AvE shows us that you don’t always need a complex expensive setup to drive industrial equipment. A simple Arduino setup is shown here to perform some simple stepper manipulation. The Arduino is connected directly to the Stepper driver which handles all of the complex microstepping etc. All the Arduino needs to do is enable it, chose a direction and pulse some steps at it. The result is a nice and simple repeatable system.

Pop bottles normally find their way into the trash or recycling but if you have some time you can make some interesting rockets with them. The 2 stage water rocket above was launched to a height of 864 feet.

 
This one quick to build the rocket portion, most of the bottle work is for looks and a bit of stable flight purpose. The neck of the bottle is simply friction fit to the multiple wraps of duct tape on the pipe that increased the diameter to provide a snug fit. The end of the tube has a cork stuffed in the end with a bottle cap and filler nozzle glued in place. This adds some safety since the cork can easily pop out if over pressured. An alternative would have been to glue an end cap to the pipe and drill a hole to mount the filler nozzle.
 

 

 
This Oobleck filled water rocket didn’t behave the way I expected. Oobleck is liquid and can be poured but when a hard force is applied it firms up. The Oobleck reacts to the high pressure and delays the launch until it is slowly forced out of the nozzle.

 
This alcohol powered rocket is great since it can be fired with the push of a button. A simple BBQ lighter is used as the spark source, a bit of rubbing alcohol fumes is used to power it but this design should be great with other things such as propane and hair spray.
 

 
There are lots of uses for MOTs (microwave Oven Transformers).  The guys from Make it Extreme have come up with a great new use. Convert them to a Heavy Lift Magnet. They take a number of transformers, chop the top off the laminated core and weld them to a heavy base plate. They are then wired to a common power source and the surface of the transformer that will touch the metal being lifted is machined flat. The only limitation that I can see is that not all of the transformer sections might be touching the metal object being lifted. The lifting capacity for some free MOTs is quite impressive!

Thanks for the tip Curt

This Gesture Controlled Lamp is powered by Raspberry Pi. An infrared camera is connected to the Raspberry Pi allowing the system to monitor for wand movements since the wand has an IR LED build into it. OpenCV is used to decipher the wand movements. There are a few simple gestures that are recognized to magically control the light.

Via: Make

“After a recent trip to Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter, my daughters and I decided to create a project that could use the interactive wands from the theme park, at home, to control our own props and gadgets. We called it Raspberry Potter because it was powered with a Raspberry Pi. We demonstrated the project last year at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Mini Maker Faire and this article — Ollivander’s Lamp — is the latest extension of that project.”

We have seen Paper Airplane making systems in the past, this one is super fast. Taking a stack of paper and jamming it through a set of rollers bending and folding as it goes makes for a very fast plane machine. The use is great, stack it full of flyers and fly them at your targets. Doing this from a tall building might be lots of fun!

Via: Hackaday

Instead of going out climbing wall or the movies this virtual experience system can provide you a variety of experiences in one facility. The user uses VR for the immersive visual experience and physical objects for the tactile environment.

Mark Nesselhaus is building a computer the hard way, by using handfuls of transistors and cardboard.

“Attempt to build a computer using cardboard and brass paper fasteners as the base material for all of the logic circuits. Why? Well, the cardboard is free as my workplace puts it in the dumpster and I do not have the funds to buy better material. All of the electronic parts thus far were given to me by a friend who passed away and what better tribute than to build a computer. Except for the ALU all gates are either Nand or Nor using DTL. The transistors used are npn 2n2222 type or pnp 2n3906”