Month: September 2021

3D Printed “What If Machine” Plays Every FUTURAMA Episode

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Reddit user Remoheadder has 3D printed the infamous “What If Machine” from Futurama and hooked it up with a Raspberry Pi 3 to play every episode of Futurama. You can check out a video of it working on Reddit as well as a how to guide for how it was put together. Inspired by Bubba447 and their working Simpsons TV, Remoheadder took a lot of the code from that build and tweaked it to fit their own project. One of those tweaks? Adding a long hold option to the button to bring up the Hypnotoad channel. All hail Hypnotoad!

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An Arduino-powered underwater ROV made out of PVC pipe

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Exploring the vast underwater world is exciting, and personal breathing devices such as SCUBA allow for people to descend far further than usual. However, robots can be even better since they can operate much longer and more efficiently than a person. And because these underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) can be so expensive, Ranuga Amargasinghe wanted to construct his own DIY version that costs less. 

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Ubiquitous Energy tech turns any everyday glass surface into a solar cell

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With the continuous creativity of humans, solar batteries have “escaped” from the familiar gray photovoltaic cells. With surprising ways of “transforming,” solar cells not only help to utilize the energy from nature, but they also have applicability and high aesthetic efficiency.

Now, a young California company Ubiquitous Energy has developed a “ClearView Power window” with transparent solar cells that selectively transmit light visible to the human eye while absorbing only the ultraviolet and infrared light and converting it into electricity. The company, which emerged from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012, hopes to use that technology to turn virtually any everyday glass surface into a solar cell.

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“Mechanical” VU Meter

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A simple VU meter realized with only mechanical typical items, as screws or nuts, but powered by Arduino!

I have always been attracted by VU Meters, in fact at home I had designed a system to listen to music using my father’s old A/V mixer equipped with 2 VU meters, the first one for the left audio channel and the second one for the right audio channel. One day, suddenly, the mixer stopped working, so I decided to make a VU meter myself using Arduino…

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3D Printed Custom Name Lights

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Custom Name Lights, we have seen them around, and they make great gifts! They are surprisingly simple to make with a 3D Printer. There are several great videos on how to create them and for this tutorial, I am referencing Les impressions d’Ega‘s instructions. The link to the video is at the end of the article. This process will use the LuBan Box Function and as a bonus, we’ll show you how to incorporate a Lithophane into this as well.

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UC Riverside Roboticists Create Airhead, a Piano-Playing Robot Driven by “Air-Powered” Memory Chips

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Inspired by player pianos and thermostats from the early 1900s, Airhead ditches electronics in favor of pneumatic RAM modules.

University of California at Riverside (UC Riverside) engineers have created what they describe as “air-powered computer memory,” which drives a robot — dubbed, amusingly, “Airhead” — to play the piano.

“Pneumatically-actuated soft robots have advantages over traditional rigid robots in many applications,” the researchers write in the abstract to their paper. “In particular, their flexible bodies and gentle air-powered movements make them more suitable for use around humans and other objects that could be injured or damaged by traditional robots.”

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