Tag: Rube Goldberg

You know how it is. You’re working hard at the office, and then you get hungry. But if you stop your work to get some food, your productivity will suffer. What can you do? You either go hungry or fall behind on your tasks.

When you could just walk over to the fridge, nine minutes seems like a long time to wait for a glass of lemonade. In this case, it’s totally worth it. What you are looking at is a ridiculously long Rube Goldberg machine that spans the entire house just to pour a few glasses of lemonade.

What if I told you that it takes a full five minutes to get a single piece of tape out of this insane Rube Goldberg machine? Hey, it’s about the journey, not the tape. At least that’s what I would keep telling myself if I had to wait on this machine to get said tape.

I’ve always wanted to build my own Rube Goldberg machine. Sadly I lack the free time and the expertise, but maybe I could build a 2D version like this one day. Who am I kidding? This thing is way too sophisticated for me.

Give a geek some cardboard, wood, and a roll of tape and he will cook up a very slick little obstacle course for said roll of tape. I don’t know what it is about this course that I find so mesmerizing.

Two friends worked together to make this cool Rube Goldberg machine designed to fix breakfast for their wives. Peter Browne designed the mechanics, while his friend Mervyn Huggett handled the electronics. The idea is to make people laugh, but it still had to work.

Last year we featured Dexter Industries’ Bookreader, a device mostly made of LEGO and a Raspberry Pi that can read text from a Nexus 7 tablet. It seems like the contraption was a hit, but people kept telling the company to make one that can read actual books on its own.

Dexter Industries makes a Raspberry Pi add-on called BrickPi, which connects the ultra cheap computer to LEGO’s NXT Mindstorms parts. To show off what you can do with its kit, they made a robot that reads eBooks aloud.

We’ve seen all kinds of crazy Rube Goldberg machines, but this one is breaking records (and bursting balloons.) In fact Purdue University’s Society of Professional Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers broke their own world record this past Saturday with a machine that has 300 steps.

Sony is getting ready to dip its toes into the tablet market with a pair of Android-powered tablets called the S1 and S2. The tablets are likely to be overpriced as much Sony gear is, but they may be interesting to some.

Here’s a nerdy a sub-genre in an already geeky genre: some Lego Mindstorms enthusiasts all over the world love creating Great Ball Contraptions, or GBCs – a large, modular machine that does nothing but transport balls in a never-ending route.

For so long, the breakfast options of lazy people like me were severely limited: either eat something that you only need to take out of its package, something with no cooking or preparation required, or wait for someone to prepare food for you.