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.
When tinkerer Rossum needed a floppy drive for his Atari 400 computer, he decided to modernize it. Gone is the giant, clanking Atari 810 and its slow 5.25-inch floppy disks. In its place is this tiny replica of the 810 which uses a microSD card instead.
The enclosure was 3-D printed by ShapeWays, and then Rossum gave it a lick of beige enamel paint, Inside went the card reader, an LPC1114 micro controller, a 3v3 regulator and an LED. Apart from the fiddly construction work, that was the easy part.
If this was a modern computer, the whole thing would slide into a USB port. The Atari 400 uses a serial connector which — as you can see from the photos — is bigger than the drive itself. Rossum programmed things so that the microSD card appears to the computer as an array of up to eight floppy drives.
But that’s just gravy. I’d just be happy with a novelty card-reader that looked like a tiny floppy drive. It’s just so damned cute.
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.
The vending machine at Metrix Create:Space in Seattle has a few geeky items in addition to snacks and drinks. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Visitors to Metrix Create:Space in Seattle can avail themselves of the hacker space’s many amenities: 3-D printers, work benches, hand tools, power tools, oscilloscopes, and 50 Mbps internet.
If you need something more than that for your project, there’s a good chance you’ll find it in the shop’s vending machine.
Alongside such vending staples as candy bars and bottles of water, this machine dispenses USB cables, LCD displays, LEDs, breadboards and Arduino kits.
The machine also contains MREs (military “meals ready to eat”), an open-source breathalyzer kit, solder tubes, servos, DC motors and ShamWows, among other things.
Metrix is one of several Seattle-area hackerspaces, and it’s one of the newest. It was started by Matt Westervelt, and unlike many hackerspaces, which are run as quasi-anarchist collectives, Metrix is Matt’s business.
Hanging out at Metrix and using the copious bandwidth is free, but you’ll pay an hourly rate to rent the space’s many tools. It’s just $5 an hour to use any of the basic tools, $15 per hour for the soldering room, and higher rates for the laser engravers, Makerbot and other specialty tools.
And, if you should find yourself short a part or two, there’s always the vending machine.
Metrix Create:Space is at 623 Broadway East in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
You may laugh, but Dominic Wilcox is able to use his touchscreen phone in the bath without getting it wet. Photo courtesy Dominic Wilcox.
Designer Dominic Wilcox has come up with a Pinocchio-style “finger-nose stylus” that lets you navigate your touchscreen phone hands-free.
He came up with the design after he found that he wanted to use his touchphone in the bath. A wet hand is not a good touchscreen navigation device, so he found himself using his nose to scroll, but found it hard to see precisely where his nose was touching the screen.
The solution was to create a nose extension “finger” that would allow for navigation while holding the phone firmly in his one dry hand (he did not want to risk scrolling and holding with the same hand for fear of dropping the phone).
The stylus comprises a capacitive end point attached to a plaster nose measuring around five inches in length and affixed to the face with elastic. The elongated nose allows the user to navigate around the screen with accuracy.
In Wilcox’s inaugural nose-tweet from the bath he wanted to type “Hello I am tweeting with my nose”, but due to the phone’s auto-correct it came out as “hello I am meeting with my nose”. Apparently this caused him to lose twoTwitter followers.
Wilcox has a track record for creating extraordinary items such as luxury skimming stones that are covered in 24ct gold leaf and contained within a leather pouch. He has also created stickers that can be placed on bikes or cars to make them look as though they are rusty and old as an anti-theft device. Another notable product is “War Bowl“, a bowl made out of melted plastic toy soldiers.
Death Race 2000: Amazing post-apocalyptic vehicle spotted on present-day city streets. Photo Nathaniel Akin
If Rube Goldberg ever built a bicycle, it would look like this crazy machine. Actually, it’s a little more Heath Robinson than Goldberg, but you get the idea: This thing is a convoluted mess. A convoluted awesome mess.
Details are slim, as the contraption was photographed not by the owner (and presumably builder), but by sometime tech blogger Nathaniel Akin. It appears to be fashioned from the zombie-fied remains of at least four other bikes, variously lashed together with cable-ties and bolts. Atop this behemoth sits a plastic chair, where the rider (driver?) presumably perches, carried along like C3PO when he was held aloft by George Lucas’ stupid teddy bears.
The bike is driven by an electric drill connected to car batteries through a inverter, and the power runs along several cogs and chains before reaching the wheel. It’s so bad-ass that I’m actually scared to make a joke about recumbent bikes [cough] beards [cough].
And of course, the “bike” is pulling a beer cooler.
Akin calls this the “Mad Max Electric Bike”, and we can’t do any better than that. We salute you, crazy bike building guy, whoever you may be. Thank you for making the world a slightly more awesome place.
There are two types of people who want to buy an Android smartphone: those who simply don’t want an Apple product, and those who want to trick out their phones fancier than a Honda Civic from the set of The Fast and the Furious.
If you belong in the latter crowd, you may be familiar with at least some aspects of the hardware-modding community. But what of the layman who wants to pimp his phone and hasn’t a clue where to begin?
We’ve gathered a handful of the most mod-worthy Android phones, complete with straightforward instructions on how to fully go “Vin Diesel” on your smartphone. That is to say, we show you how to gain root access — or superuser, full-permissions status — to each phone. That allows for customization far beyond what you can accomplish with a stock device. After root is achieved, the sky’s the limit.
Warning: More often than not, rooting or unlocking your phone voids your warranty, which means you’ll get no love from your carrier’s tech-support line if you accidentally screw it up. You also run the risk of “bricking” your phone — essentially rendering it useless — when performing some of these procedures.
IFixit’s clear case shows off your iPhone’s internal organs
For $30 iFixit will sell you an x-ray vision-like glimpse into the guts of your iPhone 4. The plastic panel is a direct replacement for the shatter-happy glass panel that ships with the iPhone, and contains all the necessary extras: camera lens, flash diffuser and black bezel.
Gaze through the transparent window and you’ll see the big battery, the camera and flash and a sweet warning sticker that reads “Authorized Service Provider Only.” Whatevs, Apple. We don’t care about your warranties.
Frivolous? Sure, but with one rather practical advantage. The iFixit panel costs less than half the $80 you’ll need for the fragile, boring, non-see-through OEM panel.
The paper record player is probably the best wedding invitation ever
When Kelli Anderson designed a wedding invitation for her friends — lawyer/DJ (Karen) and sound engineer (Mike) — she came up with the perfect balance of nerdy and cool: The Paper Record Player.
Aside from the actual mechanics, the design of the invitation is gorgeous, with great 1950s-style graphics and lettering. Flip the pages and you’ll eventually come across a flexidisc record. This contains a song written by Karen and Mike. Next, you fold the preceding page in half, and place the needle in its edge onto the record. Then, turn the record by hand at precisely 45rpm and enjoy the crackly, bass-free song.
If I was ever foolish enough to get married again, I’d love to have a friend like Kelli making the invitations. To find out just how much work went into the details, check out her blog post where you’ll discover — among other things — more than you ever wanted about the standard sizes of screwposts.
Hey fixed-gear riders — get ready to weep. You know how you spent all that time and money building the most minimal, clean-lined machine possible? Well take a look at the Alpha bike. It’s so clean it doesn’t even have a chain.
The Alpha bike is the product of a year’s work by five mechanical engineering seniors at the University of Pennsylvania, and it manages to pack in enough tech to be the KITT of bikes, but with the looks of a stripped-down “fixie.”
Let’s start with the frame. Ornate lugs? It’s got ‘em. The lugs are all CNC-machined from aluminum blocks, and then bonded to carbon fiber tubing. Thus you get the look of a classic lugged steel frame but with high-tech materials.
Through this frame run all kinds of gear. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bruce Willis (as John McClane) crawling through the ductwork. Electronic and gear cables run from the handlebars to the bottom bracket and rear wheel, and a belt drive is threaded through the chainstays. In fact, calling them “chainstays” seems a little weird.
The transmission is also fully custom built, with a mixture of self-lubricating bronze, steel, aluminum and a titanium clutch plate sitting inside the bottom bracket. The clutch is electronically actuated by a button on on the bars and switches between fixed and freewheel drives.
The handlebars are carbon fiber wrapped around a plastic tube, kind of like making a piñata with a balloon, newspaper and glue, but without bursting anything afterwards. The plastic is kept in to make cable-routing easy. Set onto the top of the bars is a small LCD screen that acts as a cycle computer, and this stores its data on an SD card for easy removal.
Finally (and somewhat weirdly) comes the front brake. This too is minimal, and the cable runs through the frame. But it is a drum brake, aka a pull and pray brake (I just made that name up, but it seems appropriate). Drum brakes are found on old granny bikes and they really don’t work very well. They’re also heavy. The hub also has a dynamo to power the electronics.
The Alpha really is a weird machine, with those huge lugs, granny hub and high-tech everything. Totally eccentric — just like pretty much every home-assembled fixed-gear bike out there.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
