Hasta La Gadget!

Fog is a big part of any good Halloween festivities. You have to have fog. It’s the stuff ghouls and ghosts rise out of. Well if you want to have a cool fog effect for your next halloween party and don’t want to pay a lot of money, you can make a fog machine out of a pumpkin.

You only need a few items like a pumpkin, glycerine, distilled water, an aluminium ashtray or bowl, some toothpicks, air-drying clay, transparent paper, florist’s wire, some tealights and some drawing pins. You’ll carve the pumpkin, make some teeth for it. Then just follow the rest of the steps over at instructables and before you know it, you’ll have your very own pumpkin fog machine.

The finished product shown here looks pretty cool. Pumpkins look more evil with fog coming out of their mouths.

Instructables member blogsdo is a pretty awesome guy. He made this “quick and dirty” Landspeeder X-34 for his son’s 6th birthday party. He used a chassis from a pedal powered Original Kettcar and built the frame around it.

He did a pretty awesome job if you ask me. I like that he used flower pots for the engines. Hey, whatever you have handy is fair game as far as I’m concerned. The important thing is that the kids at that party had a lot of fun and now all want this guy for a dad. They’ve probably started calling his house Mos Eisley.

How cool would it be to ride this Landspeeder around the neighborhood on Halloween?

While one could definitely argue that the lo-fi images you can capture with a pinhole camera are an acquired taste, it’s still pretty cool that you can capture images on film with such a simple mechanism. Now, thanks to one creative Instructables contributor, you can make your own pinhole camera from an unconventional material – concrete.

Photography enthusiast Amuu has devised a plan to create a camera using a block of concrete, with a hole cut in it and a wooden shutter. The process requires the creation of a mold using laminated foam boards, then pouring concrete into it to cast the body of the camera.

The inside of the concrete box is then painted black to minimize light reflections. The pinhole itself is made by punching a hole in a soda can and gluing it into an opening in the concrete (though it would be cool if you could drill a tiny pinhole through the concrete itself). A couple of small wood knobs are used to wind the film, and a plywood flap is used to open the shutter and let light through to the film.

Check out the image gallery below for a few examples of images that Ammu captured with her concrete pinhole camera:

Yes, they’re definitely fuzzy, distorted and gritty, but that’s what you want out of a pinhole camera, isn’t it?

Want to make your own concrete camera? Head on over to Instructables for the complete build guide.

[via TAXI]

The original Nintendo Entertainment System’s controller lends itself so well to geeky reinterpretations thanks to its simple, rectangular form. And now, here’s another cool use for the iconic controller – a night light.

This nifty night light was put together by DIYer lonesoulsurfer, and is basically an old NES controller outlined with LEDs, and set into a clear resin shell.

The circuit is triggered by tilting the controller, and tilting it multiple times can switch it into a blink mode too. And if you’re wondering how you change the batteries in this thing, you don’t. It’s powered by a solar panel.

It’s pretty nifty, and you can check out the full build instructions to make your own over on Instructables. Since the whole thing is cast in resin, I don’t see a reason why you couldn’t do this with other game controller either.

If you’ve been looking for a DIY project that combines your love of Star Wars with your ignorance of fashion trends, why not turn some papier-mâché and a hacked R2-D2 toy into a light-up brassiere complete with artoo sound effects? The hardest part of the build, as demonstrated by the mannequin in this video, is finding someone who’s actually willing to wear it and fend off Star Wars fans wanting to give it a try. [Instructables via Geekologie] More »