Hasta La Gadget!

Instructables settler PenfoldPlant traded Settlers of Catan’s flat board game for a globe. A modified truncated icosahedron, to be exact. The result is a multipurpose piece that can serve as decoration, a container for game pieces and yes, a playing surface, albeit one that’s not as convenient as the original.

PenfoldPlant calls his creation the Catanosphere. If it looks like a lot of work, that’s because it is. You’ll need lots of glue, nearly 500 small magnets and a steady hand for this project.

Also, as you may have noticed some of the Catanosphere’s spaces for the tiles are pentagonal, but the game’s tiles are all hexagonal. So you’ll have to make or print pentagon-shaped copies of the tiles as well.

The globe’s shape and the presence of pentagonal tiles also affect the game somewhat, though PenfoldPlant believes that you can still play with the exact same rules as the original.

Colonize Instructables to for his detailed instructions and notes on the Catanosphere.

Normally permanently bolted into low-cost PCs, it looks like these energy-efficient CPUs will be available for purchase separate from motherboards in a few months. If the reported specs are correct, they look like decent options for cheap, capable DIY home theatre PC builds.

Do you know what the most disappointing thing about being an adult is? It’s not the slow metabolism or the achy joints or the plateau of growth, it’s the fact that we’re all failures to our childhood selves. We don’t eat candy, we don’t play with toys and we drive responsible vehicles. Not John Bitmead though, he’s the type of full-fledged adult who wouldn’t disappoint his childhood self because he made a street legal Little Tikes Car that can zoom up to 70mph.

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Oscilloclock shop owner Aaron’s latest offering is based on a vectorscope, a special kind of oscilloscope used to analyze the quality of television or video signals. Like its brethren, the digital age has reduced the need for vectorscopes, but Aaron can make them useful again as clocks.

Like his other oscilloclocks – one of which we featured last year – the VectorClock uses Aaron’s custom controller board, which draws shapes on the screen by drawing circles, with certain parts of the CRT screen blanked out depending on the desired shape or character. Aaron is proud of this particular build, which is based on a Tektronix 520A vectorscope, because he was able to use nearly all of its exisiting circuits, thus minimizing internal modifications.

As you’ll see in the demo video below, the VectorClock can display the time and date in a variety of ways. It also has dimmable lighting and can even display words.

It looks like something you’ll find at the Darkwaters General Store. Contact Aaron if you want him to build you a VectorClock. He probably doesn’t accept bottle caps as payment.

[via Hack A Day]

There is just something about a little kid whose brain remains uncontaminated and is full of wonder about the world around him or her. Their imagination, too, tends to wander to far off places that we adults have seemingly lost such magic already. How about influencing their thinking and awakening their dormant engineering spirit with the $44.99 Gyrobot? This unique purchase for your little one would allow them to build 7 different machines using all the included parts, where there will be 102 pieces in total alongside 24-page instruction manual that you might want to go through with them so that they know what they’re doing.

After all, since your kids play with devices that have gyroscopes each day, ranging from their consoles to smartphones and tablets, why not introduce them to building a robot that has a gyroscope within instead? This is what the Gyrobot is all about, where the basic concepts of inertia and angular momentum can be learned, and with 7 different machines that the kit allows children to build, they are able to observe and experiment more evolved concepts from a first person perspective. Powered by a trio of AAA batteries, your kids would have a fun time building machines such as a gyroscopic robot, personal vehicle, gyro horizon, gyrocompass, balancing game, tightrope walker, and flight simulator.
[ Gyrobot might awake the inner engineer in your little one copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]