DIYs & Mods

Ryan may kick ass at Guitar Hero, but I fail miserably due to the fact that I play a real guitar and I find it hard to unlearn from the game. For the brainiacs at Near Future Laboratory, mastering a game isn’t necessary when you have a robot to do it for you. Using solenoids and what I’m assuming are ...

We love LEGOs and while we’re partial to the Mindstorms set, Anders S�borg has built and programmed his own NXT scanner comprised mostly of these bricks.� For those not familiar with NXT scanners, they’re a “standalone” scanner that can scan and save images as BMP-files.� The images scanned can be saved in either 24-bit true color, 8-bit color or gray ...

Erin Wilk may be from Canada, but we’ll let it slide. You see, Erin is one crafty businesswoman. Each day, as part of her Robot-a-Day project, Erin crafts a cute vinyl robot made from various felts, pieces of material and a flip-top zipper head. Each robot’s head opens up to hold your stuff, so I’d recommend using it to hold ...

If you like playing music with useless hardware and you’ve got no time to go to the Tashi station to pick up some power converters, then check this YouTube video out. Some geek hacked his old 3.5-inch floppy disk drive to play the Star Wars “Imperial” tune.� Unfortunately, no documentation was made to show you how to build one yourself, ...

If you can tear yourself away from that caviar-stuffed omelette for a second, I’ll be glad to show you a beautiful lamp. A lamp so beautiful, it isn’t comprised of gold or rubies. No, this is a lamp made from 121 recycled plastic knives. Yes, like the kind you get at Sea World. Made by the BVD Collective, the knives ...

Before you pop enough wood to start a paper mill, you should know that these are scale models of roller coasters. At 1:48 scale, they’re no tiny LEGO bricks. This is a real, working roller coaster that uses gravity to fling it left and right, up and down. Shown above is the Dragon, a $500 model that has an electric ...

That son of a bitch. Looks like Ben Heckendorn, console hacker extraordinaire, has created a one-handed Xbox 360 controller. Not only is it the wireless version and ridiculous, it’s also for sale. Yes, Ben has decided to step outside his box of making one-off portable consoles and has created a controller that will be readily available for purchase. For the ...

Popular Mechanics has a must-read guide up for PS3 owners alike. If you’ve been interested in putting Linux on your Playstation 3 and need a little help getting things done, then this guide was made for you. You’ll end up replacing the hard drive and gaining the ability to dual-boot between Linux and the PS3 OS, allowing for open-source computing ...

If cheap thrills and teenage kicks are right up your alley, you may be interested in this tutorial that shows you how to build a robot for $50. The kind of robot you can get for a measly $50 is actually pretty cool. It will stay inside a patch of sun and move around randomly until it’s brought out of ...

Anyone who grew up in the ’80s remembers Johnny Five of Short Circuit. The perfect killing machine with absolutely no desire to kill after having disbanded its deadly laser beam weaponry in favor of a pocket knife. Yea, Johnny Five’s a robo-boy scout but his redeeming quality is his vast knowledge of pop-culture. As tribute to the friendliest librarian robot ...