Cooler Master’s 2011 Case Mod Competition looks to be the gift that keeps on giving. After serving up a Tron lightcycle and an architectural marvel, it’s now playing host to a mod that redefines the idea of an all-in-one PC. Peter from the Netherlands has managed to fit a pretty bombastic set of components — 4.5GHz Core i7-980X, two ASUS GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards in SLI, over 12TB of storage with an SSD boot disk, and two PSUs providing 1,500W of power in total — together with a water-cooling setup and the inevitable glowing lights inside one enclosure, which just so happens to also serve as his desk. The three-piece monitor setup is also a custom arrangement, with a 27-inch U2711 IPS panel being flanked by two 17-inchers. Admittedly, this isn’t the first water-cooled and over-powered desk we’ve laid eyes on, but that shouldn’t prevent you from giving the links below a bash and checking out the amazingly neat design of Peter’s l3p d3sk.
Ever wish you could write on people’s walls in real life? Behold the Cellular Wall Printer, a collection of felt markers that receives messages via Facebook, Twitter, and SMS, and then transcribes them across any flat surface. Here’s how it works: seven individually controlled servo motors push the felt pens up and down to leave dots and dashes in their wake. The contraption is manually operated, and Liat Segal, the inventor, adds that there’s a timing system to ensure the printer transcribes neatly, even if you are in motion. Most interesting, perhaps, is the fact that the rig is controlled by an Android application, and uses an IOIO board to connect the electronic components to an Android device. (Our resident mobile expert Myriam Joire is pretty sure we’re looking at a skinned Nexus One.) Check out a whimsical video demonstration after the break, with a couple more at the source link.
We admit, we’re pretty jaded when it comes to PC casemods, having seen everything from the inscrutable Edelweiss to Russian Ark of the Covenant-like monstrosities. Jeffrey Stephenson, though, charmed us with his wood-carved Level Eleven case, and now he’s back with Usonian, inspired by the work of famed Fallingwater architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Split-level cantilevered roofs made of teak, mahogany highlights, all that Cherokee Red and Covered Wagon coloring – it’s enough to make an architecture nerd swoon. Beneath all that fine styling it sports an Intel Core i7-875K on a Gigabyte Mini-ITX motherboard, with 8GB system memory. There’s a 256GB SSD along with a 2TB hard drive, so it’s not just built for looks; Wright, after all, emphasized utility over pointless fashion. Still, it’s very pretty to look at. More pics in the source link and after the break.
Even though lasers are as common as dirt now, appearing in everything from DVD players to supermarket scanners to computer mice, there’s still a certain appeal to a beam of coherent, monochromatic light. Especially if it’s dangerously powerful.
So it’s no surprise that people can’t resist playing with lasers, building their own, customizing them and, of course, setting stuff on fire with them.
Theodore Maiman probably never foresaw the ways his creation would be used when he first turned it on in 1960. But then again, he might be happy to know that someone has come up with actual laser rayguns.
Above:
Pulse Laser Gun Mk II
At the top of the do-it-yourself laser pyramid is this amazing pulse gun, capable of pumping out 1 megawatt of coherent light in short pulses.
As the video shows, that’s enough to punch holes in plastic and, of course, pop balloons. Add a focusing lens and the beam of laser light creates a tiny, intensely hot ball of plasma that can burn holes in aluminum and char wood.
It weighs almost 2 pounds, but has a self-contained battery pack capable of 50 shots. It may not be practical as a weapon, but like other powerful lasers, it’s very, very dangerous.
Rusty Oliver adjusts the propane flowing through two parallel, flaming metal tubes. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
SEATTLE — Rusty Oliver sets things on fire.
During our visit to his workspace, the aptly-named Hazardfactory, he demonstrated how two long propane-filled tubes can act as a kind of fiery audio EQ meter. He created a fierce ball of flame in the middle of a hoop-shaped sculpture he calls “The Singularity.” He showed off flame-throwing rayguns (sadly not currently in operation) and talked about how he was organizing a league to play one of his favorite sports, flaming tetherball.
And then, while standing next to several large propane tanks and a lot of gas-filled tubing, a visitor who was helping Oliver lit a cigarette.
No big deal, Oliver shrugged. If someone wants to set fire to the occasional cigarette in his shop, he’s OK with that.
This article is the first in a series of profiles about do-it-yourselfers and people who make amazing things.
Oliver, an artist, got into playing with fire after meeting Mark Pauline, the founder of Survival Research Laboratories, a San Francisco-area outfit that stages violent, destructive robot battles.
“It was the first kind of art I found really gripping,” says Oliver.
That was 10 or 15 years ago. Since then he’s made fire arts into a full-time business for himself. At Hazardfactory, a grungy but workmanlike space in Seattle’s industrial South Park district, he makes his artworks and does fabrication projects for clients, including Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the videogame publisher.
Oliver presides over the genial mess of his shop in a big leather apron and gloves. He’s got a ruggedly handsome face and the kind of big hands that could easily crush yours in a handshake if you aren’t careful.
When we visited, a few other people were there, sort of helping him and sort of just watching. Oliver teaches welding classes, sponsors power-tool drag-racer-construction workshops, and is organizing that flaming tetherball league.
He also does workshops with teenagers, teaching them how to weld and then setting them loose on a collection of scrap bicycles to see what rideable contraptions they can come up with.
Because Oliver’s sculptures are a little dangerous, he prefers to deliver them as performances rather than permanent installations. Watching him fiddle with the dials on multiple propane canisters, you can see that displaying a sculpture might be tricky.
About “The Singularity,” Oliver says, “I built this for a very specific purpose, which is to see if I could keep a ball of fire static in the middle.”
And he can. The sculpture looks simple: It’s a hoop of copper tubing with nozzles pointed inward toward the center. Propane feeds into it through two separate intakes. After some adjustment, he gets it dialed in.
A blue-white, blazingly hot ball of fire pulsates in the middle of the hoop. Everything else in the room fades into darkness, as we stare into the ever-changing heart of a naked, unchained furnace of flame.
The ball of fire is just a couple feet from our unprotected flesh, warming our faces like a miniature sun. Every time Oliver tweaks the dials, alarming yellow jets of fire bloom upward from the fireball. Somehow the warehouse doesn’t burn down.
He’s not above using fire to startle bystanders. At one recent gathering, Oliver says, he hooked up a propane jet to the bottom of a barbecue where he was cooking hamburgers. Whenever a customer asked for a toasted bun, Oliver would place it over the jet’s nozzle and stomp a foot pedal, triggering the flow of propane. A huge ball of flame would burst out of the grill with a gut-shaking WHOMP! and the bun, now charred to blackness, would go tumbling end over end into the air.
Oliver was also involved in a pilot for a Discovery Channel show called Weaponizers. He and three other builders created fully armed, full-sized, remote-controlled automobiles, which they then pitted against one another in an apparently no-holds-barred desert battle. The first episode of Weaponizers features lots of gratuitous explosions. It’s awesome.
As if fire weren’t enough, one of Oliver’s current projects is an effort to mix flame and high voltage. He starts with two “Rubens’ Tubes,” long perforated pipes through which propane flows, turning into flames at each opening. The pipes are connected to an audio source, and once he dials in the propane flow just right, the flames move in sync with the sound waves, forming a kind of burning EQ meter.
When Oliver runs current through the pipes, it arcs from one to the other and also does something hard to describe to the flames: Their shape changes, they become more compact, and the flames on the top start burning down, toward the lower pipe, instead of going up as flames normally do. Seeing that, you might start to see how electrical fields could be used to put out fires, as Harvard researchers recently demonstrated.
You can get a glimpse of the effect in the video below.
It’s an experiment, Oliver says, but even he isn’t entirely sure what the ultimate outcome will be. Mostly it’s a chance to mess around with dangerous stuff and see if he can produce some cool effects. Getting the best effects, it turns out, takes a lot of messing around.
Is a robot really a robot if it refuses to act like a robot? That’s the question we were asking ourselves after stumbling upon this DIY machine, which may have just seized the crown for World’s Bitchiest Bot. Every time you flip the on switch, this little gremlin will partially emerge from its box to turn itself off with a vicious, whip-like gesture normally reserved for snooze buttons. Continue to rub it the wrong way and the petulant ingrate will eventually scurry away from you and start spinning around frantically, before completely withdrawing the switch and shutting itself off. After that, it’ll probably spend a few hours sulking and listening to Elliott Smith in its room, but don’t worry — it’s just a phase. Video after the break.
Sure, it looks just about like every other Arduino board found at Maker Faire, but this one’s special. How so? It’s Google-branded, and not only that, but Google-endorsed. Shortly after the search giant introduced its Android Open Accessory standard and ADK reference hardware, a smattering of companies were already demonstrating wares created around it. Remote-control robots? Check. Nexus S-controlled gardens? Check. A laughably large Labyrinth? Double check. It’s already clear that the sky’s the limit with this thing, and we’re as eager as anyone to see ’em start floating out to more developers. Have a look in the gallery for close-ups of the guts, and peek past the break for a video of the aforementioned Xoom-dictated Labyrinth.
You aren’t looking at a retro microSD card reader, you’re looking at an Atari-compatible serial disk drive that just happens to use microSD in lieu of 5.25-inch floppies. In a Zork inspired fit of nostalgia (we’ve all been there), hardware modder Rossum paired up an Atari connector with a LPC1114 microcontroller, capable of emulating up to eight Atari drives, managed by a custom, auto-booting app. The whole package is neatly packed in to a tiny 3D printed replica of the original Atari 810 disk drive, and is available for sale never — but don’t let that stop you: Rossum’s schematics are free for the taking. The word’s biggest little Atari drive is just a DIY away.
What do you get when you get when you combine a fan and a scooter? If you said “Scooterfan,” you should be ashamed. Really ashamed. The correct answer, clearly, is Fanscooter, the latest project from fighting robot builder / MIT engineering student Charles Guan, the guy who brought the world the similarly named and equally breezy Fankart last summer. What this new DIY vehicle lacks in the ominous ever-forward creep of its predecessor, it makes up in actual vehicular rideability, marking the return of Guan’s HFF propeller — the “h” stands for “holy” and the second “f” stands for “fan” — which is positioned between two Razor Scooter decks. The whole things is topped off by a power source taped on in a manner that would surely put Homeland Security on high alert. Checkout of some slow-motion Jackass-style video of the project, after the break.
So you’ve built your own homebrew CNC mill and want to test out some recent modifications? That’s a question few ever have to ask themselves, but DIYer Jamie Nasiatka recently did, and came up with the bright idea of making his very own Weighted Companion Cube. As you can see above, things turned up pretty well, and you can check out the complete build process at the source link below — yes, it lights up, and changes colors. Let’s just hope no one tries to throw this cube through a Portal t-shirt.
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