Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37033652

by yen223 • 3 years ago

377 667 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Could be a painting, or a boat. I'm interested in what HN'ers are building that isn't software-related.

h2odragon2• 3 years ago

Took an old 42U rackmount cabinet and turned it into a dehydrator, last year. Cleaned it out and used light diffuser grille for shelving, a little table fan for air movement and a simple speed controller. Ugly fruits make great dried fruit snacks.

Software may become involved. i'm playing with ideas for adding temp / humidity sensors and putting the fan's speed under the control of something that switches it based on time and those sensor readings. The in/out vent baffles could be actuated by servos. It completely lacks blinkenlights, which deficiency keeps me from showing it off more.

ricardo813• 3 years ago

Cliche response but has to be said, a daughter.

h2odragon2• 3 years ago

Presumably you had assistance. Altho if it was a wholly individual achievement, there should be a lot more celebration.

ricardo813• 3 years ago

The process was not biblical, though it was fun.

bhouston3• 3 years ago

Cobuilding and comaintaining the whole family unit is a major accomplishment that we do not sufficiently value in the tech community, especially in the VFX & video game industries. Sure you raised some VC or had an exit or launched a game or got a paper accepted somewhere or have a popular open source project, but did you completely sacrifice having a family to do it?

lemper• 3 years ago

mine is a son. he's tempering my patience all day every day. and I'm absolutely fine with it.

chazu• 3 years ago

I've got one of each and they are unquestionably the best things I've made, done or invested in.

IggleSniggle• 3 years ago

I came here to say the same. And let me just say, that with special needs children, it truly is the hardest thing I've ever done. I remember older people saying that sort of thing before I was a parent and I was SO DISMISSIVE. Like, "oh yeah sure, you put you heart into it, it's important to you," whatever. But holy fuck. It's actually really really hard. Love is NOT enough. Strategy is NOT enough. Patience is NOT enough. It takes everything you've got.

digging• 3 years ago

Even though lots of people are parents, being a good parent requires a huge amount of work before, during, and after their childhood. We should celebrate people who actively give their children a good household and life. Your life is going to be pretty turned upside by having children whether you invest your energy in them or not - might as well make something great out of it.

m1ster_d4d• 3 years ago

I made handles for a bunch of axes and hammers. I have them hanging on the wall in the garage for when my daughters bring boys around.

geocrasher2• 3 years ago

A 9 foot long recumbent trike with compound low gearing:

https://youtu.be/o3SEndDnVXg

hkt• 3 years ago

A habitable "shed" to serve as an office. In the near future that might be displaced by an underfloor heating system.

failrate3• 3 years ago

Wooden puzzle boxes.

akudha• 3 years ago

Do you have more info? Blog?

failrate3• 3 years ago

No blog right now. I replied with more details to the commenter above.

eps5• 3 years ago

Oooh, do share some details. I've been meaning to try making them after stumbling upon https://www.pelikanpuzzles.eu

failrate3• 3 years ago

I make them out of inexpensive wood scraps, so they end up looking rustic. Basically, they would be a prototype for someone with actual Woodworking skills. They all include a substitution cipher message and code wheel. They are usually single movement puzzles. The "Sweet as an Onion" cryptex required multiple positions to solve, and the recipient was never able to solve it, so I lean into the simple designs unless my friend is an expert puzzle solver. I usually go for hidden pocket puzzles, but my current favorite design is a variant of the snake cube puzzle that assembles into a functional code wheel to solve the message woodburned into the blocks such that if assembled in a second configuration reveal an encrypted message and instead of letters, I used Cistercian numerals. Each puzzle also tries to embrace the onion philosophy, where each layer is easy to peel, and leads to making the puzzle easier to solve. Clues are usually hidden on the object to eventually guide solvers to solving it instead of trying to frustrate or defeat them.

edent• 3 years ago

Animated laptop stickers.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/06/building-a-minimum-viable-l...

First time I've ever built and sold something physical. Amazed at how many people liked them.

swayvil3• 3 years ago

Nice. I did a lenticular thing too. A couple years ago. A 4x6 inch 6 frame art thing. The printer was in Los Angeles and shortly thereafter he stopped doing business. Funny how hard it is to find a printer of such.

sloaken• 3 years ago

That is awesome! I want to do this now.

ricardo813• 3 years ago

Nice, appreciated the breakdown in the blog post!

nathan_f77• 3 years ago

That's awesome! I would love to buy one if there are any available.

methyl• 3 years ago

My father runs a car wash and I built a vacuum cleaner that accepted coins using coin acceptor from Aliexpress and Arduino. That was fun but it lasted only a few months until the device got too dirty from open weather to recognize coins properly.

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

I've looked at the stuff that gets built into car washes and that's a seriously hostile environment, but the weather by itself can also be pretty nasty. Quickest way to demolish a house without any effort: open the windows and doors, maybe a small hole in the roof. The weather will do the rest.

jhoelzel• 3 years ago

I learned the basics of electrics and rewired my house. While doing that i also learned how to "make" network cables and everything. That in turn has lead to some cool house automation for lights pool and more and now i can make my own homekit adapters too =)

klysm• 3 years ago

being able to crimp out ethernet cables is so useful

bombcar7• 3 years ago

I used to love crimping out cables until I got a punchdown tool, now I punch down jacks and leave the cables to the professionals :D

xdennis3• 3 years ago

I have a Fairchild K-20 [1] lens from WW2 and I created a 3D printed camera for it so I can shoot large format 4x5 inch film handheld.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_K-20

damnesian• 3 years ago

Wow, nifty! I would love to see the results.

xdennis3• 3 years ago

Here you go: https://imgur.com/XgSRnHi

The viewfinder isn't mounted in that picture. The two knobs on the right are from the lens to control the speed (125, 250, 500) and the aperture. The knob on the left is the shutter trigger. Shutter cocking is done by removing the ground glass from the back (which is how you preview focusing). Focusing is done by rotating the front side which is actually a giant hollow screw. The indentations are finger grips for rotating.

I have details for all my 3D printed cameras, unfortunately they're under my real name.

mhb• 3 years ago

Brass coin:

https://youtu.be/te130KONPP4

xdennis3• 3 years ago

I like that it includes a large rope around the edge to prevent coin debasement.

bunabhucan• 3 years ago

A titanium road bike frame. UBI in Ashland OR USA had a 2 week course during which you learn to and complete a frame. You didn't need prior experience but I took a welding course in a community college beforehand.

sliken• 3 years ago

Very cool. I wanted a custom frame for my hard to fit wife. The bike shop (dragonfly bike shop in Davis CA) offered a custom frame or I could build one myself for the same price.

I ended up taking the semester class that met twice a week for an evening. Had an overview of bike design, light overview of drafting, and used a 1:1 frame drawing on paper. Handy to be able to hold up the frame you are working on up to the paper. It was fun to go from a pile of bike tubes to a usable bike frame. The meeting of 4 tubes at the bottom bracket had a surprisingly complicated interface. I'm glad I sprung for the powder coating at some bike frame aware place, maybe Cycle Art?

Recommended if you get the chance.

robviren3• 3 years ago

This one is physical and digital. I personally patented, designed, built, and deployed a novel ultrasonic inspection device that encoded position/orientation using IR (Just like motion capture in movies). Actually used it in the field at a nuclear plant. The value pitch is that is allowed for fast deployment (manual scanning), but could also record coverage ensuring nothing was missed. Fast deployment was important to avoid radiation and guaranteing coverage was important for safety. Ended up costing significantly less than automated scanning using a robotic system.

My absolute favorite was using the data to project a 3d model of the interior of the welds. Had to learn quaternions which was nearly the death of me, but I'm just glad it worked.

dismalpedigree• 3 years ago

This is really interesting. Id love to hear more about it.

Also agree quaternions are the worst. You should check out n-vectors. Solves most of the same problems and way easier to work with.

robviren3• 3 years ago

https://nuclear.gepower.com/service-and-optimize/solutions/a...

They still have the link apparently. The system used traditional manual scanning system with a VGA capture card on the back. I synced that with an off the shelf IR capture system and was able to record the ultrasonic scan into a video file using opencv. I would also record a USB cam at the same time as a sanity check. I could generate point clouds of data by reading the video file and the synced position data to project where the ultrasound was going and the linear response of the scanner. Was a ton of fun to develop and it was nice that I pretty much only had myself to blame when things went wrong. I also had to write the procedure for operation in case someone else had to use it.

anfractuosity• 3 years ago

That sounds really fascinating, could you post the patent no. or a link to more information? I bought a cheap NDT ultrasonic 'scope' to play with recently, to see if I can potentially measure specific gravity via it.

robviren3• 3 years ago

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/robert-w-viren

This correctly listed the parents. Hard part was linking all the systems together and keeping sync. Did it all in C++ way back when I actually programmed for work. Now I am a PM and code on the side for fun. I'm almost glad I cannot go back and see my code. It produced good data but damn was I a novice.

vikbez• 3 years ago

I made a player piano from scratch ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atJ_YsPFDjQ (improved since I took the video).

I do a LOT of custom stuff (mechanics, woodworking, house rebuilding, electronics, ...) but this is my favorite one yet, kind of sad I'm bad at showing the stuff I make :D

If you have any idea of what kind of job I could do to make use of all these skills I would be happy to have your thoughts !

peteradio3• 3 years ago

I think it would be cool if you made a "player xylophone". I love the tonal sounds of wood and have thought to do the same. Similarly a plucking piano with bass strings that you play like a piano but sounds like a bass guitar.

aliljet• 3 years ago

I built a house myself.

bhouston3• 3 years ago

Amazing. Would love to do it myself, but how the hell did you find the time?

bombcar7• 3 years ago

A house costs $x dollars. You save up money and take time off to do it, or you do it in the evenings.

Here's a good YouTube channel with a father/son (experienced) team doing just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiOwwhoiKug

Note that they're doing a rebuild of an existing house, but the general idea is the same - live in a trailer/old house while you build a garage with an apartment above it, and then move into that apartment and build the main house. This is quite common in more rural areas, such that you can see it even 40 years later; the garage will have an apartment above it, or the barn will have some rooms.

jppope2• 3 years ago

do you have any photos?

stavros• 3 years ago

I made a rotary mobile phone: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/

Also an e-ink display that shows my calendar (and home power usage):

https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/

Also a LED stick that lets you add images to photos in the real world:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/behold-ledonardo/

And a toy bus that shows you when the next real bus is coming:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/bus-stop-bus/

A 3D-printer-etched PCB: https://www.stavros.io/posts/make-pcbs-at-home/

lemure• 3 years ago

few children's books

chantepierre5• 3 years ago

My telescope(s).

It's a very rewarding hobby, from making the mirror (manual labor + measurements with interferometry), silvering it (a bit of chemistry), designing in CAD and building the actual usable telescope, there are a lot of moving parts to design, and steps that you can either do or delegate. I think anyone who likes manual work can find a piece of a telescope that's enjoyable to work on.

The feeling you get after a few nights of hardware debugging, when everything properly works and you get a sharp focus in a clear night, that's quite a step above any of my other hobby projects to this day (:

Plus, you can always improve it with ergonomic modifications or additions to make observing sessions smoother.

Edit : here's a pic at first light of my last one (8" f/3.52)

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/5939ba170acf1e9d6462d8268...

Now moving on to do twins 16.5" and 16" mirrors and scopes with a friend who is joining me into this adventure :-)

jacknews• 3 years ago

I designed and made a 'cheapscope' out of PVC pipe, 3d printed parts, and cheap aliexpress 76mm mirror, mounted on a camera tripod.

It works well enough for the moon etc, and, as I'm based in a developing country, many people have never seen the sky except with the naked eye, so the gasps and oohs, etc are priceless.

I had intended to document and open-source the whole thing, but was busy at the time, and the PLA prints have since completely disintegrated in the hot humidity, lol. Maybe I'll get back to it again, with PET or nylon this time.

chantepierre5• 3 years ago

That's very nice. All DIY efforts to make visual astronomy more accessible are more than welcome as consumer products are priced for the global market.

geocrasher2• 3 years ago

Cool! I have built Hadley, a 114mm Newtonian that is mostly 3d printed.

https://miscdotgeek.com/3d-printing-the-hadley-114mm-newtoni...

It's done now, and has produced some nice images, but I need to spend more time with it to get planetary images etc.

chantepierre5• 3 years ago

Nice, Maff (& people who joined him) has done wonders to spread low-cost capable scopes with this project ! Best of luck for your future sessions

passion__desire• 3 years ago

Get normal public involved in your adventures like this guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCrJ3NflOpE

chantepierre5• 3 years ago

That's my ultimate goal, an itinerant astronomy car to go in villages where there are no astronomy clubs. I also started teaching the few things I know about mirror making to my club and whoever asks.

I'm building public-compatible stuff now that I have my own stuff that is quite delicate to handle, after a few public nights where children grab onto a high-end eyepiece...

The 16.5" will be a very rugged scope to fulfill this purpose. I think John Dobson's approach to telescopes is the ultimate one, that is, the value of a scope is the number of people who looked through it

sdenton4• 3 years ago

I've got an unfinished 8-inch mirror that I spent a month of evenings grinding... Someday I'll get around to polishing and building out a cargo-bike-collapsable structure for it.

A cool thing about DIY telescopes: You can get better results than a commercial mirror, because you can turn your time into quality at a rate which is not economically feasible for manufacturing.

PostOnce• 3 years ago

Telescopes are often built simply (and rightly) as functional tools or instruments, and that's great of course, but I wanted to compliment you on making a non-ugly, aesthetically pleasing telescope; a bit of craftsmanship goes a long way, looks great man.

bhouston3• 3 years ago

So amazing. Do you have an astrobin.com? Mine is here: https://www.astrobin.com/users/bhouston/

chantepierre5• 3 years ago

Really nice work ! I don't, as I'm doing 100% visual. Your Sadr region picture is really beautiful with subtle contrasts preserved

MrsPeaches• 3 years ago

Solar powered synth and step sequencer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_A0B1R-tZg

Made only from components locally available in Zambia.

sethgoodluck• 3 years ago

I once made a "therapeutic bartender" machine in a rapid prototyping class. It showed different drinks on the screen and used computer vision to estimate your happiness with each option (how big did you smile?). It then pumped and stirred a drink from a cooler full of ingredients.

swayvil3• 3 years ago

A fence on a ridge. High tensile wire, pickets and some other fancy stuff. All hills and transitions. 1 pedestrian gate and 1 wideish chainlink gate. Wood posts and tposts. Box braces and such.

wcunning• 3 years ago

I'm looking at doing some of that and having a hard time finding good resources. What did you use?

swayvil3• 3 years ago

Here's some reference materials

http://fleen.org/fences

perlgeek2• 3 years ago

I was at an alternative/private school, and while lots of it sucked, they did value doing things with your hands, so something I made were:

* a bowl made out of copper, with a fitting lid

* a three-legged stool

* a very fine pair of salad servers, plus a wooden letter opener

* my own apron (sewn on a mechanical sewing machine)

* a bowl made out of cherry tree

If you count perishable items, probably my semolina soufflee :-)

positr0n• 3 years ago

What sucked about the school?

perlgeek2• 3 years ago

* high variance in teacher quality (we had such a bad French teacher that after 9 years of lessons, I knew less than those who had 4 years at a public school)

* long hours

* since the school didn't believe in failing students, everybody was kept in class, and the teachers had to do lots of repetitions to accommodate unmotivated students who remembered nothing from the past two years of classes. Very boring and demotivating for others.

leemcalilly• 3 years ago

Guitar straps made with handwoven Peruvian textiles:

https://originalfuzz.com/collections/peruvian-guitar-straps

nicolaslem• 3 years ago

Speaking of guitars, I am currently restoring a Korean superstrat I have since I am a teenager that seriously needed love. I am learning a ton of things like fret work, electronics and light wood work.

cassianoleal• 3 years ago

I have a Vintage V62 ICON that I modded heavily. All new electronics (including pickups), replaced the bridge with a Babicz full contact, and I had to do a lot of work on the neck, especially fret sanding, aligning and polishing.

It's really cool to see your work improve an instrument. That's now my favourite guitar to play. Pretty low action with zero buzz, pickups can give me everything from full dynamics and great range, to easily distortable power solos.

I'm now in the process of building a new guitar with a 3D printed body. I bought an unfinished neck, so I'm also learning about applying lacquer which is interesting.

criddell• 3 years ago

Those look fantastic!

mootothemax• 3 years ago

A battery-powered sky camera I put together using a raspberry pi pico that connects over wifi to send photos every hour. Ended up going crazy and making a custom PCB for it. Need to do more work on the battery life + camera exposure levels, but overall I'm pretty happy with it, especially how reliable it is given my minimal C skills.

arbuge• 3 years ago

Apart from a bunch of high speed wireless communications chips, this:

https://foundrytechnologies.com/relay.php

About 50% of the work on this was software, to be clear.

misswaterfairy• 3 years ago

A engagement ring for my wife. Made it out of a piece of wire coat-hanger that I hammered down and polished, then mounted a small cubic zirconia gem to it. Probably took a couple of days to make.

We're still happily married six years later. :)

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

Workbench with inbuilt table saw and router, from that I’m building many cool and insanely rewarding things.

d_t_w• 3 years ago

Two Daft Punk outfits with about 70m of EL wire coupled with arduinos plugged into LED arrays stuck inside bicycle helmets. Turned out pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHrWllxRLgQ

Wrote the step-by-step and uploaded the code onto Instructables, it's still there ~15 years later:

https://www.instructables.com/How-To-Make-Two-Daft-Punk-Outf...

I made them with my girlfriend (now wife/co-founder) for my 30th, was lots of fun.

alphabetter• 3 years ago

It is software-related, but also physical: pong with the bats moved by exercise bikes: http://lushprojects.com/cyclepong2/

It's been around more than 15 years in various forms now, but people still love playing it. If you're in London it is at https://www.novelty-automation.com/

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

What a clever idea! It got an exercise bike and noticed it was boring, so I hooked it up to a speed sensor and used that control VLC playback speed. Very motivating, to watch a movie like that because if you slack off it will slooowwww dooooowwwwnn.... And not nearly as boring :)

But I like yours better, it's more fun.

djmips9• 3 years ago

So you're in the same arcade as Tim Hunkin?

sumo89• 3 years ago

Not nearly as cool as most responses but the other day I re-hung our house's back door as the hinge had snapped. I had to chisel new slots for the bigger hinges in the frame and the door. No way as neat as a proper carpenter would do but very satifying especially when you open and close the door for the first time and it doesn't catch the frame and the lock still lines up.

agentultra• 3 years ago

Does a garden count? In a small, urban plot I grow grapes, tomatoes, strawberries, mint, elderberries, and carrots.

A work in progress but I'm building a modular synthesizer. I've built the power supply and have the VCO started on a strip board. Planning on adding some bits to that, making a step sequencer, and some filters.

davidcuddeback2• 3 years ago

Does a garden count?

Yes, absolutely! :)

motyar• 3 years ago

Doing the same, would love to see photos/ videos

jppope2• 3 years ago

yes, very much so

michaelaiello• 3 years ago

RFID Blocking Wallets! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka4eg9Kl6hI&t=104s

eps5• 3 years ago

This shows 2 minutes of ads before whatever the video you linked to.

kotaKat• 3 years ago

The silliest thing I built was a hot-tub water heater system for one of those inflatable Intex hot tubs. Running the heat off 1500W was stupidly inefficient, so I went out and acquired one of those tankless propane-powered hot water heaters and rigged it to a commercial RV water pump and a 20# propane tank to circulate water into the hot tub that way. It heated the tub up from ~50* faucet to 104* hot in about 3 hours, instead of closer to 30 on 120V power.

The other thing I built is more of a lifehack living with sleep apnea. My CPAP's humidifier failed, and instead of replacing it with another proprietary humidifier, I bought an external CPAP humidifier[1] and then realized I could, with some clever plumbing, rig up a water pump from an external gallon jug of water to automatically re-fill my humidifier in the morning at the push (and hold) of a button. I took an oxygen-insertion tee, 12v pump, and some tubing and a check valve and attached the pump to the oxygen line on one of the inlets of the humidifier chamber. When you push the button, water flows through, through the check valve, and immediately down into the chamber.

Here's a snapshot of an early test: https://i.imgur.com/vund22E.png

It's been tweaked a little bit since then but it's my FAVORITE thing on my nightstand now. (And yes - that is a recalled DreamStation 1 - I personally opened it and repaired the defect foam myself. I don't trust the replacement device they sent me any farther than harvesting the motor from it when my old machine fails.)

[1] https://www.fphcare.com/us/homecare/sleep-apnea/cpap-devices...

bombcar7• 3 years ago

"Redneck hottubs" are a relatively common thing and you can get some amazing looking ones, from a fire under a cast iron bathtub to a complex system involving miles of copper tubing and burn barrels.

egberts14• 3 years ago

All before 1982:

a belt-driven windmill to an auto alternator, complete with a household DC circuit providing switchable lights. (thanks Popular Mechanic magazine!)

a 6' multi-stage magnetic-driven projectile launcher complete with a horkage of old TV capacitors.

An amplified passive Ultrasonic sniffer with earphone.

An alarm trip sensor comprised of mirrored lightbeams.

And created/deployed "THE" original credit card reader for a set of gas pumps, later sold to Gasboy, Inc.

Then got wisked away for many other things for a long time.

Now, I am back to experimenting on a portable unidirectional EMP phase.

CoastalCoder• 3 years ago

How did you make a reader like that back then?

I'm assuming that these days, and such device would use a generic microcontroller, with most of the interesting logic in the software.

(Insert snarky joke about it also requiring Electron and 16GB of RAM.)

egberts14• 3 years ago

Some of us remember the good ol’ reel-to-reel audio tape from Sony, ones with BIG capstan pinch rollers and tiny read multi-head.

That’s the primary set of part for this card reader as it came from the AKAI M-7 reel-to-reel tape deck that my dad vet sent from Thailand (that I ripped apart).

The rest is machining the new box to hold together the mechanicals and gears. It was big, something like 13”x8”x18”.

Then came the hacking part, which included plenty of social engineering to obtain its data format and then garage-based pattern construction of data bits.

Then came an Intel MCS-48 (8048) …. old, old, but big ICs approach with ADC capability.

Featured it at a Pacific Oil and Gas Conference booth, sold that day in its entirety,

bityard6• 3 years ago

IIRC, a credit card magstripe can be read with a regular cassette tape head. Which were, if not quite ubiquitous yet, common enough in the late 80's/early 90's. Converting the analog pulses to the card's 16-digit (or whatever) number was almost certainly done with discrete logic at first.

I'm not sure what OP means about creating the "original" credit card reader, unless he was working for one the credit card companies rolling out the technology. (Doesn't make any sense to me that they would put magstripes on their cards without selling the readers to merchants too.)

datavirtue• 3 years ago

Cleared trees (only those necessary), installed water service, excavated and built a 4000 sq ft irregularly-shaped driveway using DOT methods. Everything modelled and planned down to the inch in 3D using SketchUp. (Buildings to come)

intrasight• 3 years ago

With others? I'd say the CMU Terregator in 1983 Solo? Probably the stone wall in my backyard.

tinco5• 3 years ago

I bought a house that was sold as "uninhabitable" in Amsterdam, pulled out all the interior walls, applied insulation, then taught my self plumbing and did the plumbing, redid the wiring, installed the gas heater, laid radiant heating. I built new interior walls and did all the interior finishing except for plastering downstairs and pouring cement over the radiant heating, which I had professionals do. Coolest single thing I built in the house is probably the kitchen peninsula which I somehow aced the oak waterfall on (thanks to Festool I guess).

Sounds kind of cool listed out like that but it was a shit ton of work, it's still not fully done and as I was an absolute beginner with limited time a lot of things are half-assed or have to be redone at some point. I quit my job shortly after buying the house (for unrelated reasons) and took a year long sabbatical but it still wasn't long enough enough time. People warning you about renovations like this should be taken seriously.

If instead of buying this house cheap and doing this renovation, I probably could've just taken a job at a bank or some big tech co in Amsterdam and afforded the same or even nicer a year or two later. Though, with the housing market being as it is the timing was super favourable for me financially. It's also kind of neat to live in a turn of the century house with all sorts of modern amenities like radiant heating, thick insulation and HRE balanced ventilation.

soco• 3 years ago

If I was an absolute beginner (which I am) I would be definitely very wary to do by myself the electrical wiring or the gas connections... while half-assing the rest can only look bad, those can kill you and your loved ones (neighbors need not apply).

irrational2• 3 years ago

Gas? Yes. Electric? Eh, if you are smart enough to program a computer, you are smart enough to read and learn how to do electric properly.

fsckboy• 3 years ago

as homeowner to several places certified to have been habitable and built by professionals, let me tell you, that shark fin headed toward you is plumbing.

tinco5• 3 years ago

I had the gas heater checked by a professional who agreed to do the yearly maintenance.

The electrical wiring you shouldn't do if you're not serious about electrical safety, and not reverent to the industry standards. I read the Dutch standards for electrical wiring, but it's actually hard to do it wrong if you have a small house and no complications like solar panels because building stores don't even sell wrong materials.

I agree with the other person, the plumbing was definitely more error prone. Who knew that PVC glue has a (very) limited shelf life after opening?

s5300• 3 years ago

> I probably could've just taken a job at a bank or some big tech co in Amsterdam and afforded the same or even nicer a year or two later.

Yes, but now you know how to fully renovate a previously-deemed-uninhabitable house.

Many, especially people that make large $ in tech may disagree, but I find this to be extremely valuable knowledge & experience. Tangent, but I experience second hand humiliation & embarrassment when I see an adult paying hundreds into thousands of dollars for something that can be fixed in well under an hour with basic tools.

freitzkriesler2• 3 years ago

Laptop case broke so I bought a bunch of corkboard and mounted the laptop guts as a hanging desk top.

davidcuddeback2• 3 years ago

My dining table. It's a trestle design, made from walnut, breadboard ends, wedged and drawbored tenon joinery for the base assembly, and large enough to fit 10-12 people around for Thanksgiving. The lumber cost $1,400 and it took over a month to build, but it really transformed our dining room.

Some day, I look forward to building a guitar and a telescope, either of which have the potential to take that title away from my dining table, but that will be several years down the road for me.

wdfx• 3 years ago

* modular synth - not pre-build modules, but from circuit schematics (yusynth) upwards: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WemnJZp1ecTxksjb6

* 2-axis camera gimbal - my first fully 3d-printed design. I will try to use this for astrophotograhy target tracking when the weather permits but I haven't been able to actually field test this yet: https://photos.app.goo.gl/a7VxYy77NaH48XP56

gtmitchell• 3 years ago

I spent a lot of my time in graduate school fabricating transmission diffraction gratings using electron beam lithography.

Turns out making a bunch of nanometer-scale straight metal lines one a flat surface is a lot harder than you would think.

satisfice• 3 years ago

A child.

jermaustin12• 3 years ago

I make a lot of marijuana paraphernalia (stash boxes, rolling trays, pipes) all from wood. Its a great stress reliever (the wood work, not the weed - never mix the two), and people love them and buy them.

With each new product, I try to add a new skill to it. So for my stash boxes [1] (I've only made 3 so far -- all prototypes), I have an "air-tight" lid that requires being within 0.001-inches, and the lid incorporates a rolling tray on the underside, so you open it, flip it over, it reseats inside the box, and you have a stable tray to grind you herbs and roll a joint. I haven't figured out mass production on it yet, though, so each one takes me about 2 hours of work, and none of them are perfect, but that is the fun part of it. Figuring out how to make something is easy, figuring out how to make it more than once and quickly is a challenge.

1: https://instagram.com/p/CvpUKVBLph3/

all2• 3 years ago

I assume that 1/10thou of an inch would disappear into the swelling of a wood product? How do you manage moisture and dimensional changes?

jermaustin12• 3 years ago

It's 1/thou, not 1/10k. 1/thou is within a couple thou of the maximum difference in expansion.

How I keep my wood from over expanding and shrinking is by using aged woods. My red cedar (what my stash box is made of) was cut down multiple years ago and stored at my grandfathers sawmill, it was then milled 2 years ago to 3/4 rough. I hold them in my shop for over a year before I plane them, then another 6+ months before I use them. All that time, the moisture has stabilized (theoretically), so the only expansion and contraction would be through temperature, which has a much smaller effect than moisture.

I have had some of my wood products expand in shipping, but after a week of them sitting in a person's home, they will be back to normal. That was my vape cart holders. So after a few people said when they arrived they couldn't use them. I started milling them a little looser.

CasualAttila• 3 years ago

I assembled an Airbus A380-800 model. I had no prior experience in assembling models however I used to play Lego as a kid. This model took about 2 weeks to complete and I did it during my sabbatical. It was a bit harder than I thought it would be and I did unrecoverable mistakes when gluing and using the stickers but overall it was a great feeling to have it done. Now it has its dedicated space in the living room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBwNPSXeh1A

flashgordon2• 3 years ago

I was told the Snoo was the bees knees of baby rockers. Damn it was pricey (1600) bucks. I luckily saw a friend's model in action. Figured it can't be hard to make! Bought myself an Arduino, a stepper motor, a few trips to home depot to get some 2*6s (needed a bit of experimentation here) as a base and a lazy Susan swivel. Voila! Hard work but a lot of fun as I not only had a working rocker (definitely wasn't as pretty as the Snoo but also learn a lot of mechanical engineering in the process. Oh yeah I did rent the Snoo for a month so the baby would have something while I was working at it.

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

Neat :) A friend used a wiper motor from a 1943 Jeep and a very long piece of string to rock his kids cradle because otherwise he wouldn't sleep.

flashgordon2• 3 years ago

haha - nice. By the way for me it was more the "principle" than practicality. I found tons of much simpler solutions that would have worked. Snoo charging that crazy mullah was something I couldnt accept!

vax4252• 3 years ago

I’m designing and building a series of clocks that don’t tell you what time it is.

https://digitalhorology.com

kmm5• 3 years ago

A few years ago I made a "string art" portrait for my girlfriend at the time. It's made from a continuous† 2 km long black thread, woven around a loom made from a bicycle wheel rim. I'm still very proud of how it turned out.

†OK fine, it broke at a few points and I had to knot the ends together, but it's the principle that counts.

https://imgur.com/gallery/ljoJeal

I really wanted to make something creative for her, but I'm pretty terrible as an artist, so I instead applied a talent I do have: making 200 line Python scripts. Apparently the first to do this was an artist named Petros Vrellis, though I did come up with it independently.

Sadly, we've broken up since then, and we didn't remain friends. I do wonder what happened to it, I can't imagine she'd've thrown it out, but on the other hand it would be odd to have a physically quite large memento to a previous relationship hanging from your wall.

chews2• 3 years ago

That is truly remarkable… nicely done.

Also, love is an intense thing and it doesn’t always work out… just don’t lose that love of love

pimlottc• 3 years ago

That’s really cool! Did you publish your code anywhere?

jukkakoskinen• 3 years ago

I found this in the Imgur comments: https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/781f0137b361b51224dcab7...

sulZ• 3 years ago

Do you have the source code for the scripts you wrote to help? I'd be interested in seeing them

kmm5• 3 years ago

They're in two gists here:

https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/781f0137b361b51224dcab7...

https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/b6f158b1278de307e48a200...

I just hacked it together, but I do think it's not unreadable code

nojs• 3 years ago

That is insanely cool, I would love to see the script to convert png to string placement.

kmm5• 3 years ago

Enjoy

https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/781f0137b361b51224dcab7...

https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/b6f158b1278de307e48a200...

I hope it's readable

JackFr• 3 years ago

Best no-word, visual, intuitive explanation of how CAT scans work ever!

s1artibartfast2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure I'd be able to figure it out easily if I didn't already know how a CAT scan works, but I agree it's a excellent demonstration of the principle

pengaru• 3 years ago

Impressive creation, creepy gift.

slow_typist• 3 years ago

Nothing creepy here.

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

Creepy comment.

hattmall3• 3 years ago

Extremely unnerving.

Simon_O_Rourke• 3 years ago

Beautiful piece of art, sorry the whole relationship side of it didn't work out... Onward and upward!

networkchad• 3 years ago

Sorry about the relationship not working out. That art is a beautiful piece of work.

mips_avatar• 3 years ago

This is so beautiful, thank you for sharing. My favorite HN comment of the year

jameswatling• 3 years ago

This is awesome, and am so tempted to try.... one question, how long did it take to physically complete this! Also I know you had to "repair" the string a few times, but is this a 2mi single thread?

kmm5• 3 years ago

I don't remember exactly, it's been 5 years, but I remember there were almost 4000 loops. The loom is a little less than a meter across, but most loop don't span the entire width of the loom, so half a meter per loop is a good estimate, which would yield 2 kilometers. I think that's only 20 euros worth of thread.

Similarly, assuming the average loop took me 10 seconds to do, that amounts to about 10 hours, and I do remember that the final step only took a day or 4, with a few hours of work every evening.

netsharc• 3 years ago

If I could guess, the gift is in a box somewhere in her garage/attic/etc, too nice to throw away but too awkward to display.

_zoltan_2• 3 years ago

would you consider sharing the python code?

kmm5• 3 years ago

Here you go

https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/781f0137b361b51224dcab7...

https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/b6f158b1278de307e48a200...

Haven't looked at it in five years, but it should probably still work if you update the variables at the top.

mutatio• 3 years ago

Wonderful expression of art and life, bravo.

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

That's very nicely done, impressed!

chankstein38• 3 years ago

This is SO cool! I love the python script too!

mdip• 3 years ago

Gotta say -- that looks ... kinda awesome.

I'm sorry the relationship didn't work out. I can completely relate, though. I think just about every "coolest physical thing" I've made ended up going to an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend.

I guess I'm just not motivated to make cool physical things for myself.

cossatot2• 3 years ago

You guessed it, boats. I have built a stitch and glue (plywood) sea kayak[0], an Aleutian-style skin-on-frame sea kayak[1], and a skin-on-frame canoe[2]. All were fairly approachable and straightforward projects (I built the first two with basically some hand tools, a drill and a jig saw, on my deck, but a table saw is highly recommended for skin on frame). Tons of fun and the feeling of being a couple miles offshore or cruising down rapids in a boat you built yourself is awesome.

[0] https://clcboats.com/shop/boats/kayak-kits/petrel/stitch-and...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Aleutian-Kayak-Construction-Tradition...

[2] https://www.capefalconkayaks.com/canoes.html

ratrocket• 3 years ago

Very cool! I've been wanting to build either a Cape Falcon canoe or F1 kayak for a few years (and might get the chance -- read, "have the space to" -- soon). If you see this & can elaborate, how did the Cape Falcon build process compare to the stitch and glue CLC and to the non-Cape Falcon skin-on-frame?

Also, do you find yourself using one or the other of the boats more or less?

Either way/no matter what, fun to see this answer on HN! Thanks!

cossatot2• 3 years ago

The Cape Falcon plans are far more detailed so there is a lot less figuring out stuff by yourself, relative to getting written plans. It's definitely a much more efficient process and there is probably a lot less variance in the result. I winged it on my Aleutian kayak a lot with mixed results (I gave it a lot of rocker and some other whitewater-inspired geometry). Of the kayaks, I prefer the Aleutian skin on frame although it was quite painful before I got the seat dialed in, and sometimes I can't roll it very well (I'm an expert whitewater boater and have a very solid roll), and its top speed is low. But it is very light, maneuverable, quiet (waves hitting it don't make much sound) and the peaked deck sheds water so it doesn't spray your face when you are punching through waves in the surf. The F1 is probably best of both worlds.

The Cape Falcon canoe that I built deviates a bit from the design pattern because I wanted a wide and flat bottom with harder edges, similar to a lot of modern Royalex tandem canoes. It's a 16' tandem I think, and even though it is pretty wide, it is still less stable than most canoes. However it is fast and extremely maneuverable in Class III.

Skin on frame is also awesome because when you are loading or unloading a 17' boat in a crowded beach parking lot and smack the bow into the car next to yours, it doesn't do any damage to either car or boat, or so I hear.

Stitch and glue is straightforward but the woodworking part goes fast and then it's just a ton of fiberglass work, i.e. cycles of epoxy and sanding, which is not that enjoyable for its own sake. On the other hand, one of the great parts of skin on frame construction is that other than a short amount of time ripping the ribs on a table saw, the rest is basically quiet and without harsh chemicals, so you don't need earmuffs or a respirator and can listen to music and have a snack/drink.

Stitch and glue will last forever if you protect it from UV, however skin on frame will most likely need to be reskinned in 5-10 years or so.

deltarholamda• 3 years ago

Boatbuilding is fantastic. I've done a couple small ones (canoe, kayak), and am preparing to do a sailing dinghy. All stitch-and-glue. I'd really like to do an old-school one of Pete Culler's designs with plank on frame.

In a world full of beeping and booping, working with wood, even plywood, is a welcome relief.

getpost• 3 years ago

I also built a kayak (in the 70s)! I forget the details, but I think the plans were obtained by a friend of mine, and we each built our own boats. There was a wooden frame with a canvas skin. We used airplane dope to make the skin waterproof. It lasted around 2 years of fairly steady use in the nearby American River, with no maintenance whatsoever.

kiliantics2• 3 years ago

Another would be boatbuilder checking in. I started a rather ambitious project during covid to build a 21 ft sailing dory. It's my first boat but I insisted on going with traditional solid timbers and rivets and all that. I'm just about to rivet the last plank and still have the gunwales, rigging, rudder, centreboard etc. to do. It's been an amazing process though and I already can't wait to begin another build.

cbracketdash• 3 years ago

Now that you've built a boat, who's gonna carry it? ;)

simonbarker87• 3 years ago

2 things: - Converted a Ford Transit panel van into a camper van that landed up being way higher quality than it had any right to be for my first one. I then lived in it for 6 months through winter in the North East of England and it was great. - Coffee table from a large slab of cedar, I flattened it with a router and a jig and several hours of patience, put a bevel on the top edge and it looks great.

iancmceachern2• 3 years ago

An artificial heart:

https://news.ohsu.edu/2018/03/08/have-an-artificial-heart

I've also been part of (or lead) the design teams of several LVADS (one of which is in the Smithsonian), a dialysis machine (Outset), a surgical navigation camera for NuVasive, and most recently a couple soft tissue surgical robotics systems. First, Ottava from Auris/Verb/J&J, and most recently the Maestro from Moon Surgical: https://www.moonsurgical.com/

I can't decide which is coolest, Oregon Heart or Moon Surgical. What do you think?

P.S. I also completely re-plumbed our old home in Golden, CO both fresh and black. Including personally jackhammering up the basement floor, digging a 5ft trench across the whole basement and replaced the sewer pipe and roughing in a full bath I the basement before covering it all back up.

sigmoid10• 3 years ago

That article seems really interesting, but it's over five years old. Are there any updates on the artificial heart? Did it ever make it to human trials?

iancmceachern2• 3 years ago

They did several successful animal trials which were very promising and demonstrated the thing really worked well.

Unfortunately the CEO was a career academia finance guy and this was his first startup. He wasn't good with their money, and spent it all, much on "side projects" and other stuff not directly related to the development and financing of the pump, before he was able to raise more. The project was also heavily associated with and funded in part by OHSU's Heart Transplant program which has had its own problems over the last few years: https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/07/deaths-at-ohsu-hea...

The architect of it, the guy who just thought it up, is brilliant. I chose to work at OregonHeart to have the opportunity to work with, and learn from him. Dr Richard Wampler is wonderful, one of those old school American treasures. When he was a kid he took apart his families car engine because he was curious, his mom got upset and he put it all back together before his dad got home.

He first envisioned, architected and got going: What eventually became the HeartWare HVAD, way before it was heartwarming (it was Kriton). Some crazy business history here if you want to read more, it's like a soap opera. Thoratec HM II (he helped but didnt architect it I believe) Oregon Heart VADovations And the first one, the Hemopump which J&J bought and threw in the trash, only to buy what is essentially the same device 30 years later in their acquisition of Abiomed and their impella devices.

There is so much fascinating history in this field. They even made a totally mechanical (no electronics whatsoever) artificial heart using the thermal decay of plutonium to power a sterling engine.

P.P.S. I have more info about these, and all the other projects I've worked on on my website at www.iancollmceachern.com

Iwan-Zotow• 3 years ago

kids

joewhale• 3 years ago

Two children. Still amazed how they came to be!

dmytrish• 3 years ago

It's a bit creepy to refer to people as "things"

khazhoux• 3 years ago

You misunderstand the levity of the comment.

md_2• 3 years ago

Dunno why nobody has said anything like this, but I make some awesome bread (baguettes, mainly) and pizza.

What's great is not only that you get to eat the results, but whether it turns out well or badly, you get to repeat it all over again--and again, and again, and again.

marssaxman• 3 years ago

I was surprised to learn how easy it is to make truly delicious bread. Of course you can spend years refining your technique, but the barrier to entry is low.

leipert2• 3 years ago

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35961590

1-more2• 3 years ago

I made some croissants and pains au chocolat in a class. I was expecting them to be just ok. They were not just ok. They one I had fresh out of the oven was not different by degree but different in kind from any I had had before, and I've had good viennoiserie! These were the platonic pastry all others had been reaching for and missing. I gotta try it again.

md_2• 3 years ago

Now I'm jealous. I've been working on croissants off and on for a while--off, right now, because of the hot weather--but frankly was never happy with my results compared to a decent boulangerie. Whereas I do feel my baguettes and pizzas are both decently competitive.

Croissants are damn hard.

csixty4• 3 years ago

I made a person seven years ago. They started out pretty useless, just eating and pooping and crying a lot. But now they can walk, talk, think, read, write, act, sing, and love.

bicx3• 3 years ago

Almost old enough to send into the mines and start paying rent!

bombcar7• 3 years ago

Minecraft has definitely proved that the children yearn for the mines.

giraffe_lady2• 3 years ago

This joke is funny because no one currently living has to make this choice.

mattlondon• 3 years ago

I found that V2 was much harder from an orchestration and toil point of view.

shimon5• 3 years ago

I agree, the scale problems seem to outweigh the scale economies at N=2. At some point you get positive network effects where the older ones contribute to the care of the younger ones, but so far we mainly observe a lot of resource contention with frequent livelock exceptions requiring intervention by the parent processes.

scottrogers86• 3 years ago

also came here to say, "my kids!"

DaveChild• 3 years ago

Pah, amateur. I made two at once.

Well ok, my wife did most of it, but I was definitely a contributing maker.

sramam• 3 years ago

"instigating" you mean?!

adriand• 3 years ago

My wife also says this, but I’m fond of pointing out that she didn’t create our children, they created themselves!

r00fus• 3 years ago

Right, you just provided seed capital.

yeutterg• 3 years ago

Building a hardware business is hard, but it teaches you a lot about product management, supply chains, and empathy.

A few years ago, I launched Bedtime Bulb [0], a light bulb meant to be used before sleep. Since then, my team has reached 10s of thousands of customers, and the reception has been overwhelmingly positive.

It hasn't all been rosy, however. We learned a lot from customers about where the product fell short and what features were missing. We had to pull the product from some markets due to performance issues. We learned the hard way about customs issues, damage in shipping, and much more.

Unfortunately, hardware has long and expensive iteration cycles. But my biggest advice would be to stick with it and continue to learn if you have some feedback from the market that this could be successful. My biggest role models both went through long periods of failure: James Dyson's 5,000+ prototypes and Tony Fadell's years of building ahead-of-their-time products.

And stick with it we did. We are going to release a new version of the bulb in coming months that fix all the issues of the previous product, as well as introduce some new features we think will move the lighting space forward. And we are combining our vision and additional feature requests to release even more advanced products.

[0] https://bedtimebulb.com

jes5199• 3 years ago

it’s not finished but I’m working on an astrolabe https://mastodon.social/@jes5199/110454794966272609

kalyantm• 3 years ago

does my kid count?

cushychicken6• 3 years ago

I'm an EE by trade, and my work has shipped in numerous consumer products. I was lead hardware designer for Sonos Amp, Sonos Port, and a few of the IKEA/Sonos collaboration products.

I've since moved on from that job, but it's a very cool resume item. It's also a pretty cool shameless self promotion thing to point out when I need to.

Was asked by an executive why I should run a hardware development effort at my current company and my pitch was: "Because I've designed and shipped more circuit boards than everyone else at this 500 person company combined. You probably own some of them." Turns out that said executive just got his new house wired with Sonos Amps.

Since I mostly work from home these days, I've done some fun little projects around radio just to prove that I can. I made a little AM receiver with 74xx series logic inspired by a post I saw on HN, and now I'm working on a digitally tuned FM receiver with a Si5351 as LO and an STM32 as controller/HMI.

LeifCarrotson• 3 years ago

Similar story in manufacturing automation, with a lot of automotive especially.

It's fun to drive around and see F150 doors and Subaru seats and Toyota mirrors and BMW center consoles and on and on that I assembled.

Or rather, that machines running code I wrote assembled a small part of. It's definitely a different feeling of satisfaction when a machine I was a critical part of for a few weeks years ago churns out value while I sleep versus something I made with my hands and hand tools which would take an identical amount of time to repeat.

Apofis• 3 years ago

This is one of my favorite parts of creating things. I then go and see them around town and go to myself "Oh I made that or this! Cool!"

leipert2• 3 years ago

What do you think about the longevity of these Sonos products? I got sucked into the ecosystem via IKEA/Sonos collab and now added one to my TV setup.

The ecosystem is nice _currently_ but do you think the hardware+software will be useable in 5,10,15 years from now? Do you think it could be liberated software wise. Thinking about this because I am contemplating moving my vinyl setup to Sonos as well.

pseudosavant3• 3 years ago

I have ten year old Sonos gear that still works. The feature I wish the speakers had most? A line in jack so I could use them with something other than apps. That is a kind of future proofing all powered speakers should have.

cushychicken6• 3 years ago

The hardware will absolutely still be useable. The hardware quality bar is very very high.

Our app usability sucked then (and still does now), but plenty of our products met and exceeded ten or fifteen year lifetimes.

One of the biggest issues we faced when I was there was trying to support devices shipped in 2002 that didn't have enough RAM to run features being shipped in 2016! Newer products shouldn't have that issue. They ship with tooooons of RAM for fear of that situation popping up again.

tky• 3 years ago

I recently added a new Sonos Beam to my TV and used Sonos One speakers from 2017 to serve as my rears. While Sonos has done some weird stuff with old product retirement in the past, being able to pair 6 year old speakers with current hardware was delightful and restored my faith in Sonos product longevity.

madmod• 3 years ago

I made an instructable on how to hack the sonos ikea speaker to get a line level aux out. What do you think of it? Imo its probably wrong electrically speaking summing the low and high frequency lines, but it sounds pretty good after truplay tuning.

https://www.instructables.com/Cheaper-Sonos-Architectural-Wi...

blululu• 3 years ago

I think my personal favorite physical thing that I made was a music box that plays of the voyager golden record. I made it as a Christmas present for my girlfriend. It is light actuated so when you open the box it starts playing a track from the record, skipping one track ahead each time it is opened. It mostly uses off the shelf components for the electronics, and found and decorated the box (sanding/staining/varnish on the outside, and a watercolor painting on the inside. It took quite a lot of effort to get the audio formatted and compressed enough to get it all working, but I think it is really a beautiful object on several levels.

DamnInteresting• 3 years ago

Do you have photos? I love stuff related to the Voyager Golden Record. About 7 years ago I made this: http://voyager.damninteresting.com/

joostdecock2• 3 years ago

Shoes. I've made plenty of clothes, bags, and other more common sewing things. But making shoes is a cut above.

And I recorded the process in an attempt to show that it's not even that hard in this 'Shoes from scratch' series on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1gv5yv3DoZNdz-LJFykg6mMf...

Freak_NL2• 3 years ago

Wait, aren't you the FreeSewing Joost De Cock? I had some good fun making the Benjamin Bow Tie for myself and my young son.

djmips9• 3 years ago

really cool!!

winrid• 3 years ago

Probably the last rally car I had, which I "unrolled" myself. It was a 6+ month project of working on it before and after work. The previous owner had rolled it after owning it for two decades. 1982 Dodge Omni.

It's interesting because rally involves a large rule set for safety, and you also have to make the car survive harsh conditions.

Had to do body work, replaced and rebuilt a couple engines, and redid a lot of the wiring. I did it in a rented RV parking lot. I would take the engine hoist out of storage, assemble it at the lot, and then tear down everything at the end of the day and do it again.

Did a lot of rallycrosses, rally sprints, and a couple stage rallies that it DNFd due to mechanical failures on the last stage on both events. Very frustrating, but that's rally :)

At one point it did a stage with the temp gauge pegged at 400F. The co-driver and I were standing around in start control for the next stage while it idled, and I looked down at the temp gauge (mounted bottom center console) and saw the reading and was concerned - do I shut it off? Will it start back up? This was 12hrs into the event, so I was super tired.

The answer was surprisingly yes, and we fixed the cooling system for the next stage, but it broke halfway and eventually the freeze plugs blew out and we stopped due to concerns of hot steam coming into the cabin.

It drove off the trailer the next day! Headgasket blew across every cylinder.

New head and we entered in HDT. It did okay, but then the rear suspension fell out (!) On the last stage of 1st day. We spent so much time on the front it never occurred to us to check the rear suspension mounts...

When I entered that event I asked the co-driver what he thought and then tried to close his door, but it would not latch. Had to rebuild the mechanism before tech that morning. Foreshadowing at its best.

I think I'll stick to cars made in this century.

binarymax2• 3 years ago

A shoe sole cleaner, which I call the "Sole Glo". Made out of mahogany and oak for the body, a small reclaimed motor, a couple toilet brushes, and some basic wiring with a pressure switch. It actuates when you step on it and does a great job of cleaning snow off your shoes. I've made 4 of them, plus the prototype.

ac2u• 3 years ago

A play on the hair product in 'Coming to America'? :)

binarymax2• 3 years ago

Of course :)

monological• 3 years ago

Started a company to build chip testers. Didn't go anywhere, but I had a ton of fun doing the hardware and software. One specific example is writing a Linux driver to interact with your IP block running on the FPGA. Got to see what happens on the other side of the kernel.

https://www.geminicomplex.com/

djmips9• 3 years ago

I had chip tester on my resume when I was starting out because it sounded impressive - actually it was wood chips - for a pulp and paper company...

jtode• 3 years ago

I just cut a walking trail through a stand of trees on our property, and I'm in the process of putting in a deer fence so my dog can run around and chase squirrels in those same trees without terrorizing the neighbours, he's still learning his manners and he needs to run off leash like ten times a day.

This is already by far the coolest thing I've ever done, and I haven't even started with the light show.

joostdecock2• 3 years ago

Shoes. I've made plenty of clothes, bags, and other sewing things. But shoes is a cut above.

I also documented the process on this 'Shoes from scratch'series on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1gv5yv3DoZNdz-LJFykg6mMf...

malux85• 3 years ago

When I was 18 years old in high school, I found the video online of Mercury beating heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6631u7d4E0

Being young I thought I had discovered free energy, so I set about making this. I carefully setup an experiment in the school fume cupboard, and then experimented with different container radius until I was able to setup an oscillating standing wave. I then put styrofoam that had magnitized nails on the surface, held in place by copper coils wrapped around plastic hollowed out pens, and the vertical motion of the floating styrofoam magnetized nails induced a small current in the coils.

My chemistry teacher then spent a good few days explaining to me why the chemical reaction runs out eventually and how the laws of conservation of energy worked. It was an amazing learning experience and sparked a lifelong interest in chemistry.

lqr• 3 years ago

My siblings and I replaced my parents' rickety exterior stairs. It was super gratifying to make their house safer and save them thousands of dollars while having fun.

hoofhearted7• 3 years ago

I helped build “The Cloud” without really knowing it lol..

I joined a 5 year electrical apprenticeship after highschool. I spent many days between 2006 and 2012 building out crazy electrical systems in these giant warehouse looking buildings in Northern Virginia, for DuPont Fabros and Digital Reality.

I had no idea exactly what the purpose of these server farms were for, but they just told us “if we build it they will come” lol.

I had always wondered who “they” was, and who was renting so much server space.

Eventually we heard that Amazon was leasing some of these buildings, but it was crazy to think that an online bookstore needed such crazy infrastructure.

Flash forward to today and these buildings are called “us-east-1” lol..

aio2• 3 years ago

Goddamn that's pretty crazy

hoofhearted7• 3 years ago

https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-centers/americas/northern...

alberth3• 3 years ago

Am I understanding this correctly, basically a Colo was acquired by Amazon?

It’s pedantic but colo existed for decades before AWS.

It’s the software layer from AWS that made it “The Cloud” (quicker access to hardware & billing by the second, not month)

hoofhearted7• 3 years ago

Nope. As I understand it, Amazon doesn’t actually own data centers; similar to how they don’t own warehouses.

My understanding later on in my career shift to computer engineering was that Amazon is renting out the whole colo, and just owns their equipment.

Amazon isn’t maintaining the datacenter infrastructure such as cooling and power, but instead it’s covered in their bill.

hoofhearted7• 3 years ago

But to answer your reply further, yes colocating already existed in the northern Virginia area because of Arpanet, the internet exchange, and AOL all being in the area pre 2000’s.

DuPont had been building in Datacenter Alley for a number of years already, but the buildings were way smaller; and the systems less complex. ACC1, 2 and 3 are all still there in operation today and have been retrofitted a number of times since 2000. Today, those tiny DC’s are apart of the bigger network in the area; and are just connected together via private fiber loops.

https://maps.apple.com/?ll=39.022237,-77.457433&q=Dropped%20...

jrumbut2• 3 years ago

It’s the software layer from AWS that made it “The Cloud”

That's one way of looking at it, but no one would have used that software if OP had done a sloppy job with the electrical system.

I'm sure there was plenty of boilerplate code in that software (and some very innovative code) and plenty of sophisticated work done to create the physical datacenter.

Aaronstotle• 3 years ago

This is really cool, do you still do electrician work now?

hoofhearted7• 3 years ago

No, I was actually really fascinated by the server and IT infrastructure in these types of operations and worked to make a career switch to programming.

I’m a full stack engineer now professionally, and work on open source code on the side.

larrik• 3 years ago

I was under the impression us-east-1 launched in 2002 or 2003. AWS was certainly a thing in 2004, at least.

hoofhearted7• 3 years ago

Yes, your timeline is correct with the boom in Ashburn. It started out with Acc1, then Acc2 and then Acc3.. These were just some tiny buildings compared to the DC’s that would come in the next 20 years. ACC4 came online somewhere around your timeline as well.

ACC4 was the most state of the art data center in the world when it opened, and it was like 10 times the scale as the previous 3.. Construction halted on ACC5 when the 2008 recession hit. They said the funds dried up to continue construction, and laid thousands of workers off one morning.

Things picked back up a number of years later, and I believe they are past ACC12 now lol..

Here is ACC4, and 5 is right next to it..

https://maps.apple.com/?ll=39.018565,-77.461943&q=Dropped%20...

The newer generation data centers with 2 floors right down the street eclipse the ACC’s of the past and make them look child’s play.

hoofhearthed• 3 years ago

Cool username

Paul-Craft2• 3 years ago

Funny, I was building fiber optic switches around 2010-ish. I'm not talking one of those cute little 48 or 64 port things. I'm talking 250+ inputs and 250+ outputs, where each input is able to route to any output port independently, all with under < 4dbm loss through the optical core, and a switching time of something like 1-2ms.

IIRC, these things were like 18U beasts. I think 4 of them fit on a standard rack? One of the reasons we employed interns was so we'd have people to plug the damn things into the calibration and diagnostic rigs if necessary. Think about it: each LC connector has to be cleaned, then plugged into the correct port, for over 500 ports. If cleaning and plugging in the connector takes, say, 2 seconds in total, that's 30 minutes just to get it hooked up to get checked out.

Besides getting to play with high powered lasers and work on exotic hardware pretty much nobody has ever seen (which also sold for more than my annual salary at the time), I frequently got to work in one of our clean rooms (my sinuses loved me at that job lol), work with hardware and mechanical engineers, and usually had to figure things out on my own, because nobody else was building these things at that scale and there were no fine manuals to read.

Fun times.

dirtybirdnj2• 3 years ago

A few years ago I worked at a startup that let you send handwritten notes via an API. The machines that did this were basically 2.5 axis 3d printers, aka pen plotters which is not a new concept.

I was a software dev on one floor of a building working on the platform, and on the floor below us there was a fleet of about 100 of these machines that were producing the notes. Edit: There was a team of folks that maintained and operated these machines. They didn't write the software but without them the API would not have been able to function.

I really enjoyed interacting with these folks when I could. I got to build some QA UIs for them, and I took a lot of satisfaction out of using my knowledge of the platform to make a nice and efficient tool for them. You don't get to talk directly to your users often and it was a very enjoyable project for that reason.

Anyway, for a holiday party, I thought it would be cooler than a photo booth if we could find a way to make the robots draw the people that operated them. "Yeah sure, that would be cool good luck!"

Well, I actually made it work. With grit, determination, duct tape and jQuery I created a UI for generating vector path data from bitmap images so my "robot" could draw them. I hung out in a room and operated the photo booth all night and it was really fun. Nobody at work actually cared in a meaningful way but it was an extremely satisfying project for more than its aesthetic value.

https://facetrace-party.vercel.app

https://www.robotdrawsyou.com

I've figured out multi-pen workflows to do things like maps and really cool repeating pattern geometric artwork, but the project is kind of stuck because my career has been a struggle. I have my own dedicated machine / hardware to free me from the tyranny of the cloud, but turns out the "I'm gonna build it myself" path takes longer than expected. Who would have known?

I love it so much. I can't give up on it, but it really needs more attention than I can dedicate to it. If you think this is cool and you'd like to commission some artwork please get in touch I'd really like to make this happen.

dylanlacom• 3 years ago

Really cool! But your site could really benefit from having more examples. One image is not enough. Maybe you can link to an instagram account with examples that users share with you. I could see this being a fun activity at a wedding event.

dirtybirdnj2• 3 years ago

Thanks so much, here's the IG account I set up.

https://www.instagram.com/robotdrawsyou

Re: "Wedding events" Yes! But, the cloud. (see below).

One of the problems with my current workflow is its dependent on not only 1. an internet connection but 2. there is a "cloud" i have to interact with to use my off-the-shelf machine.

I have hardware for a new machine, it will need zero internet and work off the grid with nothing but 110 (maybe 12v?) power.

I haven't spent the time to "put the pieces together" so to speak. It needs a UI that allows control over the execution of the plotter artwork. Stuff that pesky "cloud" sort of does, but separates me enough from that I need to make my own version that allows for necessary control.

I think if I was given the time and space to do the deep work necessary I could get a functional MVP working in 2-3 weeks. The constraints of life mean that I can only give it 30min to 1 hour spurts, and even then those are not consistent at all.

Photographing the artwork has also been a challenge for me. I finally bought a pre-made template that I like so hopefully I can get past all the emotional hangups with my past failures and just move forward with what I have instead of trying to "perfect" it all before launch.

whynotmaybe• 3 years ago

Can't decide between

- a mini trailer for camping. It has drawers with cutlery and camping stuff and a roof top tent on top. It's lightweight so I can move it easily in the campgrounds far from my car.

- a guitar from a kit

- fixed my garage sagging roof by lifting it up and rebuilding trusses

bicx3• 3 years ago

I've rebuilt most of the electrical system in an RV I recently bought. It started out with a basic "shore power" system as the dominant source of electricity along with a couple lead acid batteries. I've replaced the old batteries with LiFePO4 (lithium) batteries, swapped out the AC->DC charger/converter with one that can charge lithium, extended the main AC power cable into a central electrical bay, installed a 2000W inverter, installed a hardwired EMS/surge protector, and a transfer switch to automatically switch main power to the inverter whenever it's powered on. Next is to install dual 400W solar panel systems (it could have been a single 800W system, but it was actually cheaper with a dual 400W system).

Ultimately I'm going to live in this RV and work remotely as I travel.

itintheory• 3 years ago

I'm interested in learning how to do this kind of work. I ultimately plan to install it in a van or trailer, but I'm thinking of starting with some kind of portable solar system to use while camping. Do you have any recommendations for resources to learn about these types of systems?

bicx3• 3 years ago

Renogy is a popular brand for solar systems, and they have some great resources. Also lots of YouTube vids that walk through solar installation on RVs and vans. Once you know what you need (panels, charge controller, batteries, inverter), it starts to come together pretty quickly. I’d just make sure to scope out your typical watt usage so that you size the system to what you need. For me, I can run everything for a remote work setup _except_ the air conditioner and things like the microwave (I’m on a 800W system with 200ah of battery). My fridge can run on propane, otherwise that would be a non-starter for off-the-grid remote life/work.

JamesMcMinn• 3 years ago

This is a partial cheat, because there was software involved, by the coolest physical thing I've made is probably the photobooth I put together for my wedding, combining an old laptop with a broken hinge (which allowed it to become a cheap touch screen), my Sony A6300 and big Epson photo printer, all crammed into some ikea shelves that I boxed up with some stiff cardboard and decorated as nicely as I could to match our thankfully fairly rustic wedding [1].

It was very simple to use, completely automated, took no maintenance other than loading some paper every few hours, and people were free to print as many high-quality 10x15cm photos as they wanted, and if I recall correct, that number was somewhere in the region of 200. There's something special about a physical print compared to seeing a picture on a screen.

The reason I think it's cool is because even 5 years later, I still visit friends and family and see photos printed from the photobooth framed on their walls, and I've had multiple friends use it for their weddings too!

I think the advantage of keeping it unmanned and simple was that older couples had a bit more confidence to get up, press one big button, and get a photo without any fuss. We had an actual wedding photographer there too, and they got plenty of wonderful photos, but mostly of the wedding party. It's only been a few years since my wedding, but unfortunately, some older guests are no longer with us, and the photobooth has left us with some wonderful photos to remember them by, which otherwise I don't think we'd have.

Very DIY, bit in my rather biased option, very cool.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ONFa9AU.jpg (the photobooth in action)

[2] https://i.imgur.com/DcldyHV.jpg (my wife and I taken using photobooth - we still have the damn ring of ivy floating round the house!)

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

A 4 axis CNC mill. It ended up at an auto supplier making key fobs for a major automaker (because I needed the cash more than I needed the tool at the time).

mealkh• 3 years ago

I used to be heavily into building terrains, physical dungeons and other props for tabletop gaming. I wish I still had my old pictures! At one point, I considered taking on commissioned work for castles, fortresses, modular tile-based dungeons...

Ilasky2• 3 years ago

I made one of those Word Clocks using an arduino, glass, wood, paint, a couple buttons, and a laser cutter.

I painted a pane of glass white, then black, and created the file for all the letter to say the time as well as happy birthday. Took it to a laser cutter to etch it into the glass.

Made a backing with leds programmed to display correctly the date and time, iterate through colors, modes, etc.

I also made it in Hebrew too. I have the code somewhere if others are interested in making it.

Edit: Here is the code in case anyone else wants to use it https://github.com/imlasky/wordclock

vax4252• 3 years ago

So cool! Got any photos of your build?

I did something similar...

I made a musical automatic Hanukkah Menorah using an Arduino (Seeeduino XIAO SAMD21), MDF, birch veneer, melamine edge banding, a GPS module, tiny speaker, LED strip, and a CNC machine.

Check it out: http://HanuKron.com

My other clocks: https://DigitalHorology.com

Ilasky2• 3 years ago

Ah - I wish I took more photos. I only have some in-progress photos around. I'll upload them a little later today.

I love the simple wood look of your pieces! Really elegant looking.

cjm42• 3 years ago

I made a silverware holder custom-fit to my silverware.

I found a half-inch thick HDPE cutting board at a restaurant supply store, cut it to fit my drawer, then drilled holes in it and inserted short wooden dowels to hold the stacks of silverware in place. To position the dowels, I wrapped a nail in tape to match the diameter of the dowels, then placed my silverware on the board, slid the nail up next to it, and gave it a tap to mark the board where the holes needed to be drilled.

It worked really well and was quite easy to do. I highly recommend it.

jumploops• 3 years ago

I once built a “solar chime” using broken solar panel pieces, a microcontroller, battery, wind chime, motor and two magnets.

The idea was simple: when the sun comes up, chime.

It would charge up the battery during the day, lose current over night, and when current came back in the morning it would spin up a magnet using the motor (hidden under a platform) which would then cause the chime to activate (after attaching a magnet to the central chime string).

The whole thing resembled a flower in a pot, with a wind chime hanging off it.

After I finished, a guy came up to ask what it was. He and I were both a bit delirious as it was 6 or 7am after a long night of hacking. I demoed the solar chime and he exclaimed: “wow, it’s like analog to digital to analog!”

I now thing about most things that way.

eye-robot• 3 years ago

Built "Free Enterprise" (AKA 'Big Bird") with Dave Elliot. My boss was Tom Jewett. That plane along with the golden Q2 shown at Oshkosh 1981.

I'd be super impressed if anyone knew my name ;-) (Fred Jiran would know me) (plus, I was hired by Boeing in 1985 and worked in MR&D Composite Primary Structures)

P.S. G. Michael Huffman is a BFL (big fat liar). He came on after Dave and I completed the aircraft, INCLUDING the landing dolly. Actually, I give 95% credit to Dave there, he did most of the final work, since he was a registered A&P.

chews2• 3 years ago

I was a co-builder of “the funhouse”.

Have a look - https://funhouse.house

My ex and I built a large physical love note to each other by way of turning what started as her boring studio apartment into an interactive art installation we would live together in and build.

It’s now an exhibit in Manhattan and over 100k people have moved through the whimsy and magic at a huge scale… and yet, it started with a huge crush between a nerd and an artist.

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

That's amazing. I spent a good 20 minutes looking at it all. You guys must have had a lot of fun building all that.

delboni• 3 years ago

Building my own mechanical keyboards and learning to paint with gouache (not that super amazing end result, but is for me super cool to have a physical painting at the end of a session).

orblivion• 3 years ago

Search for "in case of revolution break glass" and you'll see a bunch of photos of copies, some even for sale, of a physical meme that a friend and I built over a decade ago. You'll also see the original mixed in there somewhere :-) It's still in my apartment.

(Credit goes mostly to my friend for the construction, though it was my idea and I placed the lettering by hand.)

bredren• 3 years ago

I built a pikler triangle out of solid oak with all brass hardware. Painted it with my wife using milk paints.

Came out very nice, learned a lot of woodworking skills.

TT-3922• 3 years ago

One of my favorites is an RC boat made out of metal. It turns out that you can get 0.3mm thick, tin plated steel, cut it with scissors, bend it, and solder it together with a normal soldering iron.

Another other one would be a split keyboard, for which I designed and built everything (case, pcb, plate, software) from scratch.

LesZedCB5• 3 years ago

I used to make RC planes and quads, it was super fun, and there's a huge community of foam board planes which are pretty fun and easy.

which style keeb did you make? :D

TT-3922• 3 years ago

I tried to get into RC planes, but not living near any places where flying is even allowed really ruined those plans.

As for the keyboard, it is a split arisu style keyboard: https://fosstodon.org/@TT_392/109920314230277590

whalesalad3• 3 years ago

I built a new TV stand for myself. I grew up watching my dad, uncle and grandfather do all kinds of woodworking so it was time to dive in myself. It was a lot of work, but also very rewarding and I am really glad with how it turned out. Towards the end I kinda ran out of gas and so I ended up skimping on the legs with some premade ones. I would like to redo the legs at some point.

The most rewarding part was creating various tools out of wood to build the thing. In the same way that we build tools to make programming easier. I made a little jig so that I could cut all the upright pieces the same dimensions using a circular saw.

Here is an album of photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/whalesalad/albums/721777203103...

bityard6• 3 years ago

Nice result!

I've built a few things out of wood at this point, and my process is largely the same as yours... I start with an idea and a _very_ rough sketch and then just start building. I watch YouTube videos of these people who design every feature and facet in CAD before stepping foot in the workshop and I always wonder where they find the time to do that, and what they do when their plans don't match up with reality.

whalesalad3• 3 years ago

Thank you! Doing this project definitely gave me a huge appreciation for folks like foureyes on yt who are producing some truly magnificent things.

https://www.youtube.com/@Foureyes.Furniture

atorodius• 3 years ago

Not sure if it counts but my Eurorack modular synth is definitly my most loved phyiscal thing and it’s kind of built (from modules). Still habe to get into soldering my own modules..

dopheide• 3 years ago

I made a soccerball vase out of maple and walnut: https://photos.app.goo.gl/5Qh2RQiRmdRPjZdQ8

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

I'd love to see a 'making of' of that. Very impressive skills. This whole thread is full of gems.

luizfzs• 3 years ago

I 'designed' and built a small trebuchet at 15yo. It was fun. Inspired by Age of Empires II.

mav88• 3 years ago

An almost complete set of helicopter flight controls for XPlane out of wood, aluminum, potentiometers and USB controllers. Works exceptionally well for a virtual Huey.

ezedv• 3 years ago

I once built a custom wooden bookshelf from scratch. It was both a challenging and rewarding experience. I learned about woodworking techniques and design considerations.

It's amazing how crafting something tangible can provide a sense of accomplishment and connection with your space.

LesZedCB5• 3 years ago

I like building bikes. I have four now that are all frame up builds, and I've used it to get pretty good at fixing and diagnosing issues too the point friends come to me. I've also learned to build wheels though that's very much a work in progress.

I also roast coffee. I exclusively buy green to roast for myself and friends and haven't bought roasted coffee in over a year!

I learned to sew and made a frame bag or two for my bike, and have made some shorts, pants, working on some skirts.

I keep fresh water planted aquariums and have learned to set those up. they are fun and very pretty.

I struggle with creative projects, so these types of things above - skilled, short projects, I guess - are my bread and butter. I'm learning guitar again but I'm not very musically creative either so we'll see how it goes this time.

e4e5• 3 years ago

I've been thinking of making my own frame bags. You got any pointers for me? Completely new to the hobby but it seems fun

LesZedCB5• 3 years ago

I followed this guide, after prototyping a smaller one to dial in the techniques.

https://bikepacking.com/gear/how-to-make-a-bikepacking-frame...

honestly I think just getting stuff like corners and seam allowances dialed, frame bags (with minimal features) are super fun and easy. I order my tech fabric from seattlefabrics but ripstop by the roll is pretty popular too. it's worth getting a nylon swatch to see all the fabrics next to each other because of all the fabric stores I've been to, almost none have tech fabric.

if you don't have a machine, it's worth going to a store. I tried the thrift store and got one running but the feed dogs were broken. I've only ever had amazing experiences at sewing stores asking for help or guidance.

diydsp• 3 years ago

A synthesizer played by pumping energy into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huYJa2Du57g

Because the volume should track how hard you play and stopping to change/recharge batteries takes away the fun!

ryandrake3• 3 years ago

Built a two-seat, single engine airplane. Took 6.5 years to build and I've been flying it for close to a year now. The U.S. and several other countries have fairly liberal rules allowing for home-built aircraft, so there are actually tens of thousands of home-built planes flying around today. Yes, it's built from a kit (mostly sheet aluminum and rivets, some fiberglass) but I'm OK with calling it cool.

snprajwal• 3 years ago

Damn, that's well beyond just "cool"! Can you share some more details on this? It sounds fascinating

ryandrake3• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37038246

Fraterkes• 3 years ago

Do you have a link to where you got the kit? And how much do you estimate you spend in total to get to fly your own plane (including getting a license). (Srry if thats rude to ask)

ryandrake3• 3 years ago

Sure. There are a lot of kit manufacturers out there, offering a wide range of aircraft styles and purposes from back-country to aerobatic to long-range cruise airplanes and more. Materials can include aluminum, fiberglass, wood-and-fabric, and others. The EAA[1] has a lot of information about the various kits. I went with a Vans[2] which are very popular kits with a huge volunteer support/help community online and offline. They list kit prices on their web site, but they are exclusive of engine, propeller and avionics, which can be significant. Fortunately, since it takes a looong time to build, these costs can be spread out over many years to make it manageable. I got my pilot certificate 20 years ago when it wasn't as expensive as today. Not sure how much a PPL will run you these days.

1: https://www.eaa.org/eaa/aircraft-building/kits-and-plans

2: https://www.vansaircraft.com

edrxty• 3 years ago

Working on my own RV-8. There are dozens of us!

Also, support the EAA! They're basically the EFF/FSF of aviation, AOPA/NBAA/ALPA etc are all shitty industry groups that want to make aviation as inaccessible to the ordinary person as possible.

samtho6• 3 years ago

It’s even worse, general and experimental aviation is hated by the FAA itself. They would rather only commercial aircraft exist so they don’t have to deal with the silly people with their toy planes. The fact that all classes of medical certificates have mostly the same requirements for both general aviation and airline transport pilots (no prescriptions outside of the dozen they are okay with, among other things) shows that the FAA sees genav as just a pathway to get to ATP. I guess the 1500 hour rule indirectly keeps hobbyist pilots flying.

nkg2• 3 years ago

That is cool.

david-gpu• 3 years ago

Children. They are not made in a night, or in nine months, they are made over the years you raise them. When they are sick and you care them, when you are sick and you care them, in the sleepless nights when you ruminate about the world in which you brought them, etc. I'm sure it doesn't stop until you die.

vonnieda• 3 years ago

I made a clock based on an IV-18 vacuum florescent display tube. In the process I learned CAD, CNC, aluminum anodizing, metal turning, SMT soldering, laser cutting, box making, power supply design, and a dozen other skills I use every day today.

Here's the clock's homepage, which has some pictures: https://vonnieda.org/tc18, and more pictures on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vonnieda/sets/7215762293577593...

And a blog post that goes into excruciating detail about the entire process: https://vonnieda.org/archives/1406

I built a total of five of them. I sent one to the person who designed the enclosure, one to my brother, one to a friend, one to eBay for sale (which ended up in Germany), and kept one for myself. It still sits on my desk ticking along quite happily. I've changed the backup battery once in 14 years and have made little tweaks to the firmware over the years.

owalt• 3 years ago

That's incredibly cool looking!

evulhotdog• 3 years ago

The eBay listing is dead, so I have to ask… what did it sell for?!

jfsantos• 3 years ago

As a kid in high school I built an FM transmitter including etching the PCB at home and everything. Even thought it was not super high-powered (you're not supposed to build a high-power FM transmitter, especially back then when radio was not digital) it was super fun to be able to speak to this little thing I built and hear it come out from the radio.

As an adult, I built a clone of a Fender Champ guitar amp, completely handwired with an eyelet board like they did back in the day. It sounds amazing for such a simple circuit and is actually an object I enjoy using as opposed to a toy like the FM transmitter was.

fcoury• 3 years ago

I used to be deep into the mechanical keyboards rabbit hole.

On of the nicest switches out there are worn in with time, so I created a machine that wore them in by pressing them multiple times. Never got to finish it but used it quite a bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctWl4Hy6DAc

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

For a nice analogue of that: At the Steinway factory they have a machine that breaks in the actions of new instruments, it's a giant eccentric wheel that presses the keys and releases them again once per revolution, they let it sit for a few hours.

3littlefish• 3 years ago

During Covid I bought a sewing machine and taught myself to sew - then I made my daughter's matching dresses (and a ton of other stuff including toys, bags, etc!) I definitely became a bit obsessed for a while...

doctorhandshake• 3 years ago

For me it might be a system that's a hybrid of lighting and low-resolution video. It's installed in a food hall that turns into a night club after hours, so by day it looks like large glass and steel pendant lights, with circadian-scheduled blackbody colors (varying white temperature that follows the sunlight temp and goes deep orange-red in the evening), but after cocktail hour it kicks over into a dynamic, audio-responsive, stochastic, durational video/lighting sculpture that has lots of hidden behavior and a 'rich inner life', as I like to say. https://hardwork.party/rosetta-hall-2019/

It was a huge labor of love and took a lot of faith from the owners of the space - faith I feel was rewarded, because it's been running for almost 3 years now and it still gets a cheer from the crowd when it kicks over into party mode.

cactacea3• 3 years ago

After doing the vanlife thing for a few years and rewiring the auxiliary battery system in my rig a couple of times I decided to scratch an itch and created a PCB with Wago connectors to greatly simplify the process and eliminate as many crimped ring connections as possible. Nearly everything for a small 12V auxiliary system plugs directly in on the PCB: DC-DC charger, start battery, aux battery and all accessories.

Now that I've scratched the itch I've found that there's a bit of a market for a product like this so I have started a side business to start selling them:

https://www.tesotaoverland.com/product/apds

Feedback so far has been enormously positive. They're not a great fit if you have a ton of equipment or high-current devices but for smaller setups in vans, 4wd vehicles, off-road trailers, etc it really simplifies the installation process.

petsfed2• 3 years ago

There's a near limitless number of things of this nature to be designed and built, running the gammut from little gizmos to electrical distribution boards like you've designed. I've had ideas for an in-vehicle weather station (internal/external temperature and humidity), a music system hand-off switch, and a variety of other little things that somebody building their own overland rig might want.

Speaking as part of your likely market, I'm really not surprised that there is a market. The mainstream RV market seems to be most focused on the kind of person who wants to run their generator every day so they can watch satellite HBO on their big screen TV in a KOA campground every night. The interior design is locked into what a person retiring right now wanted their very first kitchen to look like. So things like off-the-lot solar, or effective laptop connections, or modern interior design is not really a thing.

My main hesitation on starting down your road myself is that I already have a job building things like this, just not on projects of my own choosing.

cactacea3• 3 years ago

Oh for sure, at least in the USA though FCC review gets pretty sticky so I'm actively avoiding selling anything for the moment that would require RF testing, etc. Unfortunately anything with a microcontroller or radio isn't going to be on my website for sale any time soon. I have to imagine most of the people in this space that are skipping testing/certification are just banking the FCC won't come after them. I support the FCC testing requirements, especially as a ham. But I wish the process wasn't quite so... expensive to be compliant. Especially when I'd rather put my money into product safety and reliability testing given the use-cases.

jairuhme• 3 years ago

This is very cool. As someone interested in overlanding, is there somewhere you could point to where I could learn more? Specifically on the tech side of it. Thanks!

cactacea3• 3 years ago

Not sure what you're interested in exactly but happy to discuss more:

https://www.tesotaoverland.com/contact

uptown2• 3 years ago

I made a farm table from reclaimed lumber.

https://imgur.com/a/QDrUJzu

My family uses it everyday.

exolymph• 3 years ago

Absolutely gorgeous.

uptown2• 3 years ago

Thanks

AndrewKemendo4• 3 years ago

I'll brag for a minute

I created what I think is a novel painting technique that I have now made significant iterative improvement on over the last 4 or so years. I now have a large portfolio of medium-large scale paintings using this technique.

https://www.instagram.com/kemendoart/

The technique is a variation of a "fresco" which is applying watercolor to fresh plaster. This is a very old method that tends to survive long periods because it is making a material/mineral change in the composite medium in a way that embeds pigments into plaster - making it durable to degradation in ways that other methods aren't.

I take this further by blending the pigment into water and then adding lime plaster so that the plaster itself is pigmented, and then you work with the pigmented plaster much like you would work with oil on canvas. I make my own wooden frame "canvases" by hand and have had to deal with warping and cracking.

The challenges are numerous and there's nobody to follow or ask for help or advice because as far as I'm aware nobody has developed a practice for this. In many cases I've had to make my own pigment (For example I ground up Kingsford Charcoal for black pigment on "Untitled 7" which gave it more of a concrete texture)

The biggest challenge however is with pigments - not only are they hard to make and expensive to buy - but when mixing with lime plaster they get IMMEDIATELY washed out so that bright and bold colors are extremely hard to make.

I am currently working on my latest piece and this thread made me upload my latest progress to show: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvptIU1urzD/

In order to get the depth of pigment I want I am experimenting with soaking my unset plaster with tons of pigmented water. So far it's working!

My next set of experiments is to figure out a new frame material that will not decompose faster than the plaster. My fear is that in a 100 years the wood will have degraded and that will cause the whole thing to fall apart, so I need to figure out how to get the plaster to adhere to stone somehow.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/kemendoart/

shimon5• 3 years ago

Interesting technique. Are there some similarities to the Venetian Plaster technique? (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfGbryICt0A)

AndrewKemendo4• 3 years ago

The primary difference is that "Venetian plaster" process is specifically intended to mimic the look of marble or stone and so the method doesn't really veer too far outside of that for materials or process.

These kind of artists seem to only use quartz or other "smooth" acrylic plasters and pigments that don't have the same structure and are generally thin and temporary (less than 20 years expected age) - so not limestone the same kind of lime aggregates like tadelakt which is what I use.

I'm attempting to make something that can last 2000+ years - somewhere between an oil painting and a marble sculpture.

mkovach• 3 years ago

I still get a bit impressed with myself when I build a new Cigar Box guitar. Build something that can actually make music, using nothing but, usually, spare parts and almost completely out of wood is pretty cool.

One of my neighbors recently had their move away to college and him and his wife were finally throwing out some of his old things. There was enough things to make them a nice three string using bits of an old desk and a metal arts and craft box.

Gave them them the completed guitar around Thanksgiving and they ended up giving it to their son, who had started playing guitar while at away at school, for a Christmas gift.

I like to think he'll continue to own, and use, those small bits of his childhood as he moves further into adulthood.

xyzelement6• 3 years ago

This may or may not fit into the OP's intention but some of my favorite physical achievements are repairs that might be impressive for a random suburban dad :)

1. Two years ago our basement flooded a week after we bought the house. I ended up tearing out the now-saturated carpet and put in vinyl plank flooring. Mainly straight forward but requires planning and at some points tricky sawing. It's cool when people come in and un-prompted say "wow that's a great floor you have here"

2. Maybe 4 years ago, I completely disassembled and repaired a through-wall heating and cooling unit in our NYC apartment because it wasn't producing a lot of air. Previously, repairmen came out and said it was working as normal and just wasn't meant to produce more air. This taught me a lot about electronics, HVAC, testing, and shopping at vendor-supply stores. People are shocked that a civilian was able to do this repair.

EDIT: I'll add one more:

3. Replacing the screen on my Pixel 6 Pro. It fell out of my pocket while biking, and although it wouldn't have been the end of the world to just get a replacement, I thought it would be fun to try and repair. I normally stayed away from stuff like that because I didn't want to deal with removing/applying adhesives but it was really not a big dea.

spcebar• 3 years ago

Were vendors willing to work with you directly or was there some process to building a relationship with them? And what were some of the challenges you ran into while doing the replacement?

xyzelement6• 3 years ago

I somehow found a store in Queens that sold AC parts to repairmen ~ no idea how I originally found it.

I remember Citi-biking over the 59th street bridge to pick up stuff ~ first capacitors, eventually a motor - which is what ended up being the real issue.

The store got a kick out of working w me at first but I think they eventually found it annoying. I suspect repair-folks don't do a lot of returns. EG - if they buy a capacitor and then it's not what was wrong, they end up keeping it for another job whereas I retired it. Also, when I bought the motor that was the manufacturer specified replacement, it wasn't a perfect match for some other part of the unit. I had to bike back to the store and the guy gave me some bushings (which solved the issue) but real repair people would probably know that the shaft thickness changed on that motor and carry some bushings around anyway.

So yeah they were fine to do business with me but they normally deal with large-size orders probably, so my stuff was "cute" but most certainly not a priority for them.

mattbrewsbytes2• 3 years ago

Similarly, I have felt huge satisfaction with DIY repairs. Re-plumbing a couple sinks and replacing a garbage disposal and/or adding a dishwasher is not hard to do, the building codes aren't terribly overbearing and its like Lego connecting things together with immediate feedback loop when testing for leaks (modern PVC plumbing, not older copper/metal).

When you own a home and have the time, there are some tasks that will save you a bunch because they are labor intensive but material costs are low. Also if you live in an area where people hire everything out you'll find shortages of contractors and high prices.

tracker16• 3 years ago

Yeah, that's the spot I'm in right now... contract rates where I live went through the roof over the pandemic and never came back down.

Aside: I wish I could smack whoever did the wiring in my home. They saved a few dollars on a breaker, but if I run my AVR/TV + Microwave (in adjacent kitchen) and the lights are on in the summer, it blows the breaker. And there's a dozen spaces on the box still available even.

shimon5• 3 years ago

What was your AC repair? Did it involve dealing with the refrigerant system or just other electronic components? If so, I'd be shocked too -- AFAIK most commonly-used refrigerant compounds are not generally available to civilians because of the environmental damage caused by their irresponsible discharge.

xyzelement6• 3 years ago

No, not refrigerant. I think I ruled that out pretty quickly because one of the symptoms was icing on the evaporator side - so I figured the compressor side was producing enough cool.

At the end of the day the problem was the evaporator blower motor. It was insidious because it certainly worked and moved air around, but it was something like a 3 speed motor and the 2nd speed was failing and not moving enough air around, hence the icing and not producing enough air, something like that.

MerelyMortal2• 3 years ago

AFAIK most commonly-used refrigerant compounds are not generally available to civilians because of the environmental damage caused by their irresponsible discharge.

I don't know if the EPA test has changed in the decade since I took it, but it was very easy for me to get the cert needed to buy refrigerants myself. I found an A/C supply store that administered the tests, found a study guide on the internet, ready the study guide in half an hour, took the test. Now apparently you can do the test online whereas I had to go to the store.

kulahan2• 3 years ago

I get what you're saying, but even HVAC guys are civilians :)

btbuildem2• 3 years ago

Huge pet peeve of mine, this militaristic way of thinking. Even police are civilians -- every one is, except for actual soldiers. Cops love to refer to everyone else as "civilians" but they're just hired security with extra perks.

d0gsg0w00f2• 3 years ago

it was really not a big dea.

I read this like a joke that the far right of his touchscreen doesn't work anymore and can't type the letter "L"

xyzelement6• 3 years ago

:) I appreciate that! Worse, I posted this from a desktop!

tracker16• 3 years ago

That's cool.. I replaced a fireplace surround, flattened the wall, wired in for speaker passthrough and electronics to mount a tv, the surround didn't allow room for a tv mount and now power, etc.

Also enclosed a garage at a prior house, turning it into an office. Sub-breaker, lighting, etc.

Haven't been able to do much at my current house since the fireplace as my physical health is less than stellar. On the small repairs, I just can't handle those, I had trouble reading small text and not much dexterity before the tiny ribbon cables in modern laptops and phones. If it's beyond a sodimm or m2 slot, I'm out.

phdelightful• 3 years ago

It’s far from what I do now, but as an undergrad I built an automatic guitar tuner. It had a PIC32 microcontroller that read the sound waves on GPIO pins and did some cross-correlations to figure out the frequency (sort of a poor man’s FFT, but faster since it was less general). It used an FPGA to drive a stepper motor to turn the guitar pins towards the correct frequency. Code was all C and Verilog.

hathchip• 3 years ago

This sounds awesome.

How does it work exactly? Does the use pluck the strings while the machine turns the knobs?

ben7799• 3 years ago

Theoretically, but Gibson made these and it was a real failure in the market to the point they even destroyed a lot of the stock of guitars they couldn't sell.

It might raise from the dead with a non-traditional guitar design like a headless guitar where the mass of the automatic tuners could be hidden inside the guitar body.

acedTrex• 3 years ago

I made a wifi controlled blender in college. 3d printed the frame, put a website on a small pi etc. used that thing for 3 years before i bought a new one

SillyUsername• 3 years ago

A flying Delorean.

No seriously, it was a model suspended above a maglev bed. I then added an Arduino, MP3 player IC, and IR detector so that it played BTTF quotes as you walk past.

I've also repurposed an old 2.1 gaming chair hifi into an all in 1, custom "T" shape 3d printed gun metal/copper case, base speaker underneath, left right on top, controls in middle.

gilbetron2• 3 years ago

My family and I built a two story house as a family cabin in 1992-4, which was a cool experience, albeit exhausting and humbling. The only things we didn't do were the foundation and some of the finish drywall. Everything else we did mostly in a single summer, from the first floor joists to the roof (which we did in 90F weather!). Great experience, really helped me understand what is behind the walls of my future homes.

I'd say my son, but really my wife is the one that built him ;)

shimon5• 3 years ago

I'd love to do something like this with my family someday. Any advice based on your experience?

gilbetron2• 3 years ago

Make sure everyone involved is closely aligned in what they want out of it! Half our family wanted rustic, the other wanted a modern house built in the woods, it caused a lot of issues. Likewise, talk about timeline and set expectations, who wants things done by when? Some of us through we were going to take a year to build the cabin, others thought we were going to have it done by the end of summer!

djmips9• 3 years ago

That's my biggest project too! Building a house with the family. We also made the foundation using cinder blocks! The only thing we got help with was digging the original hole and smoothing the concrete floor in the basement where a friend came by with his gasoline powered trowel. I sure remember doing the shingles because I did a lot of them!

liampulles• 3 years ago

When I was in high school, I was looking around a charity shop and I noticed a basket containing a few circuit boards with familiar looking ports. One of them had a website printed on it. I was curious and it cost basically nothing, so I bought it and looked it up when I got home.

Turns out it was for a build-your-own MP3 player kit. It had slots for old SDR RAM, an IDE hard drive, and power connections for an ATX PSU. Turns out, I had the parts I needed from some old pcs I had gotten from my uncle. I inserted the RAM, copied some MP3s onto the IDE hard drive, put it all in a shoebox, figured out how to short a connector on the PSU to start it - and it worked!

It wasn't pretty, and the sound was noisy as heck, but it was a fun adventure. :)

ashton3142• 3 years ago

When we were still dating, my wife milled a Starfleet chevron from aluminum as a present for me. I proposed shortly thereafter.

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

What made you wait ;) ?

ashton3142• 3 years ago

It took a minute for the ring to get finished.

Animats• 3 years ago

https://vimeo.com/124065314

throwaway-72822• 3 years ago

I made a replica of the… device that a popular video game called Counter Strike uses in game[1]

I designed and 3D printed everything myself including the circuit board, and overall it was a really fun project to work on. There were some areas I could have been more accurate to what the in game model looks like but maybe in a version 2.

It’s a cool thing that sits on my desk and does not leave the house.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/csgo/comments/10vvupj/i_made_a_repl...

bglazer• 3 years ago

Oh wow. Thats very well done and also an extremely alarming looking object

throwaway-72822• 3 years ago

Thanks! Agreed, I think its more fun to make dangerous looking objects so long as you remember that others may not know it’s only a model

midasuni• 3 years ago

Ice cube

tejtm• 3 years ago

depending on where, that could be significant [1] which would be much better than the low effort graffiti better found elsewhere

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory

jrumbut2• 3 years ago

This was a very long time ago, but it's what comes to mind.

In middle school we had an egg drop competition where we needed to make a device that would allow a raw egg to survive a fall from the ladder on the back of a fire truck. The device was subject to various limitations like not having a parachute or an engine.

Everyone else had these elaborate contraptions with springs and whatnot. My solution was a bunch of egg cartons bound together with twine. I made it in half an hour. It was the only one that survived the first round.

I think you could have dropped it out of a plane.

horsawlarway• 3 years ago

Hah - I did exactly the same thing. No complexity - cut the corner off a couch cushion (small puffy one) shoved the egg in, taped it shut. Won by a landslide vs all the other contraptions.

Survived the initial 2 story drop, then a 5 story drop. Then being heaved as high as possible by the athletics coach off the 5 story drop.

Only broke when it got slung around so hard that the tape came off and the egg came out midair.

Long story short - Eggs like being compressed on all sides. You will win drop tests this way.

bambax• 3 years ago

I made a kind of theremin based on an Arduino and cheap distance sensors (HC-SR05). It's basically a MIDI controller that emits CC values relative to the distance of the player's hands.

Here's me playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgH-WU-9CZA

VikingCoder• 3 years ago

The coolest physical thing I've made?

I make small gametes, and I found someone who makes large gametes. We put them together and made mutated replicas of ourselves. The first experiment has been running over 3,500 days. The second experiment has been running almost 1,400 days, but it's currently significantly louder and more prone to violence. We're very proud of them both.

Havoc• 3 years ago

Some mighty impressive posts here!

Rather more modestly - made a esp32 PWM fan controller that hooks into home assistant. Nothing wild, but it did open my eyes to the fact that I can duplicate most IoT stuff on my own terms despite being an amateur. And that in turn has takes it from "IoT - not in my house" to "yes lets do more IoT".

batterylow• 3 years ago

I made a VESA mount for my iPad [1]. It wasn't exactly brain surgery [2], but I thought it was cool!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jMZtt37vgY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

reacharavindh• 3 years ago

Cradle I built with my hands for my son, and managed to finish it well before he was born. Still very proud every time I look at it. About to be used for the next one :-)

https://ibb.co/PQ38tcG https://ibb.co/tXv9dsy https://ibb.co/3FXR4Vn

uranium• 3 years ago

That's lovely--really elegant lines.

Also, congratulations!

organsnyder4• 3 years ago

Nice work! It's gorgeous. Great job on finishing it: I think most woodworkers intend to build a cradle for their kids, and end up building them for their grandkids.

Congratulations on your impending arrival!

jszymborski• 3 years ago

I've made a bunch of cancer-causing virus as a grad student. After all the COVID lab leak stuff, it's become a story I need to preface with the fact that it was all zero-risk in terms of leaking out of the lab, and the only person at risk was myself.

The virus was specifically missing the ability to replicate, but it did have the ability to infect cells in a dish. That means it was just BSL-2 stuff. Our lab studied cancer, so we'd mostly infect them with cancer-causing things like a mutated PI3K that would fluoresce so we could track it in the cell with a microscope. If people are curious, we'd mostly work with lentivirus.

It's a dream of mind to make some of the cool sorts of mechanical things people are posting here. I have multiple drawers with arduinos and components, but so far my projects hit a wall because of my lack of skill hehe. Practice makes perfect!

fragmede2• 3 years ago

That's so cool! Bioengineering things like that blows my mind. We (humanity) can take bacteria edit their DNA and make them produce all sorts of useful things. Enzymes, insulin, flavorings, colored dye. Some of that's old technology, too, it's just that petroleum based processes are cheaper that we use them instead of using bacteria for things.

mattbrewsbytes2• 3 years ago

Hardwood desktop for a sit/stand desk frame. Made from walnut planks ranging in width from 3-6" and length of ~5ft bought via mail order. Hardest part was jointing the boards (making the edges flat/square) using a router instead of a jointer, which I don't have (yet). Probably too much waste material but you learn as you go.

The fun thing about wood projects is you can cover up mistakes pretty easily and for big mistakes just make the project smaller.

patwolf• 3 years ago

A long time ago I made a needlepoint for my mother out of one of her favorite photos. I thought needlepoint was interesting because it's basically pixel art except much more laborious since each pixel requires a physical stitch. I ended up writing a program to transform the photo into a needlepoint pattern, and for a while I turned it into a website for folks wanting to generate their own patterns.

I wish I had the patience to do something like that today, but there are so many other distractions.

eschluntz• 3 years ago

Do robots count? https://youtu.be/VbIDXe5o5yM

My startup builds (friendly) security guard robots, and now has a fleet of >100 deployed around the world.

Long ago when we were seed stage I spent Christmas morning finishing soldering in the first unit to hit our first customer delivery a few weeks later. Was a good time :)

Lots of blood sweat and tears scaling from there...

giantg2• 3 years ago

Possibly a garden - growing lesser known varieties of fruits can veggies is something I find interesting.

Or maybe making a traditional bow. Identifying types of wood, reading the grain, and turning it into a bow is interesting. I think most people have this concept that wood is this rigid thing, but seeing a traditional bow on a tillering tree is something else.

kulahan2• 3 years ago

I was going to say the same thing, but with non-edible plants. I grow succulents and cacti, which are beautiful and extremely unique (seriously, the bear paw succulent is the CUTEST THING, and a String of Pearls has a window in each pearl showing you how much water is in it!).

It's so satisfying to watch them grow and to show progress... even if I have killed a few on accident.

WillAdams2• 3 years ago

Making an (archery) bow is one of the most challenging woodworking projects of all --- removing 1/1000 of an inch of thickness from the back (evenly) will change the draw weight by 1 pound, and when the stave is first roughed out, there is a single point in the structure which is the weakest which defines the maximum possible draw weight for that bow --- that is, until one tries making arrows, as the old saw goes:

Any stick will do for a bow, but an arrow must be perfect.

I've made a couple --- one of my most successful was a Decurve-reflex hickory-backed hickory Flatbow:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/paleoplanet69529/decurve-ref...

polishdude20• 3 years ago

A thrust vectoring rocket! It was my sanity project during the pandemic. Flew many times and even flew two stages with slight software mods:

https://github.com/AdamMarciniak/CygnusX1

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

Remind me to stay on your good side. You don't happen to have 'poor impulse control' tattooed on your forehead, do you? Sovereign citizens with their own cruise missiles are not to be trifled with...

Libbum• 3 years ago

A set of clay tablets that depict the Sumerian/Babylonian epic of creation.

https://whispers.neophilus.net/

taroth• 3 years ago

My uncle had ALS and was slowly losing his ability to speak. I visited and in order to hear him, we had to gather around him closely. It was very fatiguing for him to project his voice.

I went to a few audio stores and jerryrigged a portable mic-speaker setup that could attach to his wheelchair. No software, just the right series of devices and adapters. It worked well and provided a huge relief for him and our family. Nothing impressive technically, but definitely the physical thing I'm most proud of making.

His blog, for any curious about his ALS journey: http://cheeseaisle.blogspot.com/

archagon• 3 years ago

Thank you for that link. What a funny and engaging writer.

“My statue will be made of guano, highly compressed and polished to resemble marble, commemorating the victory of Bad Taste over Common Sense and Decency.”

Sounds like another great project for this thread!

mwittman• 3 years ago

Not the coolest, but a thing I've shared publicly that's whimsical and was fun to make.

A Super Mario Question Block (wood, brass, copper) https://wittman.org/blog/mario-question-block/

sailorganymede• 3 years ago

I made a “pizza wrap” that had butter chicken with cheese on top. I’ve never topped it since.

davesque• 3 years ago

I got really into Indian classical music at one point some years back. I was learning to play the tabla drums from a really skilled teacher that I got connected with through a friend. Was a great opportunity to learn an interesting skill and related to my overall musical interests.

Anyway, I got a basic set of tabla drums that came with a pair of supporting rings and covers. But the rings and covers weren't very good quality. So I went to hobby lobby and my hardware store and bought some piping, plywood, fabric, and lace and made a very nice set of rings and covers by hand. Was a really fun project and came out very nicely. My teacher couldn't believe I went to all the trouble.

Another honorable mention is that I did Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard computer project. Took a long time and I learned a lot about EE.

rond2911• 3 years ago

When I was in school back home in India, my mom wouldn't buy a ping pong paddle for me to play with friends since it was expensive. So, I decided to cut down old notebook cardboard covers and I made one for myself by glueing 7-8 hard cardboard notebook covers.

I know, sounds lame but this is all I can remember. :D

bityard6• 3 years ago

Not lame at all, I routinely make things that I don't want to buy. Sometimes they even work.

gmac• 3 years ago

A 3D-printed Gravitrax marble-run piece ‘for my kids’ during COVID lockdown.

A rather similar official piece has recently been released.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cvpz8UAoZfb/

bryanmgreen• 3 years ago

Some stuff I'm particularly proud of:

- Most of the furniture and art [1] that I've made. I'm a very analytical person and physical creative outlets where I just create things that "feel good" really help me unwind... Even if those projects are pretty difficult for my often times rudimentary skills. There's a small gallery on my personal website.

- My own company [2] that makes titanium hand-blown glassware for whisky and spirits. They're made in Europe, so I don't personally craft them, but the glasses are my design and I learned how to 3D print prototypes - so "made" might vary based on your definition. Tangible things are just really cool and grounding.

[1] https://bryanmgreen.com/crafts

[2] https://bennuaine.com

huevosabio2• 3 years ago

I got into woodworking during the pandemic, built several pieces of furniture, my favorite is a firepit table [0].

The top is made out of concrete, and the rest is wood. The propane tank fits inside so it is out of view. I did buy the piping and the grill from where the fire comes out of, but other wise all done in my basement.

Other builds include a kitchen island, a coffee table, and a live-edge standing desk. I think the next thing I want to build is outdoor seating that goes with the firepit.

[0] https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPUzkh4ukWZ7XPD5cPvE1D6...

nkozyra2• 3 years ago

I know that fire pits (and outdoor stoves) need high heat mortar ... did you use that here or is the heat level low enough that it's not necessary.

huevosabio2• 3 years ago

Here the heat is low enough that it wasn't necessary. It's only the table top that is concrete.

avar5• 3 years ago

You don't need high heat (refractory) mortar for many outdoor fire pits or stoves.

It's mandated in many places (and for good reason) for indoor fireplaces, chimneys etc.

That's because regular mortar will crack when subjected to roaring fires, and you don't want the heat, fumes or fire itself to escape the chimney.

But e.g. for a fire pit it's usually no big deal, as the outside of the pit is presumably soil, or the open air.

dr_orpheus• 3 years ago

For me woodworking is also produced the coolest physical things that I've made. If I had to pick one, I think I would pick the kitchen island that I made.

But I think my favorite moment came from the trim I did in the basement. We have been re-doing a lot of our basement and I did all of the trim that is in there now. There is a transition in floor from carpet to tile right near a corner. Looked kind of like this [0] Lots of angles to make everything match up and tiny cuts to finally get it to match up correctly (made more difficult because of course the wall isn't a true 90 degree angle). Turned out really well and looks seamless, but not something most people would ever notice. But one of my friends who is also an avid home DIYer was in my house saw it and said "dude, that trim is fire!". Felt good to have someone recognize the work that went into it.

[0] https://kyimages.kyinbridges.com/baseboard_different_heights...

fragmede2• 3 years ago

Dreamland with the Flux Foundation for Burning Man, was a fun thing helped bring to life. It's hard to choose 'coolest' though.

https://www.fluxfoundation.org/dreamland/

balderdash• 3 years ago

A double decker bedside table for bunk beds so that both the bottom bunk and the top bunk have a bedside table for a light/alarm clock/ glass of water/book/ etc. super simple, but effective…

widea• 3 years ago

A class-A, solid state, single ended headphone amplifier, not my design, turned out to be very nice sounding: https://github.com/Wanderingidea/Formula3HP-headphone-amplif...

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

Nice, old school, none of that SMD stuff :) Very nice case you made too, I like the idea of using off the shelf cast boxes and then making them look super nice.

hospadar• 3 years ago

I built (with my partner) a crazy all-aluminum camper trailer:

https://luxurylandyacht.wordpress.com/

I've built some small boats and stuff, but this was a whole-nuther dimension Took about 11 months of pretty intense almost-every-day work by two people.

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

That design is very well thought out, as good or better than the commercial ones.

WillAdams2• 3 years ago

An Ascham (a case for archery gear):

https://www.lumberjocks.com/showcase/archery-case-ascham-of-...

Holds my Bear Custom Kodiak Takedown, half-a-dozen arrows, armguard, tassel for cleaning arrows, belt, and various other accouterments --- everything but the quiver (which I attach to the case using a leather strap).

I need to revisit it to have better proportions for the arrow holder and to work up a quiver option which I both like, and which fits inside the next version.

TheAceOfHearts• 3 years ago

Here's some art I've made by carving linoleum blocks and then printing them on paper: https://imgur.com/a/gdRTrYp

For many of them there's usually multiple images or ideas expressed within, but it's difficult to get people to share their thoughts or feedback beyond a simple comment that they think it looks cool. The most rewarding feedback is when someone spots an unintended detail or interpretation which I hadn't considered during their creation. I think a key aspect of art is in the act of interpretation by part of the viewer. The creation of beauty in the interaction between art and a mind.

azriel91• 3 years ago

1. A dove soft toy, that can tuck its wings:

- stencil: https://github.com/azriel91/dove_stencil/

- wings tucked: https://github.com/azriel91/dove_stencil/blob/main/photos/20...

Made this because one of my friends said she liked things with character, and I knew that a handmade soft toy wasn't "enough", and so letting it tuck its wings was that character.

2. Many ambigrams (words that when rotated upside down, read as the word). These ones are names for friends / acquaintances

- blog: https://cards.azriel.im/

- different names: https://cards.azriel.im/2018/09/kevin-fiona.html

- colour inversion: https://cards.azriel.im/2018/01/carlo.html

I still make them occasionally, just haven't updated the blog

edit: ah it's not markdown, links were codified

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

I have done projects pretty much all my adult life. Woodworking, electronics...

This minimalist "speaker table" has integrated full-range drivers and subwoofer:

https://imgur.com/RIVRfea

A Raspberry Pi running a Mac emulator:

https://imgur.com/XgnGYH9

stankot2• 3 years ago

I'm a sucker for old games and good pixel art and I've built a pixel art frame powered by a LED matrix. It is not the most impressive thing I've built, but it is the one that brings me the most joy.

Videos:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Stanko/retro-frame/dev/ret...

I wanted something that has a feel of an art object and sits on the shelf, rather than being a smart object that you can control with an app.

The whole thing is open source and you can make it yourself:

https://github.com/Stanko/retro-frame

Disclaimer - This was my first ever python project and I just made it work. ATM a friend of mine is helping me refactor everything. Repo also needs images of a new wooden frame I made.

Edit: Formatting.

neontomo2• 3 years ago

Love it! You might wanna experiment with Flip-disc displays too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-disc_display

stankot2• 3 years ago

Oh boy, flip-disc displays are really nice, I would love to get my hands on one.

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

That's gorgeous, and the animations are so smooth :)

s0rce3• 3 years ago

I built a few custom scientific measurement equipment over the years during my Postdoc and at a biotech startup.

System to monitor crystallization/freezing of ice in 2-5nm diameter pores within silica (coated on molybdenum mirror) by infrared absorption (https://lylegordon.ca/researchoverview.jpg).

Micro-rheometer to measure viscosity of samples as small of 3uL of liquid (this was an improvement on a NIST design that didn't require calibration of capillary diameter)

Porosimeter to measure active (flow through) pore size (5-50nm) in tiny membranes that only flow a few microliters per minute of helium (gas).

Custom time-resolved pycnometer to measure flow rates of membranes attached to a closed volume, detect leaks, and measure the internal volume.

jimbooonooo2• 3 years ago

After leaving my old job, I realized that I loved the device design work I had been doing, I just didn't like the work environment... So I started my own company and designed my own fine pointing device, sensors, controller and software.

The company didn't go anywhere because it turns out that business is hard when you don't like to self promote, but I am incredibly proud of the end result. It has high bandwidth, <100nm RMS jitter, a nice network interface, and incorporates reinforcement learning-based controller tuning

Check it out here if you'd like: https://www.rockymountainservo.com

s0rce3• 3 years ago

neat, I don't think I have any use for this, just used a few pre-assembled laser galvos for optical coherence tomography but I love the super niche small companies selling hyper-specialized instrumentation.

jimbooonooo2• 3 years ago

Thanks for the kind words, and agreed, I enjoy the enthusiasm and detailed craftsmanship you see in the boutique shops. Makes me think of watchmakers or similar...

elliottkember• 3 years ago

I made a 6 foot long LED staff with 1,500 LEDs. It had a huge custom battery inside it and it lasted for hours and hours. I got really into programming LEDs and making great patterns, but it was a lot of work keeping it running and replacing LEDs as they failed.

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

I designed and sold a faceplate mod for the Behringer Neutron semi-modular synth. I sold a few thousand before shutting down in late 2020. There were two varieties - here's what they look like (search Google for Behringer Neutron to see the stock look):

https://imgur.com/a/ezbg3py

neontomo2• 3 years ago

I wrote, illustrated and self-published a book about mental health, psychedelics, sex and meaning in life. It's meant as an anti-dote to self-help (while diving into those topics) and a memoir of a strange part of my life where I had to rebuild my mental health from scratch.

I was incredibly proud to have copies in my hand, and it's sold around 100 copies, which is more than the 5 I expected.

You can buy it here (and read reviews):

https://neontomo.com/book

You can download for free (bc I care about freedom of information):

https://archive.org/details/recovery-from-ego-death

samhuk• 3 years ago

Due to two things:

1. I'm a bit of a klutz

2. I'm somewhat of a perfectionist-closeted-as-a-realist-for-money kind of person, so physical things that I make/do never scratch that "must be perfect" itch.

...I almost never make anything physical (other than food? Is that cheating?). However!

First tiny backstory: Around 5 years ago I had a Clevo shitbox laptop for gaming (all I could afford then). It was loud and overheated (obviously). It was back in the "desktop replacement" days when there was a weird trend craze of putting desktop GPUs and CPUs into huge laptops, at the peril of...everyone?

So after a few months of having it, I decided to integrate an AIO water cooler "onto" (into?) it.

From a Youtube videos I learned the ins-and-outs of molex, lapping copper (how to not breath in ultra toxic metal dust was a welcome bonus), 12V and 24V switching power supplies, soldering, wire stripping, etc., then I just stuck the AIO cooler on with thermal adhesive, hooked it all up with a nice rocker switch and electric wizbangs, and I had a cute little switchable AIO cooler for my gaming laptop.

It looked gross, but actually resulted in a ~10% gaming perf boost and made it a lot more quiet (the AIO was taking a tonne of heat from the CPU where most of the heat and gaming bottlenecks came from.

It really did look hilarious. It was a fun story when guests came round for food/drinks/whatever; I would often get asked about what the heck it even is, as it just looked like some kid hot-glue-gunned a bunch of random wires, fans, and boxes to the back and under-side of a laptop.

vyrotek• 3 years ago

I converted our old dining table into a board game table.

I had no idea what I was doing and never done any woodworking before.

https://imgur.com/gallery/TTEPVLw

Today it's covered in Lego from the kids...

scooble• 3 years ago

I made a 14ft oar to scull my sailing boat, a 9ton gaff cutter. Worked surprisingly well.

simeonf• 3 years ago

I built a two-story straw bale house with lime exterior stucco and clay plaster on the interior walls.

Many details in the house use reclaimed/salvaged lumber (fake box beams on the ceiling, deep window sills in every window, wood paneling, fireplace mantel, pantry shelves, etc).

I had construction skills at the start of the project due to my dad who is a contractor. But through the project I started doing some finer woodworking and ended up with some hand tool woodworking skills and was able to all the trim: recessed baseboard (bent around curves some places), door casings, window details, some custom cabinetry, etc.

d0gsg0w00f2• 3 years ago

That's awesome. How long will a straw bale retain it's structural volume even if it's dry forever?

I watched some YT series about dirt buildings covered with plaster and that was fascinating.

nerpderp82• 3 years ago

I welded a huge bike trailer out of old bikes and EMT. For the coupling between the bike and the trailer I used a two bike forks, and JB welded the hubs together to create a universal joint. It worked wonderfully and I could haul 20 or more bikes on it.

schubart• 3 years ago

A simple robot that plays a toy:

https://github.com/schubart/donald

Blackthorn• 3 years ago

Built a leg vise stand out of an old truck brake drum. Very simple construction but I think it's cool and a great use of reused material.

1-more2• 3 years ago

I have knit a number of scarves. They're kinda cool because I knit partial rows from each side. While they are rectangular in that the number of stitches across each row is constant, the tensions in the scarf make them wavy.

I made doohickeys to add homekit controlled dimming and convenient physical switching to my bedside reading lamps.

I am in the middle of making a farmhouse table out of walnut. It is very precise work that I am not used to.

kroltan• 3 years ago

Just a simple thing compared to the epic works of art and engineering seen elsewhere in this thread, but it pleases me and that is enough.

Don't even have a name for it, but I trapped a bunch of small bearing balls between a couple sheets of acrylic, so they are free to move but only in 2 dimensions.

It is so relaxing to handle, it's a hefty thing with around 4500 2mm balls in it. I like holding it on my lap and swishing around until I manage to form them into a single lattice. As the thousands of little balls roll, they make a sound that is the mix of raining, a stream, or a million Lego pieces being dug through.

There is a video of it here: https://twitter.com/kroltan/status/1385386058913832963

While building it with my dad, we weren't sure how to fix the acrylic plates together, so we used some double-sided tape. My dad raised the board before his eyes, but a terrifying crack was heard, and the smile that was on his face turned into a frown at the exact same rate the level of the balls dropped from the frame.

We spent the next 2 hours sweeping his workshop to retrieve all the balls, and then fixed it with double sided tape, glue, and an outer "framing" of a fabric tape which is really good under tension.

pseudosavant3• 3 years ago

Recently, I've delved into creating and modifying electric guitars. Here are some of the enhancements and modifications I've made:

- Pickups: Upgraded to Fleor's pickups, which are both excellent and budget-friendly. - Blender Knob: Replaced the traditional pickup selector switch with a blender knob. Most blender knobs aren’t designed effectively. I've found using a dual potentiometer (stereo fader) with a center detent to be the only way that sounds really good. I’m currently exploring slider pots that can be seamlessly integrated into the pickup selector's position. - Configuration: Transitioned to SS or HS configurations on my Strats. The middle pickup tone falls short, but blending the neck/bridge results in a phenomenal sound. - Noise Reduction: Lined the electronic compartments with copper tape. This ensures the guitar remains silent, even when utilizing high-output pickups. - Tone Knob: Modified the typical frequency-adjustable low-pass filter to be a push-pull between low-pass and high-pass. This results in a crisp, punchy funk sound. - Bridge: Converted my Strat's tremolo system to a hardtail using wood epoxy and by repurposing the existing bridge components. - Luthier Skills: I've been enriching my knowledge via Stew Mac videos on YouTube, especially on *expertly* setting truss rods. This expertise has significantly enhanced the playability of my guitars, eliminating any fret buzz. - Design: Ventured into laser engraving on headstocks, pickguards, and bodies, which adds distinct details to the look of each guitar.

Regarding tone, the type of wood in an electric guitar plays an extremely minor role. The primary influencers are the electronics and components in contact with the strings (e.g., nut, frets, bridge). Currently, my go-to instrument is a $65 Monoprice Tele, spruced up with roughly $130 worth of parts and an old Seymour Duncan pickup. Some additional upgrades include a Fleor hotrail tele bridge pickup, engraved bridge with roller saddles, and locking tuners. It plays and sounds incredible. Basically, any electric guitar with a neck that plays well can be made to sound good with improved electronics.

njanirudh• 3 years ago

I have recently started modding my guitars also!

It such a fun activity, especially if you are an engineer+creative type since its involves reading circuit wiring, planning the tones and the sounds that you actually like in the guitar, buying and testing cheap(ish) parts, soldering them and finally playing the guitar with all the mods.

I recently changed the 5 way switch in my Harley Benton Fusion and now the guitar sounds so crisp and bright. All the buzzing and honkyness in the pickups disappeared. The pickups circuit with a 5Eur mod sounds as clear and bright as my EMG retroactives.

Next I want to buy a kit-guitar and learn to stain them for custom finishes. Want to try some of the beautiful bursts that ~10k$ PRS custom shop does.

supertofu• 3 years ago

- a coffee table! - a crochet stuffed animal! - lots of baskets out of wood! - a tanned deer hide! (it was very hard and gross to flesh the hide.)

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

You pick: a windmill, a refurbishing + automation of a grand piano, a workshop, a CNC plasmacutter. I love projects and I always have one or more things on the go (usually one for good weather and one for bad weather).

xd1936• 3 years ago

Last spring, I had my dad woodwork a large (cabinet door sized?) solid silhouette of Michigan, where I live. I then drilled holes throughout it, ran WS2811 LEDs through the holes, and coded up live temperature data to be shown as a color spectrum. It's a nice piece of wall art!

https://github.com/leoherzog/michigan-temp-map

lagrange77• 3 years ago

Very cool idea!

organsnyder4• 3 years ago

That's awesome! I might have to build one of those myself (as a fellow Michigander).

whalesalad3• 3 years ago

Hello from Royal Oak :wave:

tticvs• 3 years ago

I've built several mechanical wristwatches. Including assembling one movement from scratch (so difficult I've not been tempted to repeat this, I'll stick to storebought for new projects)

dbqpdb• 3 years ago

I've been working on this thing(https://entropyandsons.com/products/fr4xtal) for about 4 years and it's almost done. It's a video synthesizer that uses pixel shaders and complex analysis to make interactive art. My Instagram act (https://instagram.com/entropyandsons) has a bunch of media.

simonsarris• 3 years ago

I built a timber-framed 12x16 barn with a cedar shingle roof with almost no experience. Mostly I read one book and, by strange chance halfway through, an interested person (who loves timber framing) saw me working in my driveway and decided to teach me several things and aid my technique, and supervise the raising process.

Some pictures and more details: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/building-the-goose-palace

Late this year I will plant 2000 tulips and daffodils as part of a rose garden I am planning, that begins in earnest next year. I hope it will look nice enough to turn some heads.

kiliantics2• 3 years ago

I built this same frame from the Sobon plans last summer on a lot of raw land I got with my wife. It's a supremely satisfying building method in so many ways, the simplicity, longevity, locality of materials: mine just sits on some laid stacks of fieldstone I found on the land. I also met local people with timber frame experience through the process and it has led to some great relationships within the community where we bought the land.

I'm currently sitting comfortably inside the structure which I have almost finished enclosing this summer and fitting with some of today's less traditional amenities.

coldpie• 3 years ago

Probably this Arts & Crafts style cabinet I made, with glass work from a friend and a local blacksmith I hired to make the door pulls. https://www.smokingonabike.com/2020/10/21/project-completed-...

dharmaturtle• 3 years ago

I built a super cheap "traditional" dry sauna. It's basically an electric burner, a pot to increase surface area and humidity, a 25 foot roll of thermal foil, and a sleeping bag as the ceiling. I disassembled the burner, removed all the plastic pieces, and short circuited the safety cutoff. It's jank AF, but in the end less than 100$. AFAIK there aren't any dry saunas under $1000 - the heater alone is ~$200. Mine is also portable, so it's in the garage in summer and in the laundry room in winter. There are portable infrared saunas for ~$100, but most studies are on the "dry" type. I rubber band a block of ice to my phone and do my reading/social media in there, so the time cost is reduced. It's pitch black in there, so I have a very bright night light. No problems with air circulation - it doesn't get stuffy, even when I throw a dash of water in the pot. https://i.imgur.com/Lml7Vms.jpg

2 years in and I haven't burned down the house... yet. I've since added more ceramic around the pot so burning myself would be very difficult.

(Reference to my post from the last time this article was posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495062 )

NotYourLawyer• 3 years ago

I built a step stool that turned out really gorgeous. Walnut lumber, hand-cut angled dovetail joints. Plans were based on https://thewoodwhispererguild.com/product/dovetailed-step-st...

Although if you ask my kids, the answer would be their treehouse.

demondemidi• 3 years ago

A pair of cargo pants. During COVID I learned to use a sewing machine and patterns. I made them the right length, material, and put pockets where _I_ wanted pockets.

etaque• 3 years ago

I’m a hobbyist woodworker. Amongst others, I made this « floating table » : https://www.lairdubois.fr/creations/13006-table-flottante-a-...

Sudiball• 3 years ago

Sudiball telescope mounts

I like visual astronomy and manual pointing (star hopping). Build a 12.5" Dobsonian (with Dobson) and it was great.

I also love doing public outreach (sidewalk astronomy). Wanted robust, portable, mount for larger mirrors. Ball scopes tick many of the desirable trade offs for me I put a 16" mirror in one and it was a favorite for years.

but balls do have drawbacks, lack of physical access to back of mirror, poor ventilation, how to lift into vehicle ... and they can be stunningly expensive to buy.

Sudiballs are my answer to how to easily construct precise light weight spherical analogs in the comfort of your own home with materials lying around.

HN crowd could likely think of them as wire frames of spheres in meat space.

There are of course many (infinite) ways to choose a wire frame representation of a sphere. So we choose one that provides convenience IRL.

The "wires" in the wire frame are the edges of some sheet material such as plywood cut into arcs.

By following the geometry of an octahedron, three planes (sheet material) intersect at right angles which (surprise) is exactly what our household tools saws, drills, routers, lasers etc, are designed to cut.

There are other details to make it work, ensuring the wire frame is always touching the base at least three points. Eroding the edges of the edges to be one with the sphere ...

But all doable by you.

[] https://ix.cs.uoregon.edu/~tomc/Hobbies/Astronomy/ATM/index....

swighton2• 3 years ago

I made a baseball bat that uses explosives to add a bunch of energy to your swing and hit a baseball really far. It uses the explosive blanks normally used to shoot nails into concrete (e.g. ramset). It worked way better than I expected, didn't have a kick, and turned out to be just a really neat thing to look at while sipping a frosty beverage. I also made a video about it if you're interested: https://youtu.be/Puo6Vgcbxps

cocoflunchy2• 3 years ago

Is that your favorite project so far? Too many to pick from!

swighton2• 3 years ago

It's definitely my favorite

y-curious• 3 years ago

Hi Shane, I'm always fangirling when I see you on HN. Much love and keep making the content I love!

zefhous2• 3 years ago

As explosive as the bat was, I feel like the most explosive thing you’ll ever make is your YouTube channel. One of very few instant-subs for me.

93po• 3 years ago

Love your content!

stefanvdw1• 3 years ago

Love your videos, already excited for the next one!

samwillis• 3 years ago

Love your content, really looking forward to your next video!

asdfman123• 3 years ago

I love your channel, keep posting the good stuff.

zachthewf• 3 years ago

Your channel and engineering skills are amazing. I've showed the series of increasingly awesome basketball videos to so many people.

nataz• 3 years ago

Great channel. You had me as a subscriber after your pool stick video. Cool to see you post on hn.

javajosh• 3 years ago

I'm honestly a little jealous that you've managed to carve out a niche where you get to imagine and built insane/cool stuff. A dream come true! Congrats and great channel.

endgame• 3 years ago

I shouldn't be surprised that you post here. Your channel is amazing and inspiring, and I love that you dive into your failures and dead-ends, and hide little background gags on the monitors. And the pranks and roasts between you and your wife are so much fun to watch - you're a lucky man.

jmatthews• 3 years ago

Fan of the channel.

alexitosrv• 3 years ago

Full AC of yours!!

stewartjarod• 3 years ago

Love your channel

csaha• 3 years ago

I love your videos! Not just because of your incredible command of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and programming.

The thing I think you do so well is you take a statement like a little kid would make- I want to only hit home runs or, I want to sink a basket every time. And then you break down the problem and solve it. It's incredibly inspirational!

My girlfriend's son was struggling in school with math and science and he just didn't see how they could be cool or why they were important or something. I showed in the videos from your channel and it was so incredible where I was like hey look. Here's something that seems like total fantasy or like something like a six-year-old would say, but look with science and engineering you can make it happen.

Anyway, thank you very much Shane for what you do and how are you inspire people

yobityte• 3 years ago

You're hands down my favourite creator. You come up with such brilliant solutions. It's really inspiring to watch.

paindiverson• 3 years ago

Love your channel, it has been a true inspiration!

steezeburger2• 3 years ago

Oh wow, it's you! Your videos are super inspiring. Keep on making!

valtism• 3 years ago

Your productivity absolutely phenomenal. Each video that comes out seems like you make what would take a normal person a good part of a year to produce in a fraction of the time.

Perepiska• 3 years ago

I bet there is a person who is constantly adding engine to bike :)

Paul-Craft2• 3 years ago

I've gotta say, I appreciated how you spent literally 75% of the video explaining all your safety precautions and how they all helped you avoid death, dismemberment, or disfigurement.

q-base• 3 years ago

Okay this is cool as hell! I love the amount of practical engineering that went into this. You have earned yourself a new subscriber.

randomcarbloke• 3 years ago

Oh hey I made a jigsaw your robot can't solve

whatsthenews• 3 years ago

LOVE your videos, looking forward to the next one

3guk• 3 years ago

Just wanted to add - I absolutely love watching your videos, thanks so much for all of the effort you put in !

trentearl• 3 years ago

I built a canoe out of plywood with no wood working experience. It was very difficult, and involved a lot more epoxy, sanding and clamps than I expected. But in the end I could float around Town Lake in Austin and adventure to snake island.

cocoflunchy2• 3 years ago

I built a small alarm clock with 2 states: night and day, to try to prevent my daughter from waking us up at 6 in the morning! Just uploaded a small write-up here https://cosmith.fr/projects/nightbox

skeltoac• 3 years ago

Other than children, the coolest thing I have made is a medical device. It’s only Class I (requiring no pre-market approvals) but I still had to register with the FDA before selling it.

At first I was making software while selling my device on the side. The feedback from patients and practitioners was so encouraging that I couldn’t bear to keep making software despite the generous compensation.

The majority of the device is 3D-printed and the remainder is formed in 3D-printed molds. I have over a dozen printers and one full-time employee keeping them going. Hoping the business will make enough to start paying me, too!

engneering101• 3 years ago

This Wemos D1 mini dev board was my first PCB, I learned how to design PCBs and made this: https://github.com/fellowgeek/wemos-d1-mini-dev-board

cbames89• 3 years ago

Robots that build houses, check us out, www.botbuilt.com

bityard6• 3 years ago

A band saw!

https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2019/January/i-built-a-ban...

(I purchased the plans for it, though. It was not my design.)

zefhous2• 3 years ago

One of my favorite things that I’ve made in terms of utility is a little leather belt holster for my AirPods. I wear it almost every day and enjoy the functionality of it. I made it for the first generation AirPods case, but it still fits the wider AirPods Pro case sideways, so I didn’t have to make a new one for those.

https://zef.studio/projects/airpods-holster

culopatin• 3 years ago

A turbo Miata. Not that unique but it was a collection of all the fabrication I did in the last few years. Taught myself how to weld and it was super fun to make things for it.

foobarbecue2• 3 years ago

The world's first ice-climbing robot https://eos.org/articles/meet-iceworm-nasas-new-ice-climbing... .

LesZedCB5• 3 years ago

that's so cool! what do you do to keep the screw cores from freezing up solid? I've found myself blowing them out, sometimes unsuccessfully to evacuate the ice core.

foobarbecue2• 3 years ago

You are right on the money. We never really solved that problem for cold ice. The fumarolic ice caves we tested in were close to 0C, so it wasn't a problem. But we did a test campaign in a -25C walk-in freezer, and had to use a hot air gun to clear the end effector manually every step. If we got funded to do another version I think we would try to incorporate some kind of heater.

lobsterthief• 3 years ago

A few years back [I turned a Furby into an Amazon Echo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCOsM-4NEKs)

qingcharles2• 3 years ago

This is great. I made a few Uncut Gems Furbys last year:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/04/28/arts/22a24-item1/...

But now I watched your video I want a ChatGPT Furby!

qingcharles2• 3 years ago

Putting my DeLorean on the train tracks at the original filming location for Back to the Future III:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBo1DvKzRJ4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLU4RPWjTY8

(we'd never tested it before the day, so we didn't realize the train wheels wouldn't fit over the brake calipers... so no brakes lol)

kylecazar• 3 years ago

Where you were going, you didn't need brakes

tracker16• 3 years ago

I spent a few years when I was younger learning to cook better... pretty much immersed myself in it when not working. Watched a LOT of cooking videos, the entire Good Eats series, and more. Never made anything especially cool, just got pretty good at sauce work, and understanding how some ingredients and techniques come together. I might have gone to cooking/culinary school in the evenings, but never did well in formalized education environments.

The fairly irony is I now pretty much have to eat very simply, Diabetes, FODMAP and Histamine Intolerance. I eat something I shouldn't at least once a week and usually pay for it for at least a day after.

jokethrowaway2• 3 years ago

Similar story, I used to be really into cooking and baking.

I still have photos of sourdough bread, pizza, croissants, cakes, elaborate dishes...

And then I started having weird health issues (auto immune crap, aka doctor speech for "we have no clue what we're talking about but you're screwed") and debilitating stomach pain. I was on a 95% vegan diet and I switched to paleo, which seemed to help a bit but still caused occasional pain. After suffering for 2 years and tired of doctors not finding a solution, I tried the carnivore diet.

I pretty much cook the same steak every day and then some eggs or some more meat.

If I eat vegetables I get the taco-bell treatment. If I eat too many carbs over a short period of time I feel bloated and my gallbladder is not happy. Fruit is ok but I'm not a fan of getting too much sugar into me.

Goodbye croissants.

tracker16• 3 years ago

That's how I eat most of the time... eggs, meat and greens are pretty safe, but when I venture out of that box, I definitely pay for it. I like to say, "I like food, food's the one that declared war on me." When people question it.

danielvaughn• 3 years ago

I went to art school for college, and one of my internships was working with a guy who did facial prosthetics using medical-grade silicone.

I made a couple of eyes and ears, and kept some of the discarded ones we used during testing. I still show people for fun every now and then because they look extremely realistic.

I don't have any pictures available but I do a link to some of my old artwork (I don't really make art anymore):

https://www.behance.net/gallery/2201575/Drawings-2010-2011

jjk1663• 3 years ago

I made a turntable that spins cars around at 12 rpm, which doesn't sound like a lot but when it's your car spinning around at 12 rpm, it's a lot.

eps5• 3 years ago

What was it for exactly? 5 sec/rotation is a lot of angular velocity.

jjk1663• 3 years ago

It was an imaging system for cars that needed high throughput. Normally you would just have a lot of cameras all around the car, but they were very space constrained so spinning the car was the only way to get all the angles.

maiensch• 3 years ago

Used my local makerspace’s laser cutter to make multi-layered wooden pieces off of vector designs I bought on etsy:

https://www.design-dekor.de/

kokanee• 3 years ago

The coolest thing I made is probably my two-tier, 3-kettle, 240v E-HERMS homebrewing system, but that was probably only about 15% fabrication and 85% integrating off-the-shelf hardware.

For some reason, the thing that still feels the coolest was the RC hovercraft (converted from RC airplane parts) that a friend and I made for a science fair. It was a bit silly because it wasn't cordless, but that attribute doubled as a nice safety feature given that this was being piloted in a gymnasium full of kids.

FelipeCortez• 3 years ago

Wooden version of Scrabble! I need to update the site with pictures of the tiles. https://felipecortez.net/woodworking/

Huhuhn• 3 years ago

I once built an elevator for a vacuum robot in my old dorm which had two floors. The elevator was moving twice per day to each floor. Was as cheap as buying a second vacuum robot.

Video of the device in action: https://youtu.be/F_gTlU9w7dQ

Image documentation of the build: https://imgur.io/gallery/y1dB4zr

djmips9• 3 years ago

ha! that's too good.

at_a_remove• 3 years ago

I don't know about cool, but I made this black and gold display of Ra on the solar barque, versus the serpent Apep, for the solar eclipse here.

miiiiiike• 3 years ago

I started painting miniatures last year. It's fun. This is only the fifth model I've completed. Definitely a novice, just trying to get the techniques down.

https://imgur.com/a/7tBD8AS

My girlfriend used to do research with rats — she asked for a "Spliter" Clanrat.

joshfee• 3 years ago

I made a spinning LED sphere that has 72 addressable RGB LEDs on a 3-spoke "propeller" that spins on 2 axes. This is still a work in progress, as I need to design the final control board PCB so that it's not a bunch of breadboard wires, but the main physical assembly is complete.

* Got and learned how to use a 3D printer

* Learned parametric CAD in Fusion 360 to design the main assemblies that the motors, slip rings, and propeller attaches to.

* Learned how to design PCBs and had them made

* Re-learned soldering and did SMD soldering for the first time

* Learned some ESP32 programming to control it with bluetooth (I have plans to have a robust live-editor so you can control the light patterns from a tablet - currently on pause)

Video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/xYPSHeebGzZP7Mw47

0xbs0d• 3 years ago

Back in the days of the Amiga, me and a friend were in high school and we were obsessed with Formula 1GP from Microprose so we took a couple of joysticks apart and we built ourselves the pedals and a wheel with gear shifts. It was pretty trashy looking but worked remarkably well.

dekhn3• 3 years ago

I've built a few cool things over the years. For a while I was on the Making and Science team at Google and it was my job. I helped contribute to the "physical google doodle" (where all the letters had interactive exhibits that kids could play with) and turned a shapeoko into a microscope. We used it to watch daphnia- at some point the daphnia "gave birth" and a mom who was watching said "we just saw the miracle of life!"

I built a Galton Board to demonstrate the Central Limit Theorem, I want to re-do it in all-acrylic and aluminum at some point and add an automated mechanism.

These days I build small motorized microscopes and use them to track tardigrades using an object detector. When the tardigrade moves, the detector detects the center of the tardigrade and moves it to the center of the image. This tracks tardigrades for hours at a time!

Ultimately, I'd like to make interesting nanoscale systems but the scope is as far as I've got.

mftrhu• 3 years ago

A (somewhat) working crossbow made out of scavenged multi-strand copper wire, about as long as my thumb, long since lost somewhere around the house.

dekhn3• 3 years ago

I made a CNC carve a big (3 ft x 2 ft) 3d map of california out of wood. you can see similar projects here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoquTHsvKns&t=676s

owenversteeg2• 3 years ago

I built a 35 foot steel boat that I ended up living on for years, sailing on the North Sea, and more recently throwing a bunch of great parties with. (If you're in the Netherlands and want to come to one, my email's in my profile!)

It took about 5 years to build (on and off) and I say "built" but I actually bought a large part of the hull of the boat to start; however, somewhere around 90% of the boat by mass is stuff that I've made entirely myself or worked on significantly, so I'd still say I built it.

Because the title specifically asked for cool: I've built a lot of other serious physical things in my life but the boat somehow has some serious cool power. When I started throwing parties on it I expected a somewhat modest reception - it's a medium sized steel boat, not a superyacht - but for some reason it's attracted the coolest other people: composers, neuroscientists, filmmakers, martial artists, costume designers, makeup artists for movies, a super unique crowd. Obviously you can't fit that many people on a boat the size of mine, so we're talking 10-25 people per party, but each one is unique and some nights when the music, liquor and conversations are flowing I feel as if I have constructed the International Prototype of the Cool.

Anyway, if anyone wants to come see it in person, my final boat party of the summer is this Friday-Saturday the 11th-12th in Rotterdam, my email's in my bio :)

hattmall3• 3 years ago

Post some pics please.

owenversteeg2• 3 years ago

Exterior: http://owenversteeg.com/boat.jpg

Inside (excluding cockpit): http://owenversteeg.com/boatinterior1.jpg

Inside 2 (again cockpit invisible): http://owenversteeg.com/boatinterior2.jpg

Party photos are only for the guests, although with five thousand addressable LEDs, over 100 lasers, multiple underwater lights, moving programmable head lights, a fog machine and more it looks amazing, certainly wish I could share!

TRiG_Ireland• 3 years ago

When I look at what my parents have achieved, I feel remarkably unskilled by comparison. Perhaps that's partly because I've only ever been a renter, not a homeowner. I've not had occasion to learn how to install ceilings, lay tiles, build fences, or fix plumbing. I suppose I should put more effort into smaller pieces. I've done some painting in the past. (One painting I did hung on my grandparents' wall for many years. They're both dead now, and I don't know where it is.) I'm making a start on making some mediaeval clothes.

bozhark• 3 years ago

I 3D printed Arno Klein’s brain from a CT Scan at the Paul Allen Brain Institute in a basement on Capitol Hill back in 2012. It captured all internal folds and was quite interesting to watch it print and see the inside of his brain.

Cheers Arno, hope your Halloween adventures are still going strong!

heliodor• 3 years ago

I'm currently putting the finishing touches on a rock climbing crag together with some friends.

While focusing on the digital realm all my life, it's nice to have something tangible that I know people will enjoy for a long time.

It's in Puerto Rico if you want to visit:

https://www.mountainproject.com/area/124580883/el-semil-vill...

zeruch• 3 years ago

I have long had an art practice. Some of it involves software, but much of it doesnt, like this 6' x 9' abstract https://www.instagram.com/p/Cvd9-WTLqPN/ or this drawing of a few random redditors: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvnvbTcPC78/

jokethrowaway2• 3 years ago

I assembled an automatic watch for about 100£. I wanted to buy an automatic watch (I was planning on something reasonable, around 1k-3k) but none of the watches pleased me completely.

I bought a Miyota movement, a case, hands, a face, a leather strap and a bunch of tools. It wasn't easy to assemble it and there is definitely not a lot of documentation online, but it wasn't impossible either.

It looks great, it's exactly how I wanted my automatic watch to look like. Highly recommend the experience.

LVB• 3 years ago

As a teenager, a friend and I built an underwater rocket, with the idea that a solid model rocket engine would burn when submerged, provided we could get it lit. We started with an Estes model rocket (https://estesrockets.com/products/mosquito IIRC), inserted the engine and igniter, and sealed the entire exhaust end of the engine with hot glue, as well as around the seams elsewhere. We installed a standard launch pad in a big trash bin filled with water (our original idea of swimming into a lake was quickly scrapped) and wired everything up.

It worked. The rocket actually launched from underwater! But by the time it reached the surface, the drag of the water had ripped two of the fins off, so the in-air portion was pretty wild. We even caught the whole thing on 8mm film (this was in the early 90s).

whstl• 3 years ago

A modular synthesizer! I designed the case in CAD, put it online for free, and it got kinda popular in the DIY synth community. Some companies are making it.

I built all modules from scratch with my own circuit designs too. Mostly novel designs, especially in oscillators and filters. A lot of JFETs being used to control voltages, amplitudes, etc. It was unstable and non-linear but had its charm :)

poyu• 3 years ago

As a DIY synth nerd, do you mind sharing them? :)

btbuildem2• 3 years ago

An entire 1000 sq ft condo -- was a 1920's hovel on the top floor of a walkup, now is a modern living space with a great layout, fantastic light, and all the amenities.

Took me four years of evenings and weekends while working full-time to fund it.

milesward• 3 years ago

I made an outbuilding and an artistic deck out of ipe hardwood: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNQhDP-uAqRITl2aA6SqUjD...

smcameron• 3 years ago

I made a cyclekart, this one: https://www.cyclekartclub.com/registry/2012-CycleKart-Custom...

It's got a 6.5 HP Honda GX200 engine, a Comet torque converter and top speed of around 35-40 mph. More about cyclekarts: https://www.cyclekarts.com/

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

This whole thread is amazing, bookmarking it, too many rabbit holes for one day.

yen223• 3 years ago

I am pleasantly surprised by the variety of responses here. I'm really glad I asked the question

jacquesm16• 3 years ago

I'm glad you did too :) What also amazes me: the general quality of the work on display. There is probably some self selection going on there but every link that I've followed leads to something that a seasoned pro would have reason to be proud of.

dazhbog• 3 years ago

I made an injection molded product with almost no CAD background. came out alright ;)

guzik• 3 years ago

To me, it was Aidlab, a smart chest strap that collects and analyzes various biosignals, which I co-created.

This is a picture of my co-founder Karol and me, holding the first prototype of Aidlab : https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-44d4794da932b128c2bf6...

(plot twist - it wasn't a chest strap at first haha)

voakbasda3• 3 years ago

My farm. In the past ten years, I have built the following things here (to name a few that I can remember):

1. three small creek-fed ponds (bonus: one has an island),

2. numerous outbuildings for various kinds of livestock,

3. a pair of portable outhouses,

4. several miles of perimeter and cross fencing,

5. two large greenhouses (20x50 and 30x90),

6. a built-in oak storage bench for the farmhouse entryway,

7. a portable covered milking stanchion that can service a cow or two goats,

8. a semi-permanent lumber mill capable of milling logs up to 30" around and 24' long,

In addition, I have performed endless upgrades and repairs to existing structures and equipment:

1. rewired and plumbed the wellhouse, adding new storage tanks,

2. maintained my fleet of trucks, heavy equipment, and dozens of other machines that contain small engines,

3. finished out the farmhouse basement to use as a dairy parlor,

I still have a few projects on my TODO list:

1. more outbuildings,

2. a 20' wood bridge across to the island in the lower pond,

3. hot tub (made from cedar that will be cut and milled here on the property), and

4. so much more....

It will never be "done".

bradly3• 3 years ago

Are you milling with an alaskan mill or are you using a horizontal band saw? I'd really love to have space and money just keep a wood-mizer around. Do you have a kiln as well?

voakbasda3• 3 years ago

It's a bandsaw mill, but I occasionally need to use an Alaskan style mill to square up logs that are too big.

I have small foundry capable of casting aluminum, and I have plans to find a spot to build a proper cupola furnace that enables casting iron.

codq• 3 years ago

You're playing Stardew Valley IRL. Fantastic.

appplication• 3 years ago

What approximate physical location are you in? This is my dream, but right now I’m wasting away in SF. I’ve been looking for properties with a stream but they seem pretty far between.

samtho6• 3 years ago

I own 4.2 acres in the Sierras north of US-50 between Kyburz and South Lake Tahoe at 5,600ft elevation. It was not easy to find, but there is a seasonal creek that runs through it fed by snowmelt. I had to drill a well 600ft down to find water year round, there are no utilities so I had to dig out for septic, get propane storage for generator power, and I have a gravel path via an easement into an adjacent property to link to a forest service road. As remote and unconnected it was, it still fetched an amount that I am not super happy with, but I acknowledge even that price I got it for was cheap. I knew what I was getting into, specifically buying it after the major fire up there two years ago and was able to get a wide open tree-cleared area that I didn’t have to gain authorization to remove. I fully intend to build a cabin up there and then probably resell it because it’s too remote to AirBnB.

I think you should carefully consider your goals and what you want out of a location (must haves vs nice to haves and a list of dealbreakers).

There are a few things you probably take for granted. If your are considering an off grid or at least remote location, some things you should keep in mind:

- More than ten miles is a long way to get groceries, especially if primitive roads make part of the drive.

- It gets dark when you’re outside of civilization, don’t leave lit areas unless you must.

- Carry extra fuel at all times, you should also have a working, spare vehicle that you actively maintain.

- If you are settling in an area with snow, both your vehicles need to be AWD with snow tires and you should carry chains at all times when it’s season for snow.

- The spare vehicle should have a full tank of gas and spare fuel treated with an enzyme to keep it stable.

- You should have spare parts for your home and car, be comfortable with doing a lot of stuff yourself.

- Know the fastest and slower but more reliable route to the nearest hospital.

- Get a cell phone repeater from your cell company (they often even do it for free if you power it).

- Make sure your house has a power inlet so you can use a portable generator in case your permanent one fails or have a very beefy car inverter so your spare card can power your house.

- Have backup fuel for your generator.

- You should have one week of food, water, and generator fuel on reserve at all time.

- Your firewood pile should be sheltered, covered from the elements, and easy to get to from your home.

- Maintain a sat phone (one with minimal minutes is fine, this is backup comms).

And be sure to remember that shit gets or feels weird for us when we live in remote locations. You will start to see things if you let it get to you. If you plan on exploring, be prepared to come across (and avoid) carcasses, wild animals, poison oak or ivy, strange or out of place structures, people walking around who don’t answer or acknowledge you when you call out, trust your gut and fucking bolt when things are just not right even if you can’t put your finger on it.

I have hallucinated people that disappear when you try to approach them, full and partial structures that seem to dilapidate when I approach them. I’ve seen brand new cars driven out miles off the highway left with their door open as if someone just got out and walked away never to return, burnt out cars miles out in the wilderness, heard children laughing in the distance at midnight in the pitch black, heard the moaning of someone in pain but nobody to be found.

Maybe the most unsettling thing is when you walk into a specific area of the forest and, as if all the air is sucked out, it goes so quiet enough that you can hear your own pulse and rumbling of blood flowing through your ear. You feel, not hear, this low, intense hum, a sense of dread falls over you, as if you are being watched or hunted. This happened to me back in May when I ran across a set of poured, concrete stairs in a clearing as if built for a porch, but no foundation where the house should have been.

Nobody told me this lifestyle would cause me to become afraid of the dark again. I used to camp up there but now I don’t go up there unless it’s light and I can be back on the highway well before nightfall. Honestly, this experience has given me a huge appreciation for the game Don’t Starve.

rsweeney21• 3 years ago

I made another programmer. My daughter just finished her first year of her CS degree. I hired her as an intern at my company and gave her a project that I thought would take several weeks. She proceeded to finish it in just a few days.

Watching her deploy her code to production for the first time...absolutely the most incredible feeling I've ever had. Way cooler than when I deployed my own code to production for the first time.

I'd be proud of her no matter what career she chose. But there's something absolutely amazing about being a part of your child's journey from crawling to coding.

sonzohan• 3 years ago

Light-up ocarinas that change color as you play https://youtu.be/z8TVICcIt_0

You can buy them here: https://www.songbirdocarina.com/collections/synesthesia-ocar...

P.S. I did something way fancier than a Fourier here.

jongjong• 3 years ago

I once made a circuit which would tun on an LED light when the ambient light fell below a certain threshold using an ATMEL microcontroller. It's actually very easy to do.

The coolest physical thing I tried to make (though it was mostly a failure) was a USB powered fan from scratch. I also tried to make the plastic casing from scratch using resins. I had made a mold for the casing but I had made it out of soft clay (if I remember right) and although the resulting plastic casing did solidify inside the mold and somewhat took the form of the mold, it was too brittle and the two halves of the casing didn't quite line up so they could not interlock neatly around the electronics. I didn't complete the project. I just did it out of curiosity.

adanto6840• 3 years ago

"DJ" (music) control for toddlers - colloquially referred to as "the buttons" in our family, they've brought substantial peace to our household & they've helped our kids improve at negotiation/compromise/etc.

Details here: https://dantonio.info/projects/the-buttons/

djmips9• 3 years ago

I read your article - followed the intro quite closely and then looked for the solution and it was 'the buttons' followed by a bunch of technical stuff that kind of made me loose focus. So in the end I don't know exactly what 'the buttons' is hahah. Reminds me of the Hudsucker Proxy. 'You know, for kids!'

Tossrock• 3 years ago

I made an art installation around a large circular LED array that can display patterns generated on a computer with shaders:

https://youtu.be/LBZls9jwa0g

(I designed all the mechanical hardware and the current electrical design & software used in the video, but other people have helped over the years, too)

comprev• 3 years ago

I enjoy building bicycle wheels (mountain bikes) and get satisfaction when they survive rigorous abuse during race season!

hbroadbent• 3 years ago

A few years ago I built some teeny tiny solar powered electronic satellites - https://harrisonbroadbent.com/electronics/tinysat

(Inspired by mohit bhoite who does stuff like this... Just 1000x better)

ZainRiz• 3 years ago

Even though I've drawn pictures, built toys and contraptions contraptions out of wood, made a rube golderg machine

Still...

The thing I'm the proudest about...

Is that time I opened a jammed coaxial cable with nothing but two butter knives.

vunderba• 3 years ago

I put together a "reverse trivia" card game called Inquiring Minds structured around the mechanics of classic card game, Rummy.

Rather than each player attempting to answer questions as individuals, players need to come up with their own questions, and are rewarded when they can demonstrate some piece of trivia that nobody else in the room knows.

https://specular-realms.com/inquiring-minds

randomNumber7• 3 years ago

I made an electric longboard a few years ago. Before they where popular, and you cant buy or legally use it in germany anyways.

It worked pretty well. I guess it could drive s.th. like 35 km/h for 10 km. It even had brake energy recouperation. A higher topspeed would be no problem, but its already very dangerous^^

It was a very simple design. Just a brushless outrunner attached with friction to one of the wheels.

MichaelAO• 3 years ago

In university I made a Muon imaging system that kind of worked: https://www.instagram.com/p/BTar-wghXFB/

Started with a single detector: https://www.instagram.com/p/BSz_rZ1h_sN/

0xbadcafebee• 3 years ago

A 20x20 transforming tubular steel sculpture for Burning Man. Learned how to calculate structural limits of steel structures, how to weld, swedge, cope, bend. Made 350 3-way joints out of just tube. Assembled over 3 days in different configurations and finally served as a human cat-shelf and platform for spray-painted art on sheets. Fucker was heavy... next time I'm using aluminum.

Next up this fall: a kinetic wooden sculpture that destroys itself with fire

cristoperb• 3 years ago

Some sweaters I've knit:

Embrace Octopus Sweater https://www.ravelry.com/projects/cristoperb/embrace-octopus-...

Handsome Chris Pullover https://www.ravelry.com/projects/cristoperb/the-handsome-chr...

djmips9• 3 years ago

wow nice!

Bjorkbat• 3 years ago

This is a bit of a strange one, but I made a free-to-play game that produces “art” posters as a form of monetization. Still a work in progress, but I was able to finally produce a poster from the game, which felt gratifying.

Might post it on Show HN one of these days. Still needs some work though.

skykooler• 3 years ago

I’ve been building a mobile workshop which lets me bring all my tools anywhere in the country. Including welders, two metal lathes, 3D printers, woodworking tools, an electronics workbench, an anvil and forge, and a foundry setup to melt and cast aluminum and bronze. The whole shop runs entirely on electricity and I have deployable arrays of solar panels to power the whole thing and charge my electric car. I’m even adding a small living area at the front. I’ve been documenting my progress at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8n8vml-zgaCbXwYD_Q2jZzok...

nkg2• 3 years ago

A lot of furnitures for our home. Like a lot of software engineers, I have a thing for woodworking. I started with a footstool, then I made a simple cabinet, a mirror frame, cabinet with drawers, 3 wardrobes, a kitchen island, another footstool, shelves, a workbench, a desk, and some experimental stuff.

dymk• 3 years ago

I took a Shapeoko 4 Pro CNC, which is a belt driven machine, and redesigned it around ballscrews for the X and Y motion. I reverse engineered the stock machine and rebuilt it in CAD, and made the new parts using the existing Shapeoko. It was made out of 6061-T6 aluminum, and some 3D printed components.

I'm also pretty happy with some of the cutting boards I've made: https://www.longtailwoodcraft.com/images/cube-board.jpg

mytdi• 3 years ago

Wow! I like what you did with the CNC and your cutting board looks really cool!

Syzygies• 3 years ago

I built a tomato dehydrator (partially dried freezer packs from our garden, estrattu from Santa Cruz dry farmed Early Girls). We haven't opened a can of tomatoes in decades. Using four stacks of consumer dehydrator trays was a nightmare so:

A full sheet pan cart, like used in bakeries. Eight full sheet pans, lined with silpat nonstick sheets. A 1500 watt wall heater, a home brewing temperature controller, and a crawl space fan controller that looks like it belongs in a stereo stack. Build a plywood box around the whole thing. I had to swap in a less sensitive thermal cutoff to keep the heater from shutting off. Now we can process 60 lbs of tomatoes at a go.

There was a lot to figure out, no equations to help guess scale. I should really document this on a web site, the plans out there are very sketchy and wouldn't accommodate our scale.

peteradio3• 3 years ago

That's sweet! How many tomato plants do you have to grow each year and how many are you feeding?

tnorthcutt• 3 years ago

Some questions, if you're up for it!

- Do you have any pictures? - How do you store the dehydrated tomatoes? - How do you use the dehydrated tomatoes in meals?

pcdoodle• 3 years ago

A very tiny multimeter that also fits into Leatherman multitools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdZaFzpeRUQ

ansible• 3 years ago

(Well, I had a lot of help from my dad...)

A 3-D chess board. No, not one of those lame ones that you can put on your desk with 3 boards. And no, not like the one on Star Trek either.

It was a full cube (8 x 8 x 8). Major pieces on boards 1 and 8, pawns on 2 and 7. The moves for the pieces project to three dimensions in a fairly straight-forward manner. Pawns can only queen on the farthest board from their start, on the farthest row.

The whole thing stood five feet tall, and you were constantly squatting to see what was going on across the boards.

I even once convinced a friend to play a game with me. Once.

dhumph• 3 years ago

I wrote and illustrated a childrens book for my daughter who had open heart surgery as a baby. https://www.amazon.com/Zip-Line-David-Humpherys/dp/147919609...

westcort• 3 years ago

Most were made when I was a child. The first was a power stealer that used radio waves to power an LED. The second was a large wooden glider around 5 feet long and wide. The third was a pair of glasses for reading while walking using a half-silvered mirror and a magnifying class to project miniaturized mirror-reversed book pages into my eye so I could read while walking between classes in college. The fourth was a studying shack I made while in grad school (which I commuted to, so I needed a private space for dedicated study time).

djmips9• 3 years ago

cool stuff! Why not return to the world of making stuff?

marvinklein• 3 years ago

I made a chair: https://marvinklein.com/projects/chair

Some code was involved to optimize the layout of the pieces on the sheets of plywood they were cut out of, but that was maybe one percent of the project.

vt240• 3 years ago

I was so excited last year to get to work on a passion project, which has been at the back of my mind for 15 years. To design from the ground up, a guitar speaker or musical instrument speaker [1]. Something more than just a typical loudspeaker, which is optimized for things like cost or maximum sensitivity, or linearity. I wanted a design that subjectively sounded “good”. It turned out to be one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever worked on. I ended up with two different designs in the end, a standard single voice coil version, and series dual voice coil version. To me, and quite a few people I’ve let try them in different cabinets and with different guitar amps, they sound beautiful.

[1] https://1drv.ms/f/s!AppXGHhkkRjCk6lHhMAbkiMTE7lzlw?e=IdsZdw

ozfive• 3 years ago

I've been working on a RFID based music and story player for my daughter in spare time. https://www.github.com/ozfive/StoryBox

The other physical thing I built was a IR remote with a raspberry pi zero w for my Cambridge Audio CXA81 amp. I just recently put together and Android app with a couple buttons to interface to the API I wrote. https://github.com/ozfive/CXA81-IR-Remote-Server.

Both projects are mostly written in Go.

Don't get me started on the 2.5 years that I worked on custom AVOD systems for private jets and helicopters. I probably was the first person to integrate an Amazon Echo into a aircraft cabin to control the lighting/audio/video through voice over a satellite connection.

spiritplumber• 3 years ago

Probably OpenROV.

pawptart• 3 years ago

I 3D printed an ABENICS mechanism. I don't have much of a mechanical engineering background so it was very cool to learn how to do this.

https://blog.ty-porter.dev/3d%20printing/mechanical%20engine...

shove• 3 years ago

I sewed a pair of KKK hoods and placed them atop the bronze heads of a local Confederate monument. Less than a year later that statue and a few more like it were removed due to the “safety concern” created by myself and a ton of other activists. I like to the “the coolest physical thing I’ve made” is helping make those goddamned statues disappear.

hamlsandwich• 3 years ago

"Destruction is a form of creation" - Donnie Darko

aappleby• 3 years ago

I built an 8' wide spherical display out of an advertising balloon, a hemispherical security mirror, and a conference room projector.

Then I wrote a 3D engine that could render to it and took the whole thing to Burning Man. Worked pretty well, though contrast was crappy.

Evidlo• 3 years ago

Some fancy PCBs rulers for a senior design class: http://evan.widloski.com/projects/uiuc_ruler/index.html

Though I guess technically the PCB fan made them.

hoosieree• 3 years ago

Coolest of all time is probably the touchscreen that you can use in an MRI[1]. But my current favorite is a low-impedance guitar pickup[2].

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10820839B2/en

[2] https://alexshroyer.com/posts/2023-01-01-Low-Impedance-Picku...

relwin• 3 years ago

Posting for a friend: he built a tape recorder as a youth growing up in post-WWII Germany (1949).

https://sites.google.com/site/randyelwin/home/projects/build...

maytc• 3 years ago

I created a successfully funded boardgame on Kickstarter that basically turned UNO into a fast pace action game.

https://www.swiftwave.io/

junon• 3 years ago

I learned PCB design from roughly nothing over the last 7 months to create a custom PCB that integrates with GitHub Actions for a CI/CD pipeline for my novel operating system's kernel test harness to test on bare metal.

It looks amazing and feels really good to have completed. Might do a write-up on it.

bsima• 3 years ago

a daughter

nazgulnarsil• 3 years ago

Mealsquares, a nutritionally complete meal bar made from whole foods. v1.0 soon.

netman21• 3 years ago

It was a long time ago but I and 3,000 other people built the Edwin H. Gott, the last 1,000 foot ore carrier on the Great lakes. I got a summer job as a welder at Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. The Gott is on Lake Erie this evening. https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/EDWIN-H.-GOTT/CU...

d_pi_p_pi• 3 years ago

A de-novo peptide that adopts beta structure in solution and is thixotropic.

worthless-trash• 3 years ago

My father lost the first joint of his left ring finger to cancer in the nailbed. I designed a tight fitting single joint replacement part which has elastic loops to his watch for keeping it on tight. I've created 3x so far with minor improvements each time.

zw123456• 3 years ago

I know, I am way late to the game on this one. But WTF. I made a Scanning Tunneling Microscope, in 2001, spent an entire year doing it. Coolest F-ing thing I ever did. No money. No reason other than my curiosity. I learned Sooooooooooo much doing it. I used to have a github on it but no one looked at it but, it was one of those things. It taught me something about patience, and a ton about so many things, controllers, ADC, DAC, DSP. It. was a fun lark. I have a PHD in EE from the 90's but I felt like I learned more from that project than anything else I have ever done. I know this is a post to the wind at this point. I don't care.

msteffen• 3 years ago

Would you ever consider bringing the GitHub back?

frickinLasers• 3 years ago

How would you even begin to gather the necessary information/materials for that?

badpun• 3 years ago

How expensive are the tools and equipment necessary to pull this off?

a_f• 3 years ago

Would love to see a write up of this if you ever do one, had one

dkokelley• 3 years ago

A bit late, but I built a BattleBot back during the original show days. Never finished/competed though - I was in high school and couldn't make anything competitive with my birthday money. Learned a lot about radio controllers and aluminum angle bars! Taught my younger brother and we battled in the driveway.

l0b0• 3 years ago

Probably just a chaise longue surviving the salty, damp air outside like a champ.

chasd00• 3 years ago

I designed, built, and flew rocket to 20k ft. In a year or two I’m trying for 100k Ft.

cwbrandsma• 3 years ago

Full side dragon staff from Skyrim.

chrischen• 3 years ago

I made a robot that could replicate a painting (that you made using the robot). The robot was controlled by a Wacom tablet so it had 3 dimensions of input (x, y, and z for pen pressure). It was able to replicate its own paintings using just dead reckoning. Was fun programming custom Arduino code to drive the motors.

https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robot...

jasbur• 3 years ago

I made a robot that cheers every time the Green Bay Packers score (American football).

https://imgur.com/a/JeiDCYR

The chassis is 3D printed and a Raspberry Pi is hiding, with a couple of speakers, in the base. The Pi connects via WiFi to the local network and checks ESPN’s publicly available JSON for that day’s game to determine if the score has changed.

I gifted it to a friend that owns a bar and wanted him to be able to move to new networks and reconfigure without using a computer. So, I wrote some python scripts that interface with the GPIO pins on the Pi to reset the device and broadcast a WiFi network and web interface that can be used to connect to other networks.

That last bit now has over 500 stars on GitHub!

https://github.com/jasbur/RaspiWiFi

steezeburger2• 3 years ago

Oh wow I built something just like RaspWiFi ten years ago. Silly of me not to open source it back then!

mikewarot2• 3 years ago

A device that levitated tungsten filaments in halogen bulbs so they wouldn't sag as they were "seasoned". I used a DC current and an electromagnet to allow the Lorenz force to cancel out gravity. That was a one off, but I thought it was cool.

---

I worked in a shop making gears for a few years... I made most of the drive gears for the Marvel 8 bandsaw between 2016 and 2020. I also made lots of other gears. I'm sure that most of them will be in use for decades.

pbhowmic• 3 years ago

I made a volcano out of plaster of Paris. The cool bit was that for the eruption I used potassium permanganate in the volcano’s cone and poured glycerin on it to ignite the volcano.

ggm• 3 years ago

I made a spice rack out of unit size lumber which was strong enough to survive nuclear war.

I made a bed-desk combo when I was 16 which was similarly robust but that time modulated through my dad's sense of 'less would be more here'

I used Victor Papanek's books to get plywood "H" sections made which formed a modular bookcase I continue to use, which has been through 5 houses across 30 years now. The unit scale included a cassette tape minimum size alongside standard paperback and large format/LP scale.

I made another nuclear bomb proof wooden thing, a cassette storage case which doubled as a suitcase to move the entire collection around and then hang it on the wall. in hindsight, 90 tapes of cajun music and "my mix tape" was less in need of portability than I thought.

13of40• 3 years ago

Several years ago I bought a sailboat that was sitting on a rusted out trailer, and I decided to build a new trailer for it from scratch. Proud moments were when I finished that part that the bow of the boat sits on with the crank thingy and my wife asked where I bought it, and when I went to register it at the state patrol the inspector didn't believe I made it myself. Anyway, the kicker was that since I live in Washington State I had to show all the receipts for the materials to prove they had been taxed, and the total came to....almost exactly the cost of buying a new galvanized trailer off the shelf. Yeah.

deostroll• 3 years ago

It was a DIY pre-covid project. It was meant for me to locate my bike in an open-air parking lot meant for two-wheelers. The circuit wasn't perfect. Here are some videos/pics:

https://imgur.com/a/fv2oiZ7

Ps: it is a failed project, but enjoyable.

iblaine• 3 years ago

A walking bike with a wheel in the front and 6 Theo Jansen type legs in the back

https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-aileen-cannon-comes-out-...

Nevermark• 3 years ago

A quantum physicist, a neurobiologist, and a manufacturing engineer!

I feel like I got to split and parallelize my life four ways (I still count!) so I can do more of the things I always wanted to do.

I did have a co-maker, wasn’t all me!

sheepybloke• 3 years ago

My favorite thing that I've built is printer prop for a ballet piece about how horrible working with printers is. I had to gut the printer, which was a lot of fun, then figure out a way for it to make the noises we wanted when the dancers interacted with it. I was super happy with how it turned out, allowing the dancers to interact and run the printer while they were dancing.

Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CrT5HqKP2ts/?utm_source=ig_web_c...

Bonus: Built a new set of tweeter for my old pair of speakers, and look and sound beautiful! https://www.printables.com/model/518598-bw-cdm-7nt-tweeter-a...

aacook• 3 years ago

I built a mobile, wood-fired sauna. It's 8.5 feet wide, 12 feet long and 13.5 feet tall. It seats 6. I like to run it 180-210 °F.

Well, it was mobile until the axles ripped off on its maiden voyage. Now it's up on skids until I get the courage to throw another $4,000 at new axles (and wheels, tires and leaf springs since I have to go up to the next class).

Some photos at: https://imgur.com/a/em9gBDj

During the build I blogged a bit about the project at: http://seekingsauna.com

My brothers and my dad helped me disassemble a tiny house in someone's backyard in Cambridge in June 2021 during a heat wave: http://seekingsauna.com/building

There were quite a few gotchas, one being that once I installed the rafters I realized I had to reduce the pitch in order to be able to get under New England highway bridges (14 feet): http://seekingsauna.com/roof-snafu

I've been meaning to write about the accident (the axles completely sheared off one side of the trailer) that happened a bit over a year ago but have been too busy enjoying the sauna and working on some other projects!

scottbez12• 3 years ago

I made a rotary input device that provides software-defined "virtual" detents and end-stops, implemented using a BLDC gimbal motor. It can dynamically switch from completely smooth unbounded rotation, to having detents with configurable spacing and strength and "end-stops" that spring back if you try to rotate past them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip641WmY4pA

It's got a round LCD on the front of the knob (wired and supported via the hollow shaft of the motor) and uses the flex of the PCB and strain gauge sensors (in the latest revision, simply SMD resistors whose resistance changes when stretched) to detect when the knob is pressed down.

It's open source hardware and software - https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob

HN folks might appreciate that it communicates with host software on the computer via protobuf-encoded USB serial messages -- nanopb is awesome for embedded C protobuf support, and having the defined schema, autogenerated serialization code, and compile-time type safety is so much nicer than ArduinoJson or hand-written binary protocols!

I'd love to get it hooked up to some real software eventually (video editors or home-assistant control are my 2 main ideas), but it's really just been a fun project to tinker with and try out some new ideas and parts I've never used before.

hdra• 3 years ago

that video of yours just popped up on my YT feed yesterday! did it get "YT-algoed"?

scottbez12• 3 years ago

Hah, yeah I think it may have. I've noticed an increase in comments over the last few days, which usually suggests the algo is showing it to new people again, and it got featured on the Adafruit blog this morning which probably reinforced it further, but no idea why the recent resurgence.

mikewarot2• 3 years ago

I've noticed that finding a motor with a through-hole is a persistent problem. Have you experimented with a gear driven design to work around this?

roboy• 3 years ago

I built 2 muskulokeletal humanoid robots with my team. They use tendons to imitate the human muscles. It's also probably the most hugged robot in the world, as we let people hug them at events, which significantly helps dispersing fears of robots. One of them is now a permanent exhibit of the world's largest science museum in Munich. [1] Also university of Oxford has a shoulder using it to grow human tendons.[2]

[1] https://devanthro.com/story/ [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-022-00004-9

davewasthere• 3 years ago

A small thing. I made some braised bronze chess pieces. https://photos.app.goo.gl/rN3xkgxybeY7WP9K9

Was really happy with the design, considering I just made it up on the spot. I had previously carved a few chess sets before though out of wood.

yonatan8070• 3 years ago

I helped build several FRC[1] robots when I was in high-school, and now as a mentor for my team, who were able to make it to the international FIRST Championship for the first time this year

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Robotics_Competition

jurgenwerk• 3 years ago

Made a heavy Fibonacci clock using concrete! https://jurgen.si/posts/concrete-fibonacci-clock/

aa-jv• 3 years ago

An RC airplane, built out of an old arrow I found in a field, some foam boards cut for the wings using the Kline-Fogelmann wing form [1], and various sundry electronics rescued from the parts bin, including a DVD motor to power the prop.

The feeling of elation I felt when I first chucked it into the sky and off it flew .. can't be explained. I've been making planes for 30 years, but this was my first KFM airfoil, and it was just so neat to see it fly around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kline–Fogleman_airfoil

djmips9• 3 years ago

There are sure a lot of really neat people on HN. Very impressed with all these projects. All of them are very cool!

hemmert• 3 years ago

I occasionally smear paint on canvases :-)

https://www.krickelkrackel.com

anarticle• 3 years ago

In my old career, I built high speed fluorescence microscopes with lasers and fancy cameras. The scope parts were off the shelf, but the software was mine entirely. So were the firmware tunings for all the outboard equipment! Manufacturers in the 2000s would give you nice technical manuals with "enter at your own risk" appendixes with all the control settings. Was real fun eking out another 20ms~ from a filter wheel with some custom acceleration parameters and balancing. I used Ryan Geiss' milkdrop timing code (http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html), an absolute gem for Win32 timing quirks.

More recently I've: put an entire exhaust on my car due to manufacturer telling me it would be 2k to replace, rebuilt my garage door frame, reroofed part of my garage, and repointed my historic brick garage wall.

For the repointing, I had to get lime mortar which is rare in the US but here in PA we have a lot of old stone. DeGruchy's NHS to the rescue, color matched and everything. The labor is over the top, but the tools are cheap. I paid for this once and they did it so badly I decided it's simply not worth it. It should last another 50-100y!

camus_absurd• 3 years ago

I’ve made a physical Unix clock

unix.date

therobotcarlson• 3 years ago

My wife and I made a robot for our wedding to be the "flower girl" and "ring bearer". In the months leading up to the wedding, we realized we hadn't asked any of the nieces or nephews and that we wanted to add something unique to our wedding. She's a mechanical engineer and I'm a software engineer with electronics experience, so we threw something together. My only regret is that we didn't get the robot on camera during the wedding because it worked so great!

https://imgur.com/a/lY9CqCT

staticBr• 3 years ago

I build a house! And by that I mean I buld it with my hands: I layed every brick. Did all the rebar & concrete. Did the roofing. Mounted the windows. Installed the electrical. calculated and build the heating ...

Besides of a few smaller crafts, I did most of it myself A and with some help of the family and friends.

But I'm still pretty proud of it. This was my corona project.

shanecleveland• 3 years ago

I am into boats, actually. I have built a plywood kayak-style boat, that I am not that proud of, but I am very proud of the 1965 Boston Whaler I restored. Looking for my next one!

Would also like to become better versed in the operation of outboards. I am looking at finding an old carbonated 2-stroke to rebuild.

Also built a sauna recently. Love it!

qubex• 3 years ago

A vacuum-tube driven Tesla Multiplier (like a Tesla coil but the traditional secondary is separated into resonant and coupling components).

I also built a betatron.

wtfox• 3 years ago

Not a huge deal, but I created an Arc Reactor using micropython and neopixels! https://www.afox.dev/posts/arc-reactor

thisispete• 3 years ago

I made an antique clock that tells you the weather forecast https://thisispete.com/work/prototyping/weather_clock

factorialboy• 3 years ago

Piano stand from grey oak wood

warrenm• 3 years ago

Don't know if it'd qualify as "cool", but the most useful thing I've made is a chicken coop and run

https://antipaucity.com/2021/11/19/the-coop-with-lots-of-in-...

tomjuggler• 3 years ago

SmartPoi, the Android WiFi controlled Persistence-Of-Vision LED equipment I use in my flashy light juggling shows every week.

When I bought my remote controlled juggling equipment I thought I had everything, then I found out about Pixel Poi(TM) - which at the time were unobtainable for the kind of budget I was on. I actaully cried. For real.

Video that made me cry -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWeUQowxVlM - the good stuff starts about halfway.

I knew I had to have them, so this set me on a 10 year journey over 5 prototypes (including an early one on stripboard with 120 hand soldered LED's!) where I taught myself to program, 3d CAD, design circuit boards - even did a full Stanford U course on networking. It gave me the skills to survive the pandemic financially by making a living doing remote coding jobs (I'm a professional juggler and magician).

The project lives on today in my show and in the future at http://magicpoi.circusscientist.com - where I am bulding it out to be a full platform for IOT flashy light equipment.

levelforge• 3 years ago

I made a shovel. Coming to market soon and it's great.

epirogov• 3 years ago

I used to made of ritual black candles

notdan• 3 years ago

Fender 1957 Deluxe tube amp clone. Built the box, soldered the components (from a kit and a diagram), then upholstered it with tweed. Super fun and satisfying project, looks like a new (old) amp you’d buy at a store.

realclayman• 3 years ago

A ceramic millennium falcon. The idea was stuck in my head for a while and was keeping me awake at night ( yes I know it is crazy but I am jus saying what happened behind the scene )

https://instagram.com/p/Co_HdYVp1BP/

_odey• 3 years ago

I've drilled a hole in a fridge to put inside temperature and humidity probes, a fan, and a dehumidifier to turn it into a meat curing chamber.

EDIT: if you're in London and you want it, I'm giving it away as I'm moving to a smaller flat. Just message me and come pick it up.

gerwitz• 3 years ago

Somehow I’ve ended up making ceramics. I use OpenSCAD to turn 3D models into slices, laser cut templates from them, then use them to hand-cut and assemble the model. I’m not very good at it, which results in a hybrid look of machined and handcrafted I like.

adbacker• 3 years ago

A few years back (2015 - ok, more than a few) I built a pair of RC tanks to demonstrate the use of ardunino communication libraries. While it was for our local code camp, the hardware build was the most challenging bit with the highest learning curve.

The "tanks" had shields for front, rear, and each side that took damage separately. A main cannon with switchable weapons did different amounts of damage based on how much energy the weapon used.

Different weapons had different types of simulated kick-back ... the rapid fire machine-gun type weapon had a rapid shaking kick back while the mega-super-weapon was a super whomp kick-back. I don't recall if I got around to implementing physical effects when your tank was hit.

Control was using hacked up thrift store-sourced PC joysticks. (and by hacked-up, I do mean hacked-up. Soldered directly to potentiometers and spliced into a controlling arduino that tracked tank status etc)

All controllers and tanks were mesh-networked using cheap 2.4ghz nrf24L01+ wireless (but not wifi) chips. My idealistic final vision was massive multi-player games with selectable features.

- large games with selectable friendly fire

- different damage consequences

- scrambling opponents weapons or drive systems, drive systems degrading as they took fire, flakey shields

- communicating with a central computer for viewing game progress and tracking stats

- vastly improved system information displays (vs the cheap LCDs)

- fpv camera with a HUD woulda been sooo cool.

I knew it was going to be a huge learning curve - I was familiar with basic arduino functionality but hadn't done much beyond basic sensor reading and light blinking. I had to learn how to integrate a LOT of hardware and deal with real world complications. (sunlight plays merry havoc when using IR as your weapon-shooting and shield-receiving) I started 3-4 months before the presentation date and (of course) was still swapping out hardware and tweaking software the night before.

"trailer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7uAQrak1iA&ab_channel=Aaron...

presentation notes: https://github.com/adbacker/duinobattletanks/blob/master/doc...

code: https://github.com/adbacker/duinobattletanks/tree/master

calibrecustom• 3 years ago

I've started making guitars from bulletproof polycarbonate.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4fiQF6o3C3joso5vbH-q4Q

daemon_9009• 3 years ago

I created a child, what can be cooler than this? :)

kratos_thor1• 3 years ago

Just made bread for the first time in my life yesterday. It felt like a mixture of chemistry, alchemy and witchcraft!

Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

Related Stories