and off based on temperature thresholds.  My current setup has the dSwitch turn the light on when the water temperature is below 72F and turn it off when it hits 79F.  With NXT-G I am also able to control how often it polls the temperature to ensure that the granularity of monitoring is over a longer period of time (e.g. we don’t want the light flicking on and off when the temp is near 72F and 79F).  Currently I have it set to evaluate the temperature every 10 minutes and switch the light on/off as necessary.”

Next time you are picking out a Christmas gift for someone why not get something that is hackable and improve on the original design. With a ton of electronics stuffed inside this Big Mouth Billy Bass it now makes for the ideal gift! If you are interested in seeing how it was all put together there is a schematic available.

“The CPU board has a pair of 18F452 PICs. One controls the BMBB and MP3 player. The other is dedicated to the display. Various LEDs and the 10 position switch are connected to both PICs. The fish has three motors to move its head, tail and mouth. I used TIP3055′s t0 drive the mouth and tail. I used two relays to move the head due to its large current draw. The stock BMBB used 6vdc to control all three motors. I used 6vdc for the mouth and tail and both 4 and 6vdc for the head. If you apply only 4 volts to it, it will move half way and stop. This allowed me to make the BMBB more animated.”

You think the guitar you own is high tech? Well does it have a 500MHz processor? Can you even SSH into it? I thought not. This MISA – Touch Pad Digital Guitar is packed with tons of technology but thankfully it outputs MIDI so you can just jack it into your existing gear and jam away.

Thanks Michael

“The guitar itself is CNC machined out of solid ABS plastic. This is an extremely solid body, not like injection moulded plastic which is thin, lightweight and hollow. The screen is an 8.4″ LCD 800×600 resolution. The CPU is a 500MHz x86 compatible AMD Geode which makes life easier, I guess. The operating system is Gentoo Linux which I’ve stripped down to be as lean as possible. Graphics (framebuffer access) is done with DirectFB which acts as a fast layer on top of the hardware. The neck is 144 “keycaps” sitting on top of a special keymat that I had tooled. They are not pressure sensitive – but I made the decision early on not to include this because I don’t feel it is neccessary, it would make the instrument harder to play and less reliable.”

This NicoletoMK Mikrokopter Quadrocopter is not your department store variety flying toy. This 4 blade Quadrocopter is powerful enough to lift a 500 gram payload, this means camcorders, cameras or water balloons are fare game for this  machine. It can be flown by an operator or run in autonomous mode which would make it great as an automated surveillance system. There is a video of the unit in operation here and pictures of it in flight here.