Most useless machine
We love ’em, and we hope you do too. Here’s [Phase2plus’] take on the most useless machine.
Scratching like it’s 1989
[Nick] spent three bucks at the thrift store and ended up buying days worth of fun with this cassette player. He hacked it to scratch like vinyl.
3D printed jawbone
This lady now has her own 3D-printed jawbone. We’re not talking about the Bluetooth headset… it’s an actual bone replacement! And yes, the skeleton for the Terminator was 3D printed… we’re that much closer now. [Thanks Steve]
Hexbug superbowl
Why not let robots decide our sports gambling choices? [Eric] let this slew of HexBugs battle it out as an early indicator for who would win the Super Bowl. Seems he has no shortage of the little toys, all of which received an MSP430 upgrade. The firmware actually implements obstacle avoidance, but he makes a poke at the Chicago Bears who seem to have the same mission.
Foil fix for worn out remotes
[Viktor] found an interesting repair tip. If you’ve got remote controlers whose buttons are not working so well anymore you may be able to fix them with tin foil. He uses a single-hole punch to clip out circles which are attached to the underside of the misbehaving button. Worth a try!
I’ve fixed quite a few buttons with tinfoil that had the underside of the rubber key worn out. A piece of tinfoil and some double-sided tape work great.
Oh man, sls-printed bones. Wolverine here I come!
Screw Wolverine, imagine what this could mean to some people with bone cancer, 4 limbs instead of 3.
Me thinks Roger Ebert is going to want to look into that printed jaw.
The printed jaw is awesome, read about it in a paper earlier today.
The only bit of information that seems to be lacking is if it offers the full range of movement.
I know current replacement jaws make you sacrifice the side to side motions, but I truely hope that has been solved with the new fabrication techniques.
The report at Xilloc mentions that “On the first day after surgery, the patient showed already normal function with adequate speech, swallowing and unrestricted mandibular movement”.
A co-worker scraped off the carbon conductor from the bottom of our remote control’s on/off button. Theory was that the night cleaning staff would think the tv broken and not use our “lunch room”. As this was just an annoyance the night crew quickly figured out, I took a piece of tinned chewing gum wrapper and rubber cemented a bit to the button. Works fine and with age it’s working better and better, and the cleaning staff is lots happier, especially around game season.
That [Phase2plus]/[Searcher] guy should at least have added something really useless that would be powered when the machine is “on”. Since this is hackaday, I’d recommend an arduino counting from one random number ot another random number and then starting all over again (without using these numbers for anything). The current version is just a regular useless machine with a mislabeled switch.
On another note: I love the tape scratching. Never thought about it, but I consider it to be a great idea 😀
lw2: “The current version is just a regular useless machine with a mislabeled switch.”
OK, it is build like a regular useless machine but the switch is not mislabeled. This way the machine does nothing when someone expect it to do something because it is on. I think it makes it more useless 🙂
Wish I knew about the tinfoil trick long ago. Had to throw away a nice multidevice remote because of failing buttons.
i have been fixing remotes with tin foil since forever 🙂
so it works 100%
Scratching like it’s 1989 is pretty shocking. Love the exposed 120v lines going to the transformer…
`I doubt this could be used for music keyboards because the foil; is harder than copper traces yet alone the softer carbon pads that are on the key ckt boards that I service. I read where somebody on the web has self sticking 3M product that has carbon on the surface, it’s dots only! Yamaha keys take strips not dots. I can’t find the sheet product in 3M’s site.
simple everyday graphite pencil lead is all you need to fix remote buttons or old corroded traces on keyboard matricies. draw on the rubber contact pad till it’s good and shiny, blow off the excess and it’s good. i’ve got an old clacky keyboard from the ’80s that i just cant seem to part with, every time a copper trace oxidizes off the matrix i just go over it with a pencil and it’s back to working like new again.
For all those people who keep asking the question of “When are they going to use a 3D printer to make something useful?” I say:
FACE!