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Need some motivation for this Halloween?  Check out the Laser Pumpkin show!

via MakeZine

Wow, this 24 year old from Nigeria built his own helicopter!

Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi, seen here, a 24-year-old physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria, takes old cars and motorbikes to pieces in the back yard at home and builds his own helicopters from the parts

[via] Yahoo

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Wow, here’s a great DIY video on making your own custom fiber optic rose!

Using a few LEDs and really cheap fiber optics, I made this dead sexy, illuminated fiber optic rose.

via HackedGadgets

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Check out this tight ass hexapod robot from MicroMagic systems! Very cute.

The hexapod was my fourth generation robot, and took around 2 weeks to build, the hexapod locomotion engine has been developed on and off over a couple of years. The face recognition software was based on OpenCV libraries, integration of face recognition into the i.C. hexapod face tracking took around 1 week, but with several weeks of fine tuning and enhancements.

A bit of technical background:

i.C. has an on board processor I have developed called the p.Brain, this takes care of all body leg and body locomotion. The p.Brain runs on a PIC ds33F processor.

There is an off board Windows XP Mini-ITX based PC with a Pentium M 1.73Ghz processor which takes care of the face recognition and tracking. This PC is connected to the p.Brain via a serial link. Only simple commands such as X,Y and Z rotation of the head and body are sent to the p.Brain from the PC. This means that if the PC crashes (which they so often do!) The p.Brain will put i.C to sleep without damaging any of the servos.

There are 21 servos on i.C. hexapod. 3 degrees of freedom for each leg, 2 for head pan and tilt, and one which acts as a blink shutter for the main lens. i.C. blinks when a picture has been taken, pictures are stored locally with the time data and location they were taken, and also uploaded to a server for his website (still under development).

via HackedGadgets

You can never be too sure of the furniture that you may find lying around, and this design by Alexander Reh, is of no exception at all.

If you ever wondered what people did with all of those spent shot gun cartridges well here is just one idea, one single chair uses over 450 cartridges, and it is mentioned that the brass tipped shells have a massaging effect, rather than being uncomfortable.

I like to see old weapons and in this case shells used in furniture as it serves two purposes, and gets rid of the weapon and serves as a reminder of what weapons can do and how close they are to everyone.

Source [Yanko Design]

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Check out this awesome LED Hat you can make for Halloween! There’s some construction notes that you can refer to build one yourself.

I think this was originally because I was planning to go to the Burning Man festival, in which being covered with lights is a practical way of keeping track of your friends. But the idea was a bit beyond my expertise for a long time, and it took about two years before I found someone who said they would help me with the electronics side and I decided it was worth the risk of buying the kit to try.

I started work six weeks before Glade 2006, i.e. about June. I also optimistically hoped to finish something basic in time, but it took until about February 2007 before I had something which was self-contained and wearable. Obviously not all of this time was spent soldering LEDs, but soldering and testing those and about 400 wires was the biggest job.

Then progress stalled for a while, since I was a bit sick of LEDs at that point, but if I wanted to take it to Glade 2007 I needed to finish it off: some decent patterns and a button to switch between them, which I managed about 4 hours before having to get up again to catch the train there. And it was a success! Despite ridiculously heavy rain leading to a big mud bath at the festival, the hat did it’s job without breaking and the most common response was, “Wow, cool hat! Where did you buy it?”

via HackedGADGETS

Cool, check out CircuitScout next time you are trying to find that circuit for your next project. I looked up “Alarm System” and got some pretty decent results. (Much better than google for circuits) Thanks Jerry for the tip!

Check out FixYa, it’s a sorta like a RSS Feed search Engine.

(Spy Stats: FixYa.com has PR6 and has 1680 backlinks on Google. Pretty good stuff.)

Meaning it will pull up hundreds of relevant articles for the topic, “how to fix something”.

Interesting if this is sign of Web3.0. = RSS + Wiki + Blog + Optimized Server Code for Search.

Maybe someone will quickly think of hooking up a Wordpress blog with the MediaWik…

Anyways, FixYa just looked great to me from the get-go. I think it’s the homepage that makes difference between sell and no-sell…

It seems like Twitter.com and BbPress are having something in common. They are both simple and support tags and RSS and works with Wordpress Database.

We should have a DIY on how to setup your own BbPress for your new blog.

Yes, I lied, this isn’t a Ferrari but a car built by one human being! Check out the cool pictures and helpful notes on building your own car!

This guy’s even selling these hot little cars.

Now taking orders for Bodywork kits, Chassis build plans and La Bala-Track crate kits!

Show Schedule Coming Soon! See La Bala at a number of Arizona region Track and Show Car Events this fall and winter.

 

Winner of the 2007 Editors Choice Award at the 2007 Knotts Berry National Kit Car Show.

via HACKaDay