Category: DIY + Hacks

For all of the terrible damage and dismemberment that robots will surely bring in the near future, they also have their uses. Imagine taking a robot with you on a heist and having it crack a combination safe for you.

Many fans fondly remember LEGO set #1682, the Space Shuttle Launch. It was released 27 years ago, and is a classic. Well, last month Adam Woodworth created a tiny drone version of LEGO’s shuttle that could fly indoors, which was cool enough, but now he has created a larger version that can fly like an RC plane.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.