Make: Online: Toys and Games Archives

Archive: Toys and Games

November 6, 2009

Eight-way toss-and-catch kinetic sculpture

This work by sculptor and musician Bradley N. Litwin, of Philadelphia, is called "The Octapult." In his words:

With 8 synchronized catapults, 160 plastic balls per minute are launched, caught, and recirculated. Made mostly of wood, the work is ~36 inches in diameter. On permanent display in the lobby of Lower Merion Elementary School, Merion Station, PA.

Really narrow car

Look, Ma, it's a motorcycle with four wheels. Not a bike but, um... a "quike," maybe? It's the 4RWF V8 from "Cosmos" Muscle Bikes. ("Cosmos?" Really?) Four wheels or no, they're at least going to have to hire a copy editor for their website before they'll persuade me to part with the nearly $100K it reportedly costs. [via Born Rich]

How-To: Make a Star Trek Bluetooth Communicator

Usually I write about ham radio. But looking at communication devices of the future from the past, I thought it would be fun to have a Star Trek: The Original Series Bluetooth communicator for a cellphone. I worked with Dave Clausen to hack one together from a toy Star Trek communicator, a Bluetooth module, and a microcontroller. Following are the directions and program to make your own. And of course a video to show how the Star Trek Bluetooth Communicator works.

And if you really want to geek it up, the Star Trek Bluetooth Communicator can also be used with the Yaesu VX-8R ham radio. It also makes an awesome gift. Read on for the full tutorial.

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November 3, 2009

Alien twins life support system haunt prop

John Russell made this fantastic haunted house prop. In his own words:

Two aliens contained in suspended animation chambers. A central control unit monitors and sustains life support functions. The control screen is a looping flash animation. Every few minutes, a malfunction state is triggered. Sound and graphics announce the error, and a Make Controller board is used to trigger emergency flasher lights and a fog machine (simulates a cryogenic coolant leak).

The video shows the system going into its "malfunction state." Awesome work, John!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still time left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is 11:59 PM PST, November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Notebook based on "Jacob's Ladder" principle

You kind of have to see this thing move to get the point. The brand name is RevolveR and, apart from novelty, the "floating spine" binding seems to serve no particular function. Still, it's pretty delightful, and seems to operate on the same principle as the toy commonly known as a "Jacob's Ladder" (Wikipedia). [via Boing Boing]

November 2, 2009

Auto-tracking sentry gun build

The beginnings of an Aliens-style (except, you know, without all the actual bullets and killing and so forth) automatic sentry gun from diederick. The tracking platform is obviously flexible, but I think he intends to mount an AirSoft gun. Build details and code downloads are available from his website.

October 29, 2009

MAKE 20: Snowboard conversion to DIY splitboard

A couple of winters ago, when some friends and I were slogging up the roughly 2,000 vertical feet of Waterhouse Peak in the South Lake Tahoe area, snowshoes on our feet and snowboards strapped to our packs, we were repeatedly passed up by smiling telemark skiers, smoothly gliding uphill with skins on their skis. The snowboarding answer to this ease and simplicity is known as a splitboard, a snowboard that comes apart into two planks, which you cover with skins for the uphill, and then put back together into snowboard mode for the downhill. The hitch is that I've been drooling over ready-made splitboards for a few years now, but they regularly cost between $600-$1200 for the deck alone. Now, Voilé is offering a kit to split an existing board yourself; the Split Decision kit runs around $160. And in MAKE Volume 20, Damien Scogin gives us a detailed step by step for making your own splitboard. The sketchiest part of the build has got to be taking a saw to your snowboard. It's like DIY surgery on one of my most beloved toys, but Damien shows how to use a table saw and build a quick and dirty jig to keep the cut straight. Is it a coincidence that a friend of mine just gave me a board that would be perfect for this? Nope, I think it's a calling.

If you're a MAKE subscriber, your issue should be arriving any minute now in the mail. If not, look for it on newsstands on November 17th or order yours from the Maker Shed. The issue is dedicated to "Kids of All Ages" and it's jam-packed with nothing but fun.

October 26, 2009

Hacking the Force Trainer

Zibri did some investigative hacking with the Force Trainer (brainwave controlled toy) and posted a basic interface schematic using a MAX3233 to interface with his PC via serial. It turns out the EEG headset is sending out data as ASCII characters @ 57600 baud - should make for some quick and easy hacking! Time to add mind control to those microcontroller projects.

October 24, 2009

Laser-cut ouija board looks authentic

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Daniel sends pics of his laser-cut/engraved ouija board - the hand-painted fills add a nice touch!

October 23, 2009

Musical Go boards

Some years ago, a conversation with my old friend Billy Baque turned to the subject of adapting board games for sightless play. When it came round to Go, Billy mentioned having read of an antique Korean board, hollow inside and strung with wires along the lines of the grid, the wires being tuned such that each intersection produced a unique musical interval when a stone was placed upon it. Whether this was simply an aesthetic embellishment or a means to make the game more accessible to sightless players, he did not know.

I was fascinated, and made every effort to run down Billy's original reference, which I eventually determined was R.C. Bell's Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations, Revised Edition. From p.100:

Traditional Japanese boards are made of a solid block of wood about eighteen inches long and sixteen broad, and some five inches thick, fitted with four detachable feet about three inches high. The board and feet are stained yellow. A square depression is cut into the underside of the board to lighten it, and also to increase its resonance; the pieces making a pleasant click when placed upon it. The Koreans have gone a stage further and some of their boards have wires stretched beneath to produce a musical note when the stones are played.

"A musical note" tends to suggest that the board as a whole played a single tone, interval, or chord, rather than a unique tone or interval for each playing position. Still, it seemed worthwhile to try to run down Bell's original reference, which, thanks to his meticulous bibliography, I eventually found was Stewart Culin's 1895 Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan, which is out of copyright and available in its entirety on Google Books. From p. 91:

The Korean board, pa tok hpan, differs from that of Japan, in being made in the form of a small hollow table, while the Japanese board consists of a solid block of wood. The Korean board is resonant and by an arrangement of wires stretched within emits a musical note when a piece is played. A specimen in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (Fig. 96) is eleven inches high and about sixteen inches square.

Again, "a musical note," but the language in both cases is ambiguous.

Culin's Figure 96 is reproduced at the top of this post. I've contacted The Penn Museum to see if collection number 16,431 still exists and/or if they have any record of it. I was hoping, at least, to show you all a photograph. Can't seem to get anyone to respond, however. If anyone has any information about this artifact or about musical go boards in general, I would love to have it. Please drop us all a comment or e-mail me directly.

How-To: Make chemiluminescent soap bubbles

No photos yet. That's a homework assignment for the bubble chemists in the audience. But I couldn't resist sharing my excitement over this paragraph from US patent 5,246,631 for glowing soap bubbles:

An example of practice of the present invention involves using a liquid dish such as LEMON JOY available from Procter & Gamble Company (Cincinnati, Ohio). Although the LEMON JOY may be diluted with varying amounts of water, it is preferred that the dishwashing liquid be used at full strength. Approximately 9 milliliters of CYALUME solution made in accordance with the manufacturers instructions are added to approximately 120 milliliters of the dishwashing liquid. Although this particular mixture may be used to produce adequate self-illuminated bubbles, it is preferred that 3 to 4 drops of glycerin be added to the solution as a bubble hardener. The solution is then ready for use to form self-illuminated bubbles.

I've never actually measured how much Cyalume (Wikipedia) is in a standard glow-stick, but I'm betting you could come up with 9 mL of the stuff by cutting open two or three at most.

Lego foosball!

Stretta managed to build a fully functional (and apparently quite fun) foosball table from LEGO parts -

My son is really attracted to foosball tables, and, if I'm honest, I'd have to say I am too. I considered the idea of buying a small, tabletop unit, but I was unsure how much use it'd see. I was afraid it might become one of those things you play with for a bit, then collect dust. Once again, I see a solution in the form of Lego.
[…]
I personally prefer the design and building stage, and my son enjoyed that too, but he REALLY enjoys playing with it and now insists we play a couple matches every night.

Seems he's not exxaggerating about that urge to solve problems with plastic bricks. See exhibit A: When a new synth module didn't quite fit rackmount specs, Lego made it all better -

Yaknow, that actually makes for a pretty nice aesthetic!

October 21, 2009

Lego model of industrial pallet handler

OK, Jay, this clip takes a bit of set-up. Basically, it's a model of a factory-floor machine for moving pallets around a square assembly line. You put a pushing arm at each corner of the square and trigger them alternately in caddy-corner pairs. Some bright bulb figured out, however, that if you join two square tracks at one corner, you can do twice the work with only two more arms. Watch the intersection for a minute to confirm that the contents of the two square tracks are not mixed, which to me is counterintuitive. Here's a video of the simple, single-square case that apparently started the trend. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

October 20, 2009

iPod-controlled RC car

More Dorkbot Austin goodness! John Boiles demonstrated this radio-controlled car steered using his iPod's built-in accelerometer via its built-in WiFi transmitter. All you have to do is tilt the iPod, and the car goes. It starts to move around 1:10.

October 19, 2009

Bubble fogger with black light bubble liquid

More awesomeness from Terra of Halloween Forum. The UV-reactive bubble juice is from Tekno Bubbles.

More:

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Autobots invade Cleveland yard for Halloween

Pretty amazing yard art by YouTuber koUNit1. [via Geekologie]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 16, 2009

Exoskeleton costume

Mario Caicedo Langer just posted a bunch of pics to the Make: Flickr Pool showing off his "Battlizer."

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 13, 2009

Sweet kid's robot costume

Here's your unicorn chaser for Sunday's exploded corpse made of construction paper. Reader Mike Wakefield made this robot costume for his son, Arlen. It has batteries and blinky lights! Beep boop beep!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 10, 2009

Stone Golem costume

It's old news, but this awesome foam Golem suit from live-action role-players in New Zealand just caught my eye.

October 8, 2009

Chillingworth the owl

I sent this link over to Becky for the CRAFT blog but I got jealous after she put it up and had to post it here, too. Chillingworth may be the coolest stuffed animal I have ever seen. He was made from an antique bodice by Ann Wood of Brooklyn.