Hobbies & Toys News
News: College Kids Hack a Coffeemaker & Amazon's Alexa into a Fun WTF Robot
Leave it to some lazy college kids to attempt to figure out a way to brew a pot of coffee without leaving the couch.
News: LEGO Robot Plays 'Little Talks' by Of Monsters & Men on Guitar
Remember back in 2011–2012 when "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men was the bumping new single being played everywhere? Well, thanks to this robot created from a LEGO Mindstorm EV3 kit, and an acoustic guitar, you get to get the iconic "hey!" stuck in your head for the rest of 2017. You're welcome.
News: Stabilizing Bracelet Helps Artist with Parkinson's Draw Again
Having control of your basic motor functions is something most people take for granted, but for individuals with Parkinson's disease, that is not the case.
News: Meet SALTO, UC Berkeley's Bushbaby-Inspired Robot with Insane Leaping Skills
It's odd to see grown humans attempting to bounce off walls doing parkour. It's another thing altogether to see a robot doing it.
News: HomeMade Robot!
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News: How to Make Tinfoil Cars
In this video, I show you how to build tinfoil cars for crushing with toy Monster Trucks. My son Eston and I love monster trucks. One of the most exciting things when you go to see monster trucks live, is when they crush cars. Problem is, when you use your hot wheels or matchbox cars with your monster trucks, they don’t get smashed. So the realism isn’t there.
News: This Jet-Powered, RC Dragon Can Fly Over 100mph—And It Actually Breathes Fire!
WonderHowTo has seen its fair share of dragon-related projects, from dragon wings, to dragon kites, to less-complicated origami dragons, but we've yet to see anything quite like this. Radio-control plane builder Richard Hamel built this incredible seven-foot-long, fire-breathing dragon using a JetCat P80 turbine and a 50,000 volt stun gun, with a 2.4-gigahertz touchscreen radio controller to fly it.
News: Magnets, Sticks, and Sugru Combine to Make an Awesome DIY Construction Toy
With just sticks, some magnets, and a bit of Sugru, you too can be the proud owner of an awesome set of magnetic construction toys! The idea is very straightforward. Simply bond magnets onto the tips of thin sticks using Sugru, but the results look like a whole lot of fun.
News: Autonomous, Solar-Powered Fijibot Only Lives to Survive Another Day
Aside from being completely adorable, Fijibot is a completely autonomous robot that automatically seeks out light sources to charge his solar-powered battery. He's built from a 1.5 liter Fiji water bottle, packed with an Arduino Uno, 6 volt solar panel, and an Arduino Proto Shield. His other parts are all off-the-shelf gear you could grab at RadioShack, while the wheels are from a discarded RC car. Fijibot isn't a particularly useful robot, but it's still fun to watch him navigate from light ...
News: This LEGO Mindstorms Submersible Can Be Piloted by Your Xbox Controller
Making little robots with a LEGO Mindstorms NXT set is already cool, but putting one underwater? Now that's just crazy. That didn't stop this engineer, who built a LEGO submarine that can not only maneuver around his fish tank, but can also be remotely controlled with his Xbox controller. The craft has a sealed battery compartment, exposed Power Functions motors, and features real-time communication between it and a laptop using a NXTbee wireless module.
News: Old Roomba Vac Modified into a Robot Controlled by Google+ Hangout Users
This is OSCAR, the Overly Simplified Collaboratively Actuated Robot. He's built from an old Roomba and an Android tablet, and he's about to make Google+ a lot more interesting. The robot is controllable by users in a Google+ Hangout, allowing the audience to interactively explore OSCAR's environment via his on-board camera.
News: NASA's Curiosity Just Got Bricked! Working LEGO Mars Rover Ready for Exploration
Using a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit, a pair of awesome engineers put together this fully functional replica of the Curiosity Mars rover. Not only is it built completely out of LEGOs, it's motorized, programmable, and ready to explore the far reaches of your living room. The rover was built for the Build the Future in Space event at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Four of the six wheels are powered, allowing it to make 360 degree turns, and the arm and mast are both fully controllable. The entire con...
News: Full-Sized Mechanical Skeeball Machine Built Entirely Out of K'Nex—And It Works!
If you played with K'Nex as a kid (or still do), you know that it can take a lot of those tiny little pieces to build something. Just imagine how many it must have taken to make this full-sized, fully functional, coin-operated skeeball machine with a mechanical score counter. Instructables user Shadowman39 (aka Kyle) spent an entire year building this masterpiece. It's the same size as the ones you see in arcades, and it's coin operated, too. But don't try to feed it your pennies, it knows th...
News: World's First 3D Printed UAV Takes to the Skies
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been widely used by the military for surveillance and reconnaissance missions—even armed combat. But there are other beneficial applications of an unmanned aircraft, such as search and rescue operations, scientific exploration, locating mineral deposits, transporting goods and even filming bikini models. But drone development can be pretty pricey, unless you just happen to have a 3D printer...
Baby Voldemort: The Creepiest of All Harry Potter Reborn Dolls
Demented newborn baby? No—creepy "reborn" baby modeled after what Lord Voldemort would look like straight from womb of his pure-blood witch of a mother. As if reborn babies weren't disturbing enough, artist Tracy Ann Lister has gone and created a slew of ultra-realistic baby dolls fashioned after the characters from the Harry Potter series. It was bound to happen someday.
News: Build Your Own LEGO Skull from Noah Scalin's Skull-A-Day Project
Noah Scalin—proprietor of the web famous Skull-A-Day project—has teamed up with LEGO engineer/artist Clay Morrow to provide instructions for Scalin's LEGO skull first posted back in '08. Rendered with LDView, Morrow dissected the original piece and put together full instructions (including a parts list) now available as a free downloadable PDF.
News: Flying Pegasus Operated with LEGO Gears & Cranks
Korean MOC Pages user Kyoung-bae Na, aka edulyoung, constructed this beautiful LEGO automaton of a winged Pegasus. Maneuvered with a series of mechanical LEGO gears and cranks, watch below as Pegasus "hovers", flapping her wings. Kyoung-bae Na sells his creations out of his e-shop, Studio Amida. The Pegasus automaton was previously going for $140, but is no longer listed; however, there is a clownfish currently available for the lower price of $33.50. The models are so fantastic—it makes one ...
NextGen Terminator: Indestructible Robo-Hand Withstands a Nasty Beating
The war against machines is near, thanks to Cyberdyne... I mean... the German Aerospace Center. The DLR Hand Arm System is a terminator-like anthropomorphic appendage that functions just as a normal human hand and arm would. Only it's way more durable and can take a beating from not only a hammer, but a baseball bat. Possibly the next-gen soldier?
News: 4 Years of Spectacularly Pointless Marble Machines
So very pointless, yet unquestionably spectacular. The best kind of "art" performs no other function than to delight the viewer, and Japanese YouTube user Denha's complex marble machines do just that. But are marble machines art? You can call them that—or toys, scientific contraptions, engineering feats—but however you choose to label them, the best marble machines are complicated, skillfully crafted, and driven by the principles of potential energy, kinetic energy and gravity.
News: DIY Video Chat Robot Lets You Be Two Places at Once
Want to keep an eye on your home while on vacation? Terrorize your family pet while at work? A homespun telepresence robot might be just the ticket! Luckily, thanks to shrinking hardware costs and the efforts of renowned hardware hacker Johnny Chung Lee, building a physical avatar has never been easier! Lee's robot has two important parts: an iRobot Create and a lightweight netbook running Skype. Notable extras include a wide-angle lens and a plastic stand to raise the computer to tabletop he...
Character Building: LEGO Kanji
Here at WonderHowTo, we know a good ideogram when we see one! That's why we're so fond of the these LEGO sculptures by Flickr user Empress of Blandings:
Bubblebot: Build Your Own Gigantic Bubble Generator
Love bubbles but hate the toil and trouble of using your own lungs to blow them? Allow us to introduce Bubblebot, the latest Arduino-powered toy to attain celebrity status on Instructables. It's not an easy project by any means—even the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur has fewer steps. But come on, it's an automated giant bubble robot! It's worth it!
News: Carnivorous Furniture Eats Flies and Mice for Energy
PETA wouldn't consider James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau's ingenious flypaper clock very eco-friendly, but I might beg to differ. The clock doesn't require any electricity or batteries. Instead it captures flies and converts the bodies of the dead insects into energy. Eight dead flies makes for roughly twelve days of power. Not bad.
News: Balloon + Coffee Grounds = Robot Hands
Inspired by Cornell's new, innovative robotic gripper (a sort of shape-shifting balloon hand), Steve Norris of Norris Labs decided to go DIY and make his own home-brewed replica at a lower cost.
News: Hunting Hydrogen Balloons with Fireworks
A group of R/C helicopter enthusiasts (of the superbly named entertainment production company Dude Licking a Pole Production) outfit a mini 'copter with little missiles, and send it out to hunt balloons in the cold Swedish wild. Motivation: mystifying. Outcome: wonderful. It's like James Bond meets an arcade game. And it's got everything we love: R/C , fireworks, and great video game style motion graphics.
News: Riot in a Jar
Pie in a jar. Tree in a jar. Garden in a jar. Why not violence in a jar? Akin to the classic ship-in-a-bottle, miniature riots bottled up in jam jars entitled “Small World Re-enactments” by British artist James Cauty:
News: Haunted House in Rotting LEGO
Mike Doyle's latest LEGO house (perhaps even more hauntingly beautiful than the last) is a Victorian mansion that transcends the material so effectively, the plastic reads like real rotting bricks and mortar. Beautiful house-devouring trees, created with LEGO hinge cylinders to mimic the texture of tree bark, and ridged 3 mm hose, droid arms and other technic connectors for the creepy, spindly branches.
News: Arabian Camels Tortured By Remote Control Robot Jockeys
In the wealthy oil man's world of Arabian camel racing, the tradition of using child jockeys has been replaced with the use of small robo-jockeys in recent years. But after finally ridding the game of the mistreatment of children, the sport is now under scrutiny again. The Dubai police have discovered a new feature illegally added to the torturous, whip-endowed robots: hidden stun guns.
News: LEGO x Angry Birds
Kickass collection of Angry Birds LEGO art by Tsang Yiu Keung. Note: Catapult them and they will assuredly shatter into a pile of tiny LEGO bricks, just like the fate of the pigs they're aiming for.
News: IBM's “Watson” Supercomputer Demolishes World's Top Jeopardy Players
A testament of man vs. machine will air on February 14th, 15th, and 16th when IBM's supercomputer "Watson" is pitted against the world's fiercest Jeopardy players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, for a chance to win a cool $1 million. It took researchers four years to build Watson, a machine mastermind the size of ten refrigerators and equipped with complex algorithms capable of decoding the complexities of the human language (no small feat). Watch below as Watson kicks ass in a practice round ...
UPDATE: Lightercycle Instructions Translated Into English
An incredibly kind & helpful WonderHowTo-ian, Samuel FU, has translated the Chinese instructions for the amazing Lightercycle into English.
News: Functional LEGO Snow-Eating Beast
The Stilzkin Indrik is a mighty, mini LEGO Russian crawler, capable of lugging heavy loads over snowy terrain: "It has a large contact surface, which prevents it from sinking into the snow. It offers great traction on almost any surface, and loads of torque to get out of tight spots."
News: An Abandoned Bar, Two-Feet-Tall
Lori Nix's teeny, tiny, incredibly laborious, detail-oriented dioramas are, in a word, insane. We've seen an amazing diorama or two... but these are eerily obsessive. And creepy- all the spaces are depressed, abandoned, and in terrible disrepair.
News: Polar Bears Play Bloody Game of Soccer With Snowball Spycam
Blizzard Cam, a 40 mph mobile spycam on skis, spies on a group of adorable polar bears (um, minus the blood stained faces) as they devour a pile of remains. Operated remotely, Snowball Cam is released from the Blizzard if scientists detect the bears may attack the device. The decoy can roll across most terrains (even up hill), and easily distracts the bears into a game of soccer. From a BBC TV program on polar bears.
News: Apple Engineer Builds Fully-Functional Ancient Computer With LEGOs
Apple software engineer Andrew Carol built a fully-functional replica of the Antikythera Mechanism, the world's oldest known scientific computer. The 2000-year-old analog device was used by the ancient Greeks to predict the year, date, and time of future solar and lunar eclipses accurately to within two hours. Carol put together the 110 gears (made with 1,500 LEGO Technic parts) in just 30 days. See how it works below. For more information, check out Fast Company's interview with Carol.
News: Harry Potter Freak Spends $30,000 Recreating Magical Chess Set With 100,000 LEGOs
It took him a year to build and about $30,000 in parts, but Steve Hassenplug has created a truly magnificent robotic chess set, inspired by the magical chessboard in the first Harry Potter movie. Quite a task, but Hassenplug did an incredible job!
News: Barbies and Nazis Revive Beaten-Left-for-Dead Coma Victim
Meanwhile, back in Marwencol, the SS took me, tied me up and started to cut me... The SS had me tied up. The girls went into the church. They eliminated the SS. Her coming and saving me proved to me that she loved me. So, this is my wife, Anna.
News: Hermès Does Fingerboarding
Fingerboarding has never looked so high fashion. Gracefully orchestrated advert by Hermès.
Bacarobo 2010: Video Highlights from This Year's "Stupid Robot Cup"
Can a robot be dumber than a toaster? For the answer, look no further than Bacarobo—a yearly contest that showcases and celebrates and the world's dumbest, most adorable robots. Each year, ten robots vie for first prize. Each year, only one bot wins. Who took the title of Top Blockhead in this year's competition? That's something you'll want to see for yourself:
News: Dissecting a Frog With LEGOs
You can almost feel the pain of Dave Kaleta’s outstretched, dissected frog (which is pretty incredible, considering it was constructed with those tiny, plastic bricks we call LEGOs). Kaleta's work of LEGO art was built for the MOCPages MOC Olympics.
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