Instructables user peterthehun made this costume hat replica of a Rubik's Cube. Oddly disturbing, and I wonder how he can see out of it!

Ronnie Hinton of Florida made a tunable six-string cigar box guitar, base on the project in MAKE vol. 4. As the video on his site shows, he can play a decent tune or two on it!

From the pages of MAKE:

Cigar Box Guitar by Ed Vogel in MAKE volume 4 - preview online (digital subscribers can read entire article)

Our city prohibits street fireworks within the city limits (though you couldn't tell from the noise on 4th of July night!). We're going to contribute our own safe, legal noises this year with some Really Obnoxious Noise Makers from this Instructable.

Lots of pics of the Seattle Power Tool Drag Race in this Flickr Pool.

Seattle Power Tool Race and Derby 2008

Here's a collection of 8-bit art made with colored Post-It Notes. This is an art form I'm sure Staples and OfficeMax really hope catches on...

Post-it Note Art: 8-bit Edition [via Hack n Mod]

Matt Kirkland peels back our illusions about cute robot toys, via Bot Junkie. The machine inside the ghost?

There are two parts the game and the hardware connection. After a little research I discovered the possibility to read out the speed of a Powerball with a sensor. By connecting this sensor to the Arduino (and a bunch of other electronic components) it is possible to use the rotationspeed of the powerball on your computer.

Read more about Powerball

Natalie @ Craft found this fun tutorial on making a Super Foam-erator - a great easy (and messy!) kid's project for out in the yard.

Saturday I went to Artopia in Seattle's Georgetown area. Lots of cool art everywhere! Divide from Hazard Factory explained his (very loud) jelly bean gun, yet another way to dramatically fling things into the air. Only use this outside!

More:
Make a Spud Gun Instructions and 3D PDF
The SGTC Mega-Launcher Spudgun

Here's another cool project from Studio 3D - a smart domino run, with an option for using a LEGO RCX brick.

This simple hack shows you how to increase the transmission range of any RC car by at least 50 feet by adding some aluminum foil to the remote control. Watch the video for the simple solution.

[via]

This site has detailed instructions on how to turn a Mini XM-177 Airsoft rifle into a computer-controlled, servo-actuated gun.

Robot Airsoft [via]

Sonification Rifle by *VladislausDantes [Thanks, Patti!]

There's an old jargon term I love: "technical butt sniffing," which is when two geeks size up each others technical mojo. This vid brings a whole new meaning to the term, as two bio-mechanical critters, one dog and one crab, try to determine who has more DOF.

[via]

Here's Crabfu's latest quick and easy project to add a "dragonfly canopy" to a sub-micro helicopter. I-Wei does complain that the added weight was significant and really changed the flight dynamics.

Sub Micro Helicopter Dragonfly

Artomatic, the gargantuan art free-for-all (1000 artists!), recently closed in DC. I went five times and never saw all ten floors. One "trend" I saw in the art was the use of action figures, dolls parts, and toys in a lot of the work. One guy used the doors of vintage refrigerators, torn open as if in an explosion, to reveal hundreds of monochromatically-painted action figures blasting from the "wound." I don't know what it is, but I think I like it!

From the Tokyo Show 2008 comes a different take on action figure art,this one a 20' Ultraman built from thousands of Ultraman action figures.

Giant Ultraman is made of ten thousand Ultramen

On Johnny Lee's website, he discusses (and shows video off) his latest computer-human interaction research at Carnegie-Mellon using the Wiimote. In the above video, he gives a presentation on different types of flexible, foldable displays using the motion tracking of the Wiimote and IR LEDs (and projection) to simulate the displays. On his page is also a Cambridge video on how to do 3D motion capture for around US$100 using two Wiimotes and stereo triangulation.

More Wiimote Projects - A Brain Dump

Arounna Khounnoraj has instructions for this clever motorized drawing bug at Bloesemkids.

It's hard not to bust a gut laughing at these mini-humanoids skittering around the ring, duking it out. Of the 1st RT Battle Cup, Robots Dreams writes:

Watching the humanoid battles at RoboGames 2008 yesterday we noticed how impressive the larger, higher torque designs are for the crowd. The Robit team from Korea, with their 4+ kg bots, along with Zog and Oro from Farrell Robotics, put on a great, and very realistic show.

With that in mind, we wanted to remind everyone that it isn't just power. Speed, technique, and especially strategy, play a huge part in determining who wins. Take, for example, the RT Corp exhibition match (April, 2008), between Seega and Shiranuhi.

Although Shiranuhi is a well known ROBO-ONE champion, created and piloted by Dr. GIY, and totally out-powered/out-weighed the smaller Seega, the results showed how technique, strategy, and the will to win can succeed in the end.

[via]

Related:

• MAKE @ Robogames 2008
• RoboGames 2008 -The world's largest open robot competition - THIS WEEKEND (Bay Area, CA)

Here's an industrial robot controlled by a Wimote. The builder writes:

This is a small presentation of a university project I have worked on for the last 6 months.

Using a real-time system the orientation of the Wii Remote is polled and sent to the Stäubli TX 60 industrial robot.

The concept is stolen from a game named Kororinpa but the graphics are little more realistic :-)

This was done at the chair Robotics and Embedded Systems Knoll of the Technical University of Munich.

[via]

Robert Oschler, of RobotsRule, sent us news of these new videos WowWee has just released, showing their "Femisapien" (ugh) robot, which features poseable scripting. In the first video, WowWee (and BEAM) robotics guru Mark Tilden shows how the scripting works. The second, rather goofy, video shows two bots fencing as they play back their scripts.

More about the Femisapien at RobotsRule.

Here's a nice how-to for making your animatronic teddy (read: ruxbin) speak your friends' twitter feeds. Arduino powered and source code included. Via Hack a day.

Kieran Nolan writes:

Here are some recent projects from year 2 of the Creative Media course at DKIT. The student groups were each given a toy and assigned the task of hacking it together with a keyboard to create a controller for an original interactive experience.

Examples include a graffiti simulator and a couple of music generators controlled by toys. Hacking toys is a great way to get a crash course in tangible interface design, as you can pretty easily learn what works and what doesn't as far as human movement.

Rod Stewart: model train geek? Who knew? Stewart contacted Model Railroader magazine last year, said he'd been a hobbyist for 20 years, and sent them pics of his layout. While he was on tour, he visited the magazine's offices in Milwaukee. Stewart invited editors to come see his HO scale 23' x 124' layout in LA. They did and were blown away by what they saw. The online article has no pics, the magazine article, with lots of pictures and track layout, was in the December '07 issue of the magazine. The pics above are scans found online.

Visiting Rod Stewart's Three Rivers City model railroad [via]
More scans here.

Read more about Wall Racers: Your home is a race track

Here's a different approach to the classic Simon game -

Sing-Along is a musical tone memory game in the tradition of the popular ’80s game Simon (Hasbro). Designed for one to three players, the ATtiny12 microcontroller-based device plays a random sequence of notes, and then listens for the player(s) to mimic the sequence by singing or humming. If the player does not respond within the allotted time or sings an incorrect note, then a “lose” sound will play. If the player correctly sings the entire 16-note sequence, then a “win” tune will play. After each correct answer, the device plays an even longer sequence. LEDs indicate which player’s turn it is. They’re also used to follow the notes as they are played or sung. The microcontroller’s analog comparator is fed by an analog front end, which processes the input from an electret microphone. An automatic gain control loop enables the ATtiny12 to detect inputs over a wide range of sound levels.

Related:

Simon Stabs

In the Maker Shed:

Build Your Own Electronic Game Kit

...with circuit schematics and PCB layout.

Near Future Laboratory

I really like these colorful Japanese paper robot models. If you click on the underlined text next to the images on the site, you'll see larger images and (with more clicking!) get to downloadable PDFs. These would go great with a gift subscription to Make!

Paper Robots

Who doesn't want/need a "Flux Capacitor" for their time machine? Here's how to build one.

DIY Flux Capacitor

The Science Museum of Minnesota's Studio 3D has some great kid's projects. I especially like the Marble Machine, which incorporates recycling and simple electronics and kinetics.

Marble machine

Related:
The Way Things Go (one of our favorite DVDs!)