Category: DIY + Hacks

Thermal cameras are pretty nifty devices. They let you see the heat signature of objects by capturing infrared light. There are off-the shelf thermal camera devices like the ones from FLIR, but they’re kind of pricey, and not particularly friendly to hacking into your own projects.

We thought that we had heard the last of Flappy Bird, but it is back in a not so big way – on a Dreamcast memory card. The long-dead console still has a massive fanbase, so it is no wonder that one hacker has ported the game to the Dreamcast’s interactive memory card.

If you have ever wanted to know what you can do with a 10 year-old Roomba, check out what Roland Saekow did. He turned his aging Roomba Discovery 4210 vacuum into a racing bot. Watch it take on an obstacle course at UC Berkeley’s annual student vehicle challenge.

If you aim to become your city’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, you are going to need a few thing – a costume and a web-shooter for instance. Well, here’s one way to make your own web-slinging gear, even if you don’t have a wealthy benefactor like Tony Stark. On this episode of Odin Makes, host Odin Abbott shows us how to make Spider-Man‘s web shooters based on the design from Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Why toss paper airplanes by hand, when you can have a machine take care of the hard work for you? Now you can make a semi-automatic paper airplane launcher for yourself. This thing is a cool paper airplane gun/paper airplane aircraft carrier in one. This cool build tutorial comes from the consistently inventive and resourceful The Q.

It figures that it would be a former NASA engineer who had a hand in building the world’s largest Super Soaker water gun. It is so giant that this Super Soaker managed to break a Guinness World Record for being the largest on Earth.

James from TheHackSmith has created what might be the ultimate sleep hack. His impressive project involves a Casper mattress, and a fancy and very expensive pod to house said mattress with the goal of letting the builder sleep less without being tired all the time.

Builder Vincent Buso uploaded this short video demo of the Keymu. It is basically the Game Boy Advance SP shrunk down to an ultra-portable keychain size. It is awesome. If you have fingers small enough to use it. It has four buttons instead of two and it runs ROMs using an Intel Edison chip.

Fire trucks, by their very name, should start fires, not put them out. So tinkerer PeterSripol upgraded a toy fire truck with a functional flamethrower so that at least one these vehicles can live up to its name.

Typically, pinball is a one player at a time game, but artist Cristiana Felgueiras of Get Hands Dirty has created an awesome two player pinball machine that two players can use simultaneously. She had some help from Inventables‘ X-Carve 3D carving machine. Both ends of the plywood and acrylic pinball table slopes up towards the middle, so both players’ balls can possibly dart across to the other player’s side. This is a great idea.

British inventor Colin Furze has created a lot of cool things over the years. His latest invention? The “Carvet”, a duvet that turns a car seat into a comfy bed, while still providing access to the controls. Sleeping in a car is never comfortable, but the Carvet makes you feel more like you’re at home in bed – a bed that you can still drive.

When he’s not creating awesome video games like Superhot, developer Marek Baczynski is giving vegetables the ability to roam the land. Marek recently gave a potato the freedom to travel on its own. The self-driving potato, named Pontus, runs entirely on its own electricity too. As you can see in the video below, it is hard not to love a self-driving potato.

Check out this video from amazingdiyprojects as he takes his homemade multi-rotor copter out for its first manned test flights. Yes, it looks like a death trap. He is just sitting there surrounded by dozens of angry, spinning rotors. He admits that he should be wearing some protection, but he explains: Regarding wearing MC suit and full face helmet etc.

Do you love the classic Apple II computer? Video game engineer Chris Larkin recently met up with the folks at Tested to show how he built a working miniature Apple II replica. This mini version of the classic computer emulates the full size one, but you can hold this one in the palm of your hand. The tiny computer is based on a $9 CHIP card, and has a teensy LCD TFT screen, sound support, and is powered by a drone battery.

We love to make LEGO builds around here, but when an aerospace engineer plays with LEGO, he makes them fly. I’m talking about engineer Adam Woodworth, who made his LEGO Space Shuttle lift off. Set #1682, aka Space Shuttle Launch, was released way back in 1990.

Witness the destructive power of the mighty goldfish! What you’re looking at here is the Fish Hammer built by Neil Mendoza, who is obviously a mad scientist, as he has now given a tiny fish the ability to smash stuff with a hammer. A camera tracks the goldfish’s movement inside a tank, and communicates with a Teensy microcontroller to move the hammer to the fish’s position along a semicircular track.