Instead of a lawn tractor this Robot Tractor might be just the thing you need around the yard. It might need a bit of weight added to the design to allow it to pull anything substantial but that shouldn’t be an issue. I an see it being a great help to landscapers needing to pull around carts of material such as mulch, sod, hand tools, etc. If there are a few people working on the same site you would be able to drive it over to your fellow worker without having to physically walk there yourself. With high precision GPS this might be able to be used by farmers who need to perform the same tasks daily such as bring a load of feed from one barn to another. The build video shows the thing in operation at the 4 minute mark.

Thanks for the tip Mark.

Not that this is going to be replacing a real CNC machine any time soon but this LEGO CNC Lathe shows the cool capabilities of the LEGO system. It sure is nothing like the LEGO that I grew up with that had an optional motor and wheels to allow your creations to move about.

If you are looking to jazz up your look this Halloween why not add some lighting effects to your face! Adafruit has a great tutorial on how to use their GEMMA microcontroller to make it happen. The tiny GEMMA is using a Attiny85 and is programmed using Arduino, it looks to be a great platform when you don’t need much power and only a few IO pins.

Who would have thought that we would see a $200 printer this early! Looks like the MakiBOX by Jonathan Buford is currently the cheapest 3D printer around (please correct me in the comments if there is something cheaper). Now that Makerbot has gone through some drastic changes and is no longer open source are we going to see lots of low cost entry level machines fill the void? The current MakiBOX uses a 0.4mm nozzle can print 0.1mm layers. You can see lots of their previous pre-production versions on their Youtube site. Looks like there has been lots of refining over the months but just like any new machine there is sure to be some more fine tuning needed by the builder. Tweaking the printer to work just right might be half of the build fun though.

Who knew you could use the guts of a power transistor as a solar cell! Steven fromRimStar even takes it a step further and chains five 2n3055 in a base to collector configuration to generate enough voltage to power a small calculator. Funny how some electronics form China are working fakes. The small calculator he got has a small solar cell in it already but once the case was cracked open it turned out that the calculator was simply powered by a small coin cell battery. I wonder if the solar cell was a fake or they were just too lazy to hook it up.

Via: Solar Power and Electronic Measurement Equipment

“To easily make a homemade/DIY solar cell, get a power transistor like the 2N3055 and carefully cut open the case. That exposes the semiconductor material inside to light. Hook up some wires and you’re done! Doing this I managed to get around 500 millivolts and 5.5 milliamps which is 2.7 milliwatts.”

This Electric Imp Garage Door Opener is a great enhancement to your stock garage door opener. You can get some expensive garage doors that have lots of these features but with this project you are able to have it all. For example if you would like to get an alert at 10pm if you forgot your door open it would be simple to do. Or why not just close it if it was left open at 10pm and send you a message about that. The options are now endless when you are in control of the code!

“I’ve lost count of the number of times we have set off on a trip only to have to turn back to check to see if we remembered to close the garage door. This ‘ible shows you how to connect the Electric Imp to your garage door opener, how to control your garage door from your iPhone and how to check the status of the door from anywhere. Every time the door is opened or closed a sensor is triggered, and a text is sent to a predefined group of phones so that you are always “in the know” as to door status.”

If thumb drives were made 100 years ago it would look something like this steam punk version over at Jeff Avery’s Blog. Jeff built this with his son who wanted a cool and unique thumb drive. Nice thing about this one is you will never be stuck in the situation where someone else thinks it is theirs. The outer shell is made from some copper pipe and an end cap that is soldered in place. The USB drive was stripped from the case so that it is as small as it can be and was hot glued in place.