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This is an extreme technological breakthrough for robotic arms. You can see that the monkey feeds himself some bananas, which is all too awesome to watch. Perhaps this can eventually be applied to humans for people who have lost their arms or legs.

via randomgoodstuff

Here’s a giant LED display that covers the Galleria Mall in Seoul. Nice way to advertise…

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Holy crap, this is some tight tesla coil action!

The 6 inch coil has performed better than expected with sparks reaching 8 feet (0.5 million volts). The photo above shows 7 foot sparks to the closest point of the ladder. This is with a large topload and a tank capacitance of 92 nF (0.092 uF) at a power in excess of 5 kVA. A lot of smoke comes from my spark gap at runs of over 5-10 seconds at the highest powers. I suspect it is metal oxide from the tungsten stationary electrodes and the brass dome nuts and steel bolt heads that form the rotary electrodes. There was no sign of any polycarbonate frame or Tufnol wheel overheating. Despite the leaf blower cooling, the tungsten rods become hot enough to have a visible glow though the yellow polypropylene box after turn off. The 8 foot (96 inch) spark is exactly 3 times as long as the 32 inch secondary coil that generates it.

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Check out this cool laser graffiti!

Defense contractors say that within the next 10 years they’ll have a solid state laser mounted on a Hummer that can put a hole in a sheet of metal from several miles away. Well Dutch graffiti writers can pretty much do that now with this Hymermobil-mounted L.A.S.E.R. Tagging system dope off the assembly line at the Graffiti Research Lab

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Here’s a cool hack for extracting Lithium out of your Lithium battery for those of you scientists who need some Lithium fast!

First you must obtain some dead lithium batteries. This shouldn’t be too hard, as most people will readily give them away when they no longer produce a sufficient current. Fresh ones will work too, but it’s rather wasteful.

Note that this will only work with plain lithium batteries, not lithium ion. The rechargeable lithium ion cells do not contain the pure metal, but rather a lithium salt.

If you happen to be using double batteries like me, you must break them apart. Simply use a pliers and pry off the spot welded conductor. Those with a keen eye might notice how they are connected in parallel rather than series. This is because the lithium cell produces 3 volts, twice that of alkalines.

Check out this cool laser tester DIY. Very complicated but good source of information if you are into laser testing equipment.

The laser beam spot is the tool in laser welding cutting. Industrial lasers are really great, but there’s a huge problem when it comes to knowing the state of your tool. I mean, in a normal milling machine the mill bit can visually be examined to see if a part of the edge is chipped off. But how does your beam spot look? How is your beam quality? You might have pretty good idea of how good the beam quality is but the truth is: You don’t know. You can’t just look at the laser beam an tell. First of all trying to look at a laser beam without the right safety measures could seriously harm you. Secondly, if you’ve got these measures in place, theres nothing to see. Here’s a guide on how you can build yourself a laser beam analyzer! Get going! It’s great fun!

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Check out this Zaragoza Solar hot water system used in a desert oasis town.  They also have lots of other cool stuff like the solar heating system for pools.

The complete solar hot water system involves heat exchange between three liquids:

• Solar collector fluid. The fluid which is heated in the solar collector (above, fig. 2) and which flows into the heat exchanger unit (see figs. 3 and 4), and back into the solar collector by thermosiphon. Antifreeze (anticongelante) is used as the solar collector fluid because it exchanges heat readily, and to prevent fluid from freezing in pipes and bursting them in winter. Alyssa Grassi and the 2006 project team have both reconsidered the necessity of antifreeze in this design, as Parras winters, while they very occasionally bring snow, are reportedly mild. Additionally, there are exposed pipes at Zaragoza #1 which carry water from the street, and these pipes appear not to have posed any problems.
• Intermediary heat exchange liquid. Water held in heat exchange unit. This intermediary fluid is necessary because of the hazards antifreeze can pose to human health. If, for some reason, the antifreeze circuit were to burst, its fluid would be released into the intermediary heat exchange fluid in the heat exchanger, not into the household flow.
• Household-bound flow.

City water flows into the rooftop system through exposed metal and PVC pipes.

Check out this cool stepper motor driver you can use for your next CNC milling machine. It is completely open-source with PCB Layout and everything included.

Also check out our 3 stepper motor example.

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Check out a little DIY on how to connect FPGA to a VGA monitor.