DIY

A geek says yes

Manufacturers of Android smartphones often won’t provide an updated, custom version of the operating system for models they no longer sell, so users can’t take advantage of new features. For older phones, there’s a workaround: CyanogenMod, a free OS built from the source code for the latest versions of Android that Google releases to developers. CyanogenMod is very similar to the official Android platform, but it includes a few extra features, such as Wi-Fi tethering, a screenshot tool, and more security and power-management settings. Many users also say it runs faster than their phone’s original Android software.

To upgrade, users usually have to back up the original operating system and then “root” the phone, or disable the security settings that protect its OS from being modified, using a program such as SuperOneClick (free; shortfuse.org). Keep in mind that installing the system incorrectly could render the phone inoperable, and that running an unofficially supported OS could void the phone manufacturer’s warranty.

Though rare, official updates for certain older-model Android phones have come out after the release of the CyanogenMod community’s version. Check the phone manufacturer’s site to see if an update is available before installing CyanogenMod.

Howard Wen is a technology reporter.

Make your own portable hot packs

Instant hand warmers are great--just shake 'em up, and you've got spontaneous warmth to thaw your hands during the cold winter months. But they're awfully expensive, and not because they're complicated to manufacture. In fact, you can make them yourself in a few very easy steps.

1. Fill a large ziplock bag one quarter of the way full with calcium chloride ice-melt pellets (available at most hardware stores).

2. Fill a smaller ziplock bag halfway with water, close tight, and place inside the first bag.

3. Squeeze the smaller bag until it breaks open, to create a heat-producing reaction between 20 minutes and an hour.

Originally posted by Justin DiPlacido on Instructables.

LEGO's Master Builder class teaches you to see those little blocks in a totally new way--though that's not easy

I'm getting my MBA.

Of course, MBA stands in this case for the Master Builder Academy, a program run by LEGO that's designed to take your LEGO-building abilities from playful amateur to impress-your-friends amazing. It's a six-part course, and I've worked my way through the first two parts. Already I'm seeing a major change in the way I think about LEGO. This is the first of a three-part series documenting my journey from neophyte to Master Builder.

We encounter plenty of people with awesome jobs pretty much every day at PopSci; the researchers who study 100-year-old brains in jars or the dudes who study tides in Loch Ness come to mind. It's hard to not be jealous and think "no fair, why can't I do that, too?" Often, though, there's decades of education between us and said awesomeness. The case of the LEGO Master Builder, however, is different. Sure, we'll probably never get paid to snap together a Death Star brick by brick, but a new series of kits from LEGO, The Master Builder Academy, can at the very least train us to build and think the way they do.

Click here to launch the gallery

"Master Builder" is an honorary title bestowed by LEGO on their best builders. These are official LEGO employees tasked with one of two general assignments. Some Master Builders build monstrous sculptures like the ones you see in LegoLand or the Times Square Toys 'R' Us. Others create the model kits and step-by-step instructions for customers.

Master Builder Academy won't make you a verified, LEGO-approved Master Builder; the idea is to teach the same fundamental building rules and design principles that the Master Builders use. The ultimate goal: to teach you to conceive and execute structurally sound, detailed builds that look like they're based off a kit. So what are those fundamental rules? I began studying at the temple of LEGO to find out.

Academy training consists of six kits. The first, "Space Designer," comes on its own for $30, and a bi-monthly subscription to the remaining five kits is an additional $60. Each kit comes with about 100 pieces, a guidebook, and instructions for three builds. At the end of each level, you take the new rules from that lesson and create your own model.

KIT ONE: TINY STUMBLING BLOCKS
I started my training about a month ago. I came in with very few preconceived notions and bad habits learned after years of freestyle building (and destroying) as a child. I, a LEGO neophyte, would seek to learn the ways of the Master Builders.

At first, it was ugly. On the first build ("Helicraft"), I had no rhythm and spent more time hunting for bricks than actually putting things together. It wasn't until I started tearing the model apart that I realized my fatal mistake: I hadn't taken the time to organize my bricks before the build, even though that advice is posted on the Master Builder Academy Website. After learning my lesson, I unsnapped wings, engines, and landing gear, and sorted the pieces by size in the provided partitioned tray.

With that frustration set aside, I could focus on the lesson at hand: how to stabilize joints between bricks, and how to build outward instead of upward. Getting the hang of these tricks, though, wasn't about reading the tips in the building instructions. It was more like learning Spanish by just getting up and going to Spain: LEGO by immersion. Why do I need to build the wings and then attach them to the body instead of just snapping the pieces on bit by bit? Oh, because if they're not locked in place properly and well balanced, the whole thing will snap in half. I see... Why do I need to snap this extra plank on top of the landing gear? Whoops, it just fell off again, didn't it. Oh, I see...

Learning curve climbed. Bricks piled. Little LEGO pilot waiting on deck. Let's see if I can actually make an original aircraft happen. Graph paper at the ready, I started doodling an overhead view of some sort of space plane. Lo and behold, I knew exactly how to attach my engines, secure the wings, and hold the cockpit hinge in place. "I got this," I thought, "totally got this." And, shocked as my older brother may be, it worked. Even better, it stayed together.

It's a time-consuming process, for sure. In the day I sat my dining-room table to work my way through kit one alone, I looked up to see all the daylight has gone out of the room. Only serious builders need apply to the Master Builder Academy.

KIT TWO: I BECOME A MICROBUILD DESIGNER
It wasn't until I started prying apart layer after layer of a LEGO building in Kit Two that I got the hang of something I've now decided no LEGO aficionado should be without: a brick separator. Basically a crowbar for LEGO blocks, it's a plastic lever with a dual-faced end that can grip bricks from either the bottom or the top. Snap the appropriate face onto the brick you want to move and swing the end upward like you would a wine-key corkscrew. And, pop.

More importantly, the second kit is about getting your brain into a miniature mindset. It trains you to look at a round LEGO dot and see a wheel, the top of a stool, or a traffic sign. A clear block becomes a window, an antenna from your airplane in the first kit becomes a flagpole, and a rounded four-dot piece becomes a satellite dish.

The following kits hit all the LEGO core inspirations: robots, cars, airplanes, and monsters. By the end of the sixth and final kit, "Auto Designer," you should be able to design and build more or less anything. Yesterday, I embarked on Kit Three, "Robot Designer," in which you learn how to create joints and character details, as well as fashion creatures that can stand on their own. The name of the game this time is balance -- both artistic and physical; too much detail or flourish up top, and the whole thing comes crumbing down. Still at this point, I've learned to quell the frustration and uncertainty I felt a month ago, crack my knuckles, lean forward into what I call my "LEGO hunch," and say to myself "I got this..."

Stay tuned for Part Two of this series in a couple weeks. (It's hard, this becoming a Master Builder thing!)

The true test of Theo's trust in science

Last year, I stuck my hand in super-cold liquid nitrogen for the amusement of PopSci readers. My skin survived that demonstration, but I wimped out on a related experiment at the opposite extreme: dipping my finger into molten lead. That’s because the only time I’ve ever burned myself badly enough to need a doctor was while casting a lead plaque as a kid.

But life is too short to cower in the dark, afraid of a little molten metal. I knew that the antidote to my fear was science; I trusted the Leidenfrost effect to keep me safe. When my finger hits molten lead that’s hot enough, moisture from my finger should be vaporized instantly, creating an insulating layer of steam that should protect me for a fraction of a second. (This is a mirror image of what happened when I put my hand in liquid nitrogen, where the heat from my hand was hot enough to instantly vaporize the nitrogen, similarly creating an insulating layer of gas.)

The “hot enough” part is key. If the metal is just barely molten, not enough steam is created, and some of the lead may solidify onto the finger, where it would rapidly transfer enough heat to cause a serious burn. So I had to get the temperature well beyond that level, test the metal with a hot dog, and then go for it.

In place of lead, I used nontoxic plumbing solder, which has a melting point of around 400°F. When the temperature got up to 500°, I inserted my pinkie finger—and didn’t feel a thing. I managed to come away unscathed even though my finger was in the liquid past the knuckle long enough for me to splash around a bit. OK, according to the high-speed video we shot, it was only about one sixth of a second, but it was long enough to cure my childhood fear of molten lead for good.

An earlier demonstration of the Leidenfrost effect shows the author’s entire hand in –320° liquid nitrogen. For further details click here

In this case, yes, you can shoot from the wrist

Last October, after hurting his knee playing hockey, Patrick Priebe was holed up in his apartment near Cologne, Germany, with nothing to do. He was sitting at his computer, staring at his keyboard, when the “Y” key caught his eye. Priebe didn’t see a letter. To him, it looked like a crossbow. Immediately he knew what his next project would be.

For years, the German lab technician had built laser weapons, including a working Iron Man–style palm-fired blue-diode laser. After all those futuristic gadgets, he wanted to make a completely mechanical contraption. Priebe doesn’t draw up designs for his projects; he just starts tinkering. In his home shop, he cut some bars from an aluminum sheet and fastened together a Y-shaped frame that fit perfectly over the back of his hand.

Next he gathered more aluminum, copper, and brass sheeting. He ordered steel wire usually used in model planes, carbon-fiber tubing for the arrow shafts, and a few cylinders of low-friction Teflon plastic. He cut out two pieces of flexible spring-steel to act as the bow and stretched the steel wire between them for the string. Using a lathe, he shaped pieces of brass for the arrowheads, glued them to the carbon-fiber tubes, cut a groove down the center of one of the Teflon bars, and placed it in the center of the crossbow.

To fire, he pulls back the wire, hooks it around a brass block, and places an arrow in the groove. When he flicks the thumb trigger, the brass block drops, the wire pops forward, and the arrow flies.

Priebe can use the crossbow to pierce soda cans, smash lightbulbs, and tag apples. And although his creation isn’t the smallest crossbow in the DIY world, none match its mix of power and accuracy, quick reload and ability to fire one-handed. Still, he has no plans to use it, not even for home security. For that, he says, “I have a pretty sturdy hockey stick that would do the trick.”

Go on to the next page for three more DIY projectile launchers.

THREE MORE DIY PROJECTILE LAUNCHERS

Bungee bazooka: Sam Elder, a recreation coordinator in Richfield City, Utah, used a four-inch-diameter sewer pipe as the body of his slingshot-like shoulder cannon, cut and mounted two narrow lengths of PVC piping to the outside of the barrel, and attached twin pulleys just above them, at the nose. He secured one end of a length of surgical tubing to a carved wooden base and fed it through the PVC, around the pulleys, and into the barrel, and, finally, attached it to hooks at the front end of a foam dart. When he pulls the trigger, a pin holding the back end of the dart releases, projecting the dart out of the barrel. When Elder decided that shooting only foam ammunition wasn’t enough fun, he added a small pouch that allows him to fire tennis balls and raw eggs.

Grappling-Hook Launcher: Tree climbers typically thread their ropes over high branches by tossing beanbags tied to thin lines, but MIT student Christian Reed wanted an easier technique. So he bought a carbon dioxide tank used for paintball guns, emptied a fire extinguisher, and connected the two through a small network of pipes and valves. He cut a piece of copper pipe for the barrel and fit all the components, including a regulator to monitor air pressure, around a plastic Nerf rifle. When he pulls the trigger, compressed air blasts out of the fire extinguisher and down into the copper barrel, ejecting the grappling hook up to branches as high as 70 feet.

Gatling-gun slingshot: German businessman Jörg Sprave built a pair of wooden wheels, each with eight one-inch-square blocks arrayed around their circumference, joined the wheels with a three-foot-long steel rod so they turn in unison, and cut a frame and shoulder mount out of wood to hold them in place. For the firing mechanism, Sprave cut small pouches from scrap leather, attached them to stretchable bands, and pulled them from the front wheel to the back, making eight miniature slingshots. To load the gun, he slips steel balls between the slingshots and the wood. To fire, he turns the wheels with a crank, shooting the balls out in rapid succession.

Gives new meaning to the term "getting the lead out"

Among the most strictly enforced consumer-protection laws are those banning lead in toys. Lead is an insidious poison: It’s slow-acting and results not in immediately noticeable effects like rashes but in behavioral problems and a slightly lowered IQ. Even a very small amount of it is harmful. Yet a few decades ago, a lot of the most popular playthings were made from solid lead, including tin soldiers.

Considering all the lead toys produced in those days, tin soldiers sound pretty benign. “Tin” is a something of a misnomer, though. The soldiers were not made primarily of tin but of a lead-tin alloy containing 60 to 75 percent lead, with the rest being mostly tin and antimony. Sometimes they were cast from “hard lead,” a group of alloys typically found in bullets, which contain nearly 95 percent lead with just a bit of antimony for hardness.

Children didn’t just play with these little chunks of neurotoxin; they often cast them in their own kitchens, using kits that came with a melting pot, a ladle, some sticks of lead alloy and a selection of soldier molds. After casting, kids filed them smooth (spreading lead dust all around). Then they decorated their armies with a variety of paints, most of which were lead-based.

Safety standards, thankfully, have progressed significantly since then. At today’s standard, 100 parts per million or less, just one of those old soldiers contains enough lead to render several million toys unfit for sale in the U.S. Although such safety requirements have no doubt helped reduce the number of leadpoisoning cases, they may not be stringent enough. Unlike with most toxic substances, there is no limit below which lead is known to be harmless. As more evidence of lead’s deleterious effects on the brain accumulates, it would not be surprising to see the 100-ppm standard lowered further. If you really want to play with tin soldiers safely, you’ll have to find some vintage silicone rubber molds and cast them from lead-free plumbing solder, as I did.

Viral marketing agency Thinkmodo has been bringing sci-fi to life in the skies over New York City for the past couple of weeks, so if you thought you saw something out of the ordinary in the past few days--like perhaps a few people lazily looping around the skyline like superheroes--no need to adjust your medication. To promote an upcoming film, the agency custom built three remote controlled aircraft shaped like humans and put them in the air over New York and New Jersey.

The three main characters in 20th Century Fox’s upcoming film Chronicle have the ability to fly, so Thinkmodo thought the best was to build hype around the film would be to create some “flying people” sightings around NYC. So far, so good. Local news stations picked up the story, and a video the team released documenting the campaign (see it below) has garnered well more than half a million hits as of this writing.

Viral marketing can be so absolutely boring, but a gnarly RC airplane hack for the sake of sci-fi? Consider our hats tipped.

[YouTube]

We feel confident anointing this the world's first augmented-reality golf-cart-based OutRun cabinet

In the late 1980s, millions of arcade-addicted kids sat in the faux racing seats of Sega’s OutRun videogame, grabbed the rubber-covered wheel of the imitation Ferrari Testarossa, pressed down on the pedals, and imagined they were roaring down the street. Twenty-five years later, one of those kids, Garnet Hertz, has realized that fantasy, modding an 1,100-pound arcade machine to ride on pavement.

Hertz, an engineer, designer and artist, came up with the idea when he spotted an OutRun cabinet at an arcade in 2008. A few months later, he found one for sale online and bought it. He also bought an old golf cart on Craigslist, which had a wheelbase that matched the footprint of the game cabinet.

At the time, Hertz was teaching video-game development at the University of California at Irvine, and a few of his students offered to help with his project. The team stripped the 1959 Turf Rider cart down to its drivetrain and mounted the cabinet on top. But the weight was too much for the cart’s three-wheeled chassis, causing the vehicle to tip easily on turns. At that point, the project got sponsored by the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds, a game-research initiative at Irvine, which bought him a 2007 four-wheeled golf cart to replace the Turf Rider. The group then spent the summer of 2010 cutting, welding, and wiring to combine the cabinet with the cart. Hertz had to build a custom steering column to link the game’s wheel with the cart’s steering system.

Click to get a more detailed look at this amazing vehicle.

Yet all that work was simple compared with what came next. Instead of swapping the game’s screen for a windshield, the crew mounted two webcams on the cabinet, wired them to a laptop inside the car, and wrote software that converts the camera’s view of sidewalks and roads into a video of an 8-bit OutRun-style freeway.

The video appears on a flat-screen monitor in front of the driver. Hertz has tested the car on walkways and quiet roads, but operating it is hardly a mellow experience, despite the 13mph top speed. “You’re trusting your fate to a piece of software,” he says. “The thing is terrifying to drive.”

How It Works
DESIGN
In the golf cart, all six batteries sat below the driver. Hertz moved three of them to the back and the other three up front so he could keep the racing seat low to the ground, as it was in the original arcade game. He also wired the game’s original speaker system to the laptop inside the cabinet. Finally, to keep the cart rolling smoothly, he bought a new set of wheels.

CONTROLS
The golf cart’s steering column was on the left side of the drivetrain, but the arcade game’s steering wheel was in the center of the console. To fit everything together at the proper angles and prevent the steering system from jamming, Hertz built a custom steering shaft and mount to shift the steering column to the center and inverted several of the components connecting the steering box with the front wheels. The game’s brake and gas pedal were simpler to mate with the cart’s system, and he decided not to mess with the speed controller—13 mph was plenty fast.

SAFETY
The first version of the software detected only roads, not people. Once Hertz started showing off the car at art shows and other gatherings, he started worrying about colliding with bystanders. Recently, he altered the software to superimpose the arcade-style video over a live feed of the real-world view. The game car handles well and turns safely, but just in case it ever rolls, he built custom mounts for each of the batteries to secure them to the frame.

An engineer puts an arcade cabinet on wheels

One of the most fun Kinect hacks we’ve seen in a while gives the idea of motion capture a whole new meaning. Behold the Board of Awesomeness, an all-terrain motorized longboard wired to a Kinect and a Samsung tablet running Windows 8. To roll ahead, the rider simply pushes his hand forward.

The system uses video and speech recognition, accelerometer and location data, and other factors to determine a rider’s next move. The Kinect transmits the rider’s movements to a voice-control-equipped Windows 8 tablet, which serves as the control center. The touchscreen turns the board on and off, manages speed settings (the motor has a top speed of 32 MPH) and visually monitors hand gestures, according to the brains at Chaotic Moon Labs, which designed the board.

It’s driven by an 800-watt electric motor, powered by a 36-volt power pack. A 12-volt battery powers the computers.

To get going, raise your hand and wait for the red dots from the Kinect. To go forward, push your hands forward; to slow down or stop, bring your hand back. Check it out in a video below. For more information on the board and a photo gallery of the build, head over to Chaotic Moon.

[via Infoniac]

Sure, you can buy fun things. But if you make them, you get the fun of construction plus the fun of use, with a dash of satisfaction and an anecdote to tell anyone who uses your creation. These three projects--a sledding winch to get you up a hill, a giant version of the board game Operation, and an Angry-Birds-playing robot--are all homemade.

SLEDDING WINCH
Two years ago, Web developer Josh Smith and telecom engineer Brian Freed took their families sledding at an old ski resort in Pennsylvania but found that the 45-minute walk to the top of the 1,200-foot hill limited their runs. By the next winter, they had a solution to the problem: a homemade sledding lift. Built from a go-kart motor, the winch can pull three adults, or two adults with two children. The sleds are tethered to a rope that moves in a continuous loop over pulleys at both ends of the hill, pulling sledders 1,050 feet up. Riders can now make it to the summit in just three minutes. This year, the duo modified the winch so they can use it in the water during the summer for “winch boarding,” a sport in which a surfer is towed speedily across the surface by the device.

Cost: $1,400
Time: One month

OVERSIZED OPERATION
Joshua Zimmerman built a giant version of the classic game using parts he had around his house.
1. Paint a wide, flat box white.
2. Draw the outline of a body, and holes for the “organs.” Cut out the holes.
3. Wire a buzzer, five red LEDs for the nose, and a tin oven tray for each hole to a pack of three AA batteries.
4. Cut an opening into the box’s back. Tape the electronics and trays in place.
5. Attach a wire from a pair of metal tongs to the circuit, and test that they set off the buzzer when they contact the trays.
6. Paint the body.

Cost: $10
Time: Three hours

For details, check out Instructables.

VIDEOGAME ROBOT
Those green pigs have a new mortal enemy: an Angry Birds–playing robot. Jason Huggins, a software developer at Chicago’s Sauce Labs, originally built a motorized finger for another project, but when he realized he could make it click controls on a touchscreen, he decided to use it to operate a smartphone. Huggins laser-cut the grid beams for the frame from basswood and covered the tip of the aluminum finger with conductive foam that he found in computer-chip packaging; contact with the material causes a change in current that the phone’s touchscreen can sense.

To play the game, he sends commands from a laptop keyboard to three stepper motors via an Arduino-based controller. Next, Huggins says, he will make the design open-source and create software that controls the robot’s movements so it can play on its own.

Cost: $120
Time: 50 hours

The new MakerBot is bigger and more capable than ever before I just stopped by MakerBot's far-flung booth somewhere in the back caverns of CES (I believe it may technically be in Arizona) to check out their new Replicator 3-D printer. Check out the video below--pretty sure that's a bust of Stephen Colbert being slowly brought to life with swirling circles of molten plastic. The Replicator is the newest MakerBot, a relatively inexpensive 3-D printer that can print in either ABS (the same plastic LEGO uses) or PLA (a corn-based bio-material). This version is much bigger, capable of printing objects 9 x 6 x 6 inches in size, and has a "dual extrusion" mode to print two-colored objects, a first for MakerBot. It also ships fully assembled; previous MakerBots required the end user to construct them at home, which is described as being about as difficult to assemble as a piece of furniture from IKEA, so there's that little inconvenience taken care of. The new model updates the previous in a few other ways too--it has a built-in LCD panel, a control pad (sort of like a videogame controller), and an SD card slot, so you can just load models onto an SD card and print without needing a computer at all. And as always, plans are available at the MakerBot community. brightcove.createExperiences(); The Replicator will sell for $1,750 for the single extruder version, and $2,000 for the dual-extruder version.

This 160-by-120 pixel TV will get you stopped at the airport

David Forbes was on his way home to Tucson, Arizona, after a family trip last summer when a policeman stopped him in the Detroit airport. The officer said he had received 50 panicked phone calls since Forbes had entered the building, and now his entire family had been marked for extra screening. The delay was inconvenient, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Forbes had 160 circuit boards and enough electronics to start a data center strapped to his body. What the authorities didn’t realize, though, was that all the equipment wasn’t dangerous—it was actually a wearable TV set.

Forbes, an electrical engineer, built his first video coat in 2009 after getting his hands on a collection of surplus LED displays. He transformed them into what he calls “the world’s worst television,” an all-red screen that weighed 50 pounds. He wanted to make a better, lighter version, and thanks to a side business selling homemade wristwatches, he had the spare cash. He laid an old overcoat out on a table, measured its dimensions, and guessed that he could fit it with enough LEDs to create a sharp 160-by-120-pixel display. Next he sorted through his gadget box and found a few flexible circuit boards. The flexibility was ideal for a wearable screen, but he wanted to have more pixels, so he built a prototype of a long, thin board with 30 rows of four LEDs each and shipped it to a circuit-board manufacturer to make 175 more.

Forbes also built an additional circuit board to scale down the analog video signal from his iPod, and three other circuit boards that translate the signals into instructions for the LEDs and deliver power from two lithium-polymer batteries. He put the batteries into his pants pockets, and hot-glued the control boards to the shoulders and the flexible display boards to the front and back of the coat. A little Velcro down the middle replaced the buttons on the coat. The finished version weighed only eight pounds.

At the airport, Forbes convinced airport security that he wasn’t a threat by offering to show them The Simpsons on the coat. Since then, he has cut the coat into two less-cumbersome vests. Although they’re relatively comfortable and they work well, they haven’t replaced his family TV. “I’m not using them daily,” he says, “but they get taken out now and then if I’m in the mood for a little attention from strangers.”

How It Works
Time: 6 months
Cost: $20,000

DISPLAY
Forbes’s iPod plugs into a circuit board on the vest’s left shoulder. The board includes a digitizing chip—a type used in security video systems that allows the feeds from four cameras to fit on one monitor—that he repurposed to scale iPod video down to a resolution consistent with his display. Additional processing converts the iPod data into signals for the LEDs, which travel along Ethernet-like cables to four separate boards, one on each shoulder and hip. From there, the signals move through ribbon cables to the three miniature chips on each of the flexible circuit boards located on the chest and back. The chips turn the LEDs on and off 360 times a second to create the illusion of changing color and brightness.

POWER
Heavy batteries would make the coat hard to wear, so Forbes found an R/C hobby shop in Washington that sold lightweight, inexpensive lithium-polymer batteries. One battery fit in each pocket, which gave the coat roughly an hour of run-time. The smaller vests last up to 90 minutes.

AUDIO
Forbes initially thought about rigging small speakers to the shoulders of the coat, but he realized that they wouldn’t be powerful enough to let him show off his invention at Burning Man, the annual festival in the Nevada desert. So he wired the coat to another one of his inventions, a boom box for bicycles that he built from a six-inch-diameter drain pipe and a pair of outdoor marine speakers.

Recently I converted my old Ford pickup to diesel, and I needed to make a bracket to hold a throttle position sensor, which helps to control the new transmission. Often I wing this sort of thing, working from notebook drawings or cardboard models. But this time I decided to use 3-D CAD modeling, CNC manufacturing and 3-D printing to design and fabricate the part to the exact specifications I wanted.

STEP 1: DESIGN
Using Alibre Design Expert 3-D CAD software, I created an assembly, which lets you model previously designed parts as they will eventually fit together. In the assembly, I placed my throttle position sensor (TPS) over the fuel-injection pump to derive all the dimensions of my bracket from those two parts. I then modeled the bracket that will attach the TPS to the pump.

STEP 2: FABRICATION
I first 3-D-printed an inexpensive prototype to verify that my design would work. Then I looked to machine it. Parts better suited to conventional machining require a multi-axis CNC machine. For anything made from flat parts, a laser cutter is the best tool. Because my bracket would be made of sheet metal, I took the CAD model to a local shop that has a punch press, another type of CNC machine.

FABRICATION SHOPS AROUND THE WEB
eMachineShop: For laser cutting, injection molding, and a variety of other machining processes.
Ponoko: For laser cutting of plastics, cardboard, wood and other materials.
Shapeways: For 3-D printing.

How to make sure your browser, CPU, and network speeds are keeping up with the iJoneses and Jonesdroids

Without conducting some tests on a smartphone, it’s hard to tell whether an upgrade is overdue or just a waste of money. The most important component to benchmark is the CPU, which is most easily done on Android phones—the free application Quadrant generates a graph comparing processor speed with that of other popular phones.

To check the browser’s performance, use the SunSpider or V8 JavaScript test tools, which work across any phone platform. The Speedtest.net Mobile application is an easy-to-use tool for testing download speeds (which can vary from phone to phone on the same network) on both Android and iOS.

Battery life can also indicate if it’s time to trade up. To show how quickly the phone’s battery is draining over time, try Battery Graph, another Android app. Differences in network signal and software make comparing battery life between phones difficult, though. The best method of doing that, if you can get your hands on the phone you’re considering upgrading to, is to play the same video on both and measure how long it takes for the battery to die.

Magnets don't have to be big to produce deadly force, as this slow-motion tomato-pulverizing video shows In the past, magnets were nothing to fear. The small ceramic type long used on refrigerators were barely strong enough to hold up a piece of paper. The same size magnet today can kill you. Every electron in a material has a spin that creates a tiny magnetic field around it. Normally these electrons spin in random directions, canceling each other out, but in permanent magnets, some of the electrons are locked into alignment, producing an overall magnetic field. The stronger this lock-in, the stronger the magnet. brightcove.createExperiences(); Powerful neodymium-iron-boron magnets are used in everything from jewelry to motors. With the development of new alloys and processing methods, they are getting stronger and stronger, to the point that even very small ones can be dangerous. If you swallowed two separately and they were to find each other, they could puncture your intestinal walls and cause a fatal infection. Larger magnets, like the two-by-two-by-one-inch monsters I used in this demonstration, require careful planning just to carry from one room to another. Let one get too close to a steel door frame, and it can crush your hand. The two I used hug each other with 520 pounds of force. Neodymium-iron-boron magnets do, however, have one weak spot: Heat them above 175°F, and the electron spins are knocked out of alignment, permanently destroying the magnetism. So if you ever find yourself with two of them clamped down on your finger, you could hold your hand in boiling water for a few minutes. But try to find a pry bar first. WARNING! High-strength NdFeB magnets aren't toys. Even small ones can crush people's fingers. Do not actually try holding your hand in boiling water to remove the magnets.

Since I travel constantly for work, swapping my bulky MacBook Pro for a half-the-weight MacBook Air changed my life. Ultra-thin laptops like the Air—not to mention phones, tablets and iPods—come equipped with solid-state, or flash, memory, which writes data on tiny transistors rather than bulky spinning disks like conventional hard drives.

Flash-drive speed varies widely, and the Air’s stock drive, though zippier than a regular hard drive, isn’t the quickest, so it’s not optimal for jobs such as pro-level video or photo editing. When I learned that memory manufacturer Other World Computing had begun selling gum-stick-size flash drives, I decided (against Apple’s wishes) to replace my stock drive and conduct some performance tests. It turns out that the company’s drives are, as promised, very fast. I found that its 240-gigabyte 6G model runs about 35 percent faster than the Air’s stock drive [see findings at bottom of post]. There’s also a 3G, which is nearly as fast as the 6G and is available in a 480-gigabyte version that dwarfs the Air’s 256-gigabyte capacity, allowing me to store my entire music collection.

Changing the drive is easy. It requires little more work than unscrewing the laptop’s back panel. But it isn’t cheap—right now the 480-gigabyte drive costs about as much as a new Air. That’s a level of storage available only with a much heavier (and more expensive) MacBook Pro, though, and the prices should quickly drop. OWC also sells an enclosure ($70; MacSales) that lets users repurpose the original drive as an external storage device.

ADD A NEW DRIVE TO THE MACBOOK AIR
Difficulty: Easy
Time: 10 minutes

Step 1: Clone the stock drive onto the OWC drive with a tool such as SuperDuper, available for free.

Step 2: Turn off the Air. Remove the 10 screws holding the back panel on using the supplied screwdrivers.

Step 3: Lift the battery connector to detach it. Remove the single screw holding the drive in place.

Step 4: Pull the drive out of its slot and insert a new one. Reassemble.

Step 5: Turn on the laptop to confirm that the new drive is functioning properly.

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON
Stock drive
Geekbench score: 3,176
Opening a 348MB Photoshop file: 17.6 seconds
Importing a 739MB file into iMovie: 1:30.2 seconds

6G OWC drive
Geekbench score: 5,516
Opening a 348MB Photoshop file: 11.5 seconds
Importing a 739MB file into iMovie: 1:21.6 seconds

Talk about your Super(sized) Mario Bros.: this controller does away with sore thumbs, but it might sprain a few ankles

One night last february, Ben Allen and a group of electrical-engineering students at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands needed some help testing their 20-inch-long prototype of the classic 1980s Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) controller. The group was in the early stages of designing an absurdly enlarged version of the device—one as long and wide as a compact car—in an attempt to break the world controller-size record. In honor of the quest, they enticed some fellow geeks to join them at a campus pub by offering free Guinness. The wood-and-PVC prototype had serious design flaws, though, and before long, the testers broke it.

The students had chosen the NES because of its iconic status among gamers and because the Guinness World Records book doesn’t recognize joysticks. The test in the pub confirmed their suspicions that a 12-foot-long controller would need to be sturdier, since some players would be jumping on the buttons to play a game instead of just pressing them. The students started by designing a steel frame and added steel crossbeams and additional supports beneath the buttons. For the body of the controller, Allen and his crew chose a strong, cheap form of compressed wood.

The next challenge was to get the controller to communicate with a standard NES console. In the pub test, the conventional button mechanism didn’t work—the micromechanical switches that relay the signal got bent out of shape from rough use. So Allen and his colleagues designed a light-based system instead. Underneath each of the eight buttons—the four rectangular corners of the directional pad, red A and B buttons, start and select—an infrared LED shines on a photodiode. Metal plates block the light when a button is pressed, so the console can detect that the button has been pressed.

The group built two controllers and demoed them in the town square, giving local kids the chance to kick virtual soccer balls and guide Mario across mushroom tops by jumping from button to button. In September, the group received word from Guinness that its creation will earn a nod in the gamers’ edition of the 2012 record book, but Allen seems happy just to have a comically huge new toy. “It’s such a rush to play,” he says.

HOW IT WORKS
Time: Five months
Cost: $5,500

Electronics: The chip inside the controller has eight inputs, each of which is tied to a specific button. The console asks the buttons’ status 50 times a second and infers whether they’ve been pressed. To provide a response to the console’s queries, the students wired each of the photodiodes in the controller to a circuit board. Until a button is pressed, the LED keeps sending infrared light at the photodiode, and sensors on the circuit board register no voltage. When a player presses a button, the infrared signal is blocked and the sensors detect a rise in voltage. The group engineered the system so that the spike would represent a pressed button to the console.

Setup: Painting the NES was one of the hardest parts of the build. The group had to replicate the original look while also creating something that could withstand stomping. After cutting the composite wood plates, they painted the exterior of each with two base coats, a color coat, and a clear lacquer to seal it all in. Once everything was finished and the students set up the controllers in a public square outside the university, they realized they didn’t have the right cables on hand to connect the game console to the screen. So they borrowed a cable normally used for stage lighting and spliced the correct connectors onto the end.

Gameplay: In most cases, two people operate a single controller, since it is too hard to jump the six feet from the directional arrows to the A and B buttons. The kids at the demo loved the retro-Wii aspect, but Allen admits that the controllers don’t exactly lend themselves to high scores. “They’re big and they’re slow,” he says. In Super Mario Bros., “people die a lot.”

This transformer ‘bot is one of the more interesting and sort-of-creepy robots we have seen in a while — it can curl up in a ball and await a command, or unfold its servo-driven limbs and pick its way, crab-like, across a surface. It cannot roll yet, but we are actually OK with this, because there is something much more unsettling about a rolling robot that unfolds and starts to walk.

MorpHex is the brainchild of Norwegian engineer Kare Halvorsen, aka Zenta, who chronicles his robot-building experience on his blog. It started as a cut-up globe from Toys ‘R’ Us, and now it has 25 servos and a Basicmicro ARC-32 board, which is not yet programmed to roll. But Halvorsen said that’s his next step. Watch it fold up its arms into a sphere and then gently unfold them to walk.

It’s quieter and sleeker than this other DIY hexapod, and smaller than the albino Fraunhofer spider-bot, but somehow that makes it creepier. It’s especially weird to see it shut down when Halvorsen prods it with a stick ...

[via Engadget]