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.

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]

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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]

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.

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

More:

• Highlights from TransWorld Halloween show 2009
• Post-apocalyptic pneumatic werewolf

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You know, you kind of have to see it blown up to life-size before you realize just how creepy the "Operation" game really is. Outstanding costume build by Instructables user NavySWO91. It works just like the game!

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.

This wooden hand crank iPhone dock automata by Murtaza Lakdawala is equal parts form and function. Turn the crank and watch the gears mesh as the automata changes the iPhone's orientation from portrait to landscape.

[via Gizmodo]

Those of you who appreciated my earlier post about Dudeney's dissection will likely enjoy this table, commissioned by Joop Van Der Vaart from craftsman Jan de Koning, at Professor Greg N. Frederickson's page at Purdue.

It's made from reinforced resin and finished with automotive paints by Aaron of Fiberglassblades. That's him in the Ryo Sanada getup below. Holy crap.

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.

True that San Francisco skaters have a reputation that precedes them with their home turf being some of the gnarliest steep urban streets in the country. Check out these 36 SF skaters on Freebords flexing mad skills with neon Tetris-like shapes mounted on their heads to awesome effect.

A newly posted work from Japanese kinetic sculptor Osamu Kanda, whose elegant praying mantis automaton I blogged two weeks ago. This one is called Crawl. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

Dave Malki, who does the awesome Victorian-era webcomic Wondermark, has created a hysterical steampunky genre-fiction generator.

Liam Cooke created an automated version of the chart. Here's the story synopsis I got:

The Psychopunks
In a metaphorical Outer Rim world, a young milquetoast office drone stumbles across a time-traveling soldier which spurs him into conflict with supernatural monsters, with the help of a tomboyish female mechanic and her welding gear, culminating in a daring rescue preceding a giant explosion.

[Thanks, Jonathan Johns!]

I just checked the freezer and discovered I was down to my last bag. Don't let Halloween sneak up on you without stocking up.

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.

There's Jake, there's Elwood, and there's Dr. Kreepy. In this video he shows you how to cast cheap prop skulls by blowing canned expanding foam from the hardware store into a blow-molded plastic master. Good stuff. Wear work clothes!

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.

I'm expecting a lot of prawn-armed Wikuses (Wiki?) this year, but the award goes to YouTuber GrafixFan for producing the first bloggable District-9-related Halloween costume images I've seen. We must harvest his tissues immediately.

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.