What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

A few years ago I made a "string art" portrait for my girlfriend at the time. It's made from a continuous† 2 km long black thread, woven around a loom made from a bicycle wheel rim. I'm still very proud of how it turned out.

†OK fine, it broke at a few points and I had to knot the ends together, but it's the principle that counts.

https://imgur.com/gallery/ljoJeal

I really wanted to make something creative for her, but I'm pretty terrible as an artist, so I instead applied a talent I do have: making 200 line Python scripts. Apparently the first to do this was an artist named Petros Vrellis, though I did come up with it independently.

Sadly, we've broken up since then, and we didn't remain friends. I do wonder what happened to it, I can't imagine she'd've thrown it out, but on the other hand it would be odd to have a physically quite large memento to a previous relationship hanging from your wall.

I made a baseball bat that uses explosives to add a bunch of energy to your swing and hit a baseball really far. It uses the explosive blanks normally used to shoot nails into concrete (e.g. ramset). It worked way better than I expected, didn't have a kick, and turned out to be just a really neat thing to look at while sipping a frosty beverage. I also made a video about it if you're interested: https://youtu.be/Puo6Vgcbxps

I helped build “The Cloud” without really knowing it lol..

I joined a 5 year electrical apprenticeship after highschool. I spent many days between 2006 and 2012 building out crazy electrical systems in these giant warehouse looking buildings in Northern Virginia, for DuPont Fabros and Digital Reality.

I had no idea exactly what the purpose of these server farms were for, but they just told us “if we build it they will come” lol.

I had always wondered who “they” was, and who was renting so much server space.

Eventually we heard that Amazon was leasing some of these buildings, but it was crazy to think that an online bookstore needed such crazy infrastructure.

Flash forward to today and these buildings are called “us-east-1” lol..

My telescope(s).

It's a very rewarding hobby, from making the mirror (manual labor + measurements with interferometry), silvering it (a bit of chemistry), designing in CAD and building the actual usable telescope, there are a lot of moving parts to design, and steps that you can either do or delegate. I think anyone who likes manual work can find a piece of a telescope that's enjoyable to work on.

The feeling you get after a few nights of hardware debugging, when everything properly works and you get a sharp focus in a clear night, that's quite a step above any of my other hobby projects to this day (:

Plus, you can always improve it with ergonomic modifications or additions to make observing sessions smoother.

Edit : here's a pic at first light of my last one (8" f/3.52)

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/5939ba170acf1e9d6462d8268...

Now moving on to do twins 16.5" and 16" mirrors and scopes with a friend who is joining me into this adventure :-)

My farm. In the past ten years, I have built the following things here (to name a few that I can remember):

1. three small creek-fed ponds (bonus: one has an island),

2. numerous outbuildings for various kinds of livestock,

3. a pair of portable outhouses,

4. several miles of perimeter and cross fencing,

5. two large greenhouses (20x50 and 30x90),

6. a built-in oak storage bench for the farmhouse entryway,

7. a portable covered milking stanchion that can service a cow or two goats,

8. a semi-permanent lumber mill capable of milling logs up to 30" around and 24' long,

In addition, I have performed endless upgrades and repairs to existing structures and equipment:

1. rewired and plumbed the wellhouse, adding new storage tanks,

2. maintained my fleet of trucks, heavy equipment, and dozens of other machines that contain small engines,

3. finished out the farmhouse basement to use as a dairy parlor,

I still have a few projects on my TODO list:

1. more outbuildings,

2. a 20' wood bridge across to the island in the lower pond,

3. hot tub (made from cedar that will be cut and milled here on the property), and

4. so much more....

It will never be "done".

I made a person seven years ago. They started out pretty useless, just eating and pooping and crying a lot. But now they can walk, talk, think, read, write, act, sing, and love.

Built a two-seat, single engine airplane. Took 6.5 years to build and I've been flying it for close to a year now. The U.S. and several other countries have fairly liberal rules allowing for home-built aircraft, so there are actually tens of thousands of home-built planes flying around today. Yes, it's built from a kit (mostly sheet aluminum and rivets, some fiberglass) but I'm OK with calling it cool.

This may or may not fit into the OP's intention but some of my favorite physical achievements are repairs that might be impressive for a random suburban dad :)

1. Two years ago our basement flooded a week after we bought the house. I ended up tearing out the now-saturated carpet and put in vinyl plank flooring. Mainly straight forward but requires planning and at some points tricky sawing. It's cool when people come in and un-prompted say "wow that's a great floor you have here"

2. Maybe 4 years ago, I completely disassembled and repaired a through-wall heating and cooling unit in our NYC apartment because it wasn't producing a lot of air. Previously, repairmen came out and said it was working as normal and just wasn't meant to produce more air. This taught me a lot about electronics, HVAC, testing, and shopping at vendor-supply stores. People are shocked that a civilian was able to do this repair.

EDIT: I'll add one more:

3. Replacing the screen on my Pixel 6 Pro. It fell out of my pocket while biking, and although it wouldn't have been the end of the world to just get a replacement, I thought it would be fun to try and repair. I normally stayed away from stuff like that because I didn't want to deal with removing/applying adhesives but it was really not a big dea.

I know, I am way late to the game on this one. But WTF. I made a Scanning Tunneling Microscope, in 2001, spent an entire year doing it. Coolest F-ing thing I ever did. No money. No reason other than my curiosity. I learned Sooooooooooo much doing it. I used to have a github on it but no one looked at it but, it was one of those things. It taught me something about patience, and a ton about so many things, controllers, ADC, DAC, DSP. It. was a fun lark. I have a PHD in EE from the 90's but I felt like I learned more from that project than anything else I have ever done. I know this is a post to the wind at this point. I don't care.

I built a 35 foot steel boat that I ended up living on for years, sailing on the North Sea, and more recently throwing a bunch of great parties with. (If you're in the Netherlands and want to come to one, my email's in my profile!)

It took about 5 years to build (on and off) and I say "built" but I actually bought a large part of the hull of the boat to start; however, somewhere around 90% of the boat by mass is stuff that I've made entirely myself or worked on significantly, so I'd still say I built it.

Because the title specifically asked for cool: I've built a lot of other serious physical things in my life but the boat somehow has some serious cool power. When I started throwing parties on it I expected a somewhat modest reception - it's a medium sized steel boat, not a superyacht - but for some reason it's attracted the coolest other people: composers, neuroscientists, filmmakers, martial artists, costume designers, makeup artists for movies, a super unique crowd. Obviously you can't fit that many people on a boat the size of mine, so we're talking 10-25 people per party, but each one is unique and some nights when the music, liquor and conversations are flowing I feel as if I have constructed the International Prototype of the Cool.

Anyway, if anyone wants to come see it in person, my final boat party of the summer is this Friday-Saturday the 11th-12th in Rotterdam, my email's in my bio :)

I'm a sucker for old games and good pixel art and I've built a pixel art frame powered by a LED matrix. It is not the most impressive thing I've built, but it is the one that brings me the most joy.

Videos:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Stanko/retro-frame/dev/ret...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Stanko/retro-frame/dev/ret...

I wanted something that has a feel of an art object and sits on the shelf, rather than being a smart object that you can control with an app.

The whole thing is open source and you can make it yourself:

https://github.com/Stanko/retro-frame

Disclaimer - This was my first ever python project and I just made it work. ATM a friend of mine is helping me refactor everything. Repo also needs images of a new wooden frame I made.

Edit: Formatting.

I'm an EE by trade, and my work has shipped in numerous consumer products. I was lead hardware designer for Sonos Amp, Sonos Port, and a few of the IKEA/Sonos collaboration products.

I've since moved on from that job, but it's a very cool resume item. It's also a pretty cool shameless self promotion thing to point out when I need to.

Was asked by an executive why I should run a hardware development effort at my current company and my pitch was: "Because I've designed and shipped more circuit boards than everyone else at this 500 person company combined. You probably own some of them." Turns out that said executive just got his new house wired with Sonos Amps.

Since I mostly work from home these days, I've done some fun little projects around radio just to prove that I can. I made a little AM receiver with 74xx series logic inspired by a post I saw on HN, and now I'm working on a digitally tuned FM receiver with a Si5351 as LO and an STM32 as controller/HMI.

An artificial heart:

https://news.ohsu.edu/2018/03/08/have-an-artificial-heart

I've also been part of (or lead) the design teams of several LVADS (one of which is in the Smithsonian), a dialysis machine (Outset), a surgical navigation camera for NuVasive, and most recently a couple soft tissue surgical robotics systems. First, Ottava from Auris/Verb/J&J, and most recently the Maestro from Moon Surgical: https://www.moonsurgical.com/

I can't decide which is coolest, Oregon Heart or Moon Surgical. What do you think?

P.S. I also completely re-plumbed our old home in Golden, CO both fresh and black. Including personally jackhammering up the basement floor, digging a 5ft trench across the whole basement and replaced the sewer pipe and roughing in a full bath I the basement before covering it all back up.

When I was in school back home in India, my mom wouldn't buy a ping pong paddle for me to play with friends since it was expensive. So, I decided to cut down old notebook cardboard covers and I made one for myself by glueing 7-8 hard cardboard notebook covers.

I know, sounds lame but this is all I can remember. :D

I bought a house that was sold as "uninhabitable" in Amsterdam, pulled out all the interior walls, applied insulation, then taught my self plumbing and did the plumbing, redid the wiring, installed the gas heater, laid radiant heating. I built new interior walls and did all the interior finishing except for plastering downstairs and pouring cement over the radiant heating, which I had professionals do. Coolest single thing I built in the house is probably the kitchen peninsula which I somehow aced the oak waterfall on (thanks to Festool I guess).

Sounds kind of cool listed out like that but it was a shit ton of work, it's still not fully done and as I was an absolute beginner with limited time a lot of things are half-assed or have to be redone at some point. I quit my job shortly after buying the house (for unrelated reasons) and took a year long sabbatical but it still wasn't long enough enough time. People warning you about renovations like this should be taken seriously.

If instead of buying this house cheap and doing this renovation, I probably could've just taken a job at a bank or some big tech co in Amsterdam and afforded the same or even nicer a year or two later. Though, with the housing market being as it is the timing was super favourable for me financially. It's also kind of neat to live in a turn of the century house with all sorts of modern amenities like radiant heating, thick insulation and HRE balanced ventilation.

I made a clock based on an IV-18 vacuum florescent display tube. In the process I learned CAD, CNC, aluminum anodizing, metal turning, SMT soldering, laser cutting, box making, power supply design, and a dozen other skills I use every day today.

Here's the clock's homepage, which has some pictures: https://vonnieda.org/tc18, and more pictures on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vonnieda/sets/7215762293577593...

And a blog post that goes into excruciating detail about the entire process: https://vonnieda.org/archives/1406

I built a total of five of them. I sent one to the person who designed the enclosure, one to my brother, one to a friend, one to eBay for sale (which ended up in Germany), and kept one for myself. It still sits on my desk ticking along quite happily. I've changed the backup battery once in 14 years and have made little tweaks to the firmware over the years.

My uncle had ALS and was slowly losing his ability to speak. I visited and in order to hear him, we had to gather around him closely. It was very fatiguing for him to project his voice.

I went to a few audio stores and jerryrigged a portable mic-speaker setup that could attach to his wheelchair. No software, just the right series of devices and adapters. It worked well and provided a huge relief for him and our family. Nothing impressive technically, but definitely the physical thing I'm most proud of making.

His blog, for any curious about his ALS journey: http://cheeseaisle.blogspot.com/

I sewed a pair of KKK hoods and placed them atop the bronze heads of a local Confederate monument. Less than a year later that statue and a few more like it were removed due to the “safety concern” created by myself and a ton of other activists. I like to the “the coolest physical thing I’ve made” is helping make those goddamned statues disappear.

You guessed it, boats. I have built a stitch and glue (plywood) sea kayak[0], an Aleutian-style skin-on-frame sea kayak[1], and a skin-on-frame canoe[2]. All were fairly approachable and straightforward projects (I built the first two with basically some hand tools, a drill and a jig saw, on my deck, but a table saw is highly recommended for skin on frame). Tons of fun and the feeling of being a couple miles offshore or cruising down rapids in a boat you built yourself is awesome.

[0]: https://clcboats.com/shop/boats/kayak-kits/petrel/stitch-and...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Aleutian-Kayak-Construction-Tradition...

[2]: https://www.capefalconkayaks.com/canoes.html

All before 1982:

a belt-driven windmill to an auto alternator, complete with a household DC circuit providing switchable lights. (thanks Popular Mechanic magazine!)

a 6' multi-stage magnetic-driven projectile launcher complete with a horkage of old TV capacitors.

An amplified passive Ultrasonic sniffer with earphone.

An alarm trip sensor comprised of mirrored lightbeams.

And created/deployed "THE" original credit card reader for a set of gas pumps, later sold to Gasboy, Inc.

Then got wisked away for many other things for a long time.

Now, I am back to experimenting on a portable unidirectional EMP phase.

After doing the vanlife thing for a few years and rewiring the auxiliary battery system in my rig a couple of times I decided to scratch an itch and created a PCB with Wago connectors to greatly simplify the process and eliminate as many crimped ring connections as possible. Nearly everything for a small 12V auxiliary system plugs directly in on the PCB: DC-DC charger, start battery, aux battery and all accessories.

Now that I've scratched the itch I've found that there's a bit of a market for a product like this so I have started a side business to start selling them:

https://www.tesotaoverland.com/product/apds

Feedback so far has been enormously positive. They're not a great fit if you have a ton of equipment or high-current devices but for smaller setups in vans, 4wd vehicles, off-road trailers, etc it really simplifies the installation process.

I got into woodworking during the pandemic, built several pieces of furniture, my favorite is a firepit table [0].

The top is made out of concrete, and the rest is wood. The propane tank fits inside so it is out of view. I did buy the piping and the grill from where the fire comes out of, but other wise all done in my basement.

Other builds include a kitchen island, a coffee table, and a live-edge standing desk. I think the next thing I want to build is outdoor seating that goes with the firepit.

[0] https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPUzkh4ukWZ7XPD5cPvE1D6...

I built a timber-framed 12x16 barn with a cedar shingle roof with almost no experience. Mostly I read one book and, by strange chance halfway through, an interested person (who loves timber framing) saw me working in my driveway and decided to teach me several things and aid my technique, and supervise the raising process.

Some pictures and more details: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/building-the-goose-palace

Late this year I will plant 2000 tulips and daffodils as part of a rose garden I am planning, that begins in earnest next year. I hope it will look nice enough to turn some heads.

Animated laptop stickers.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/06/building-a-minimum-viable-l...

First time I've ever built and sold something physical. Amazed at how many people liked them.

This one is physical and digital. I personally patented, designed, built, and deployed a novel ultrasonic inspection device that encoded position/orientation using IR (Just like motion capture in movies). Actually used it in the field at a nuclear plant. The value pitch is that is allowed for fast deployment (manual scanning), but could also record coverage ensuring nothing was missed. Fast deployment was important to avoid radiation and guaranteing coverage was important for safety. Ended up costing significantly less than automated scanning using a robotic system.

My absolute favorite was using the data to project a 3d model of the interior of the welds. Had to learn quaternions which was nearly the death of me, but I'm just glad it worked.

I built a mobile, wood-fired sauna. It's 8.5 feet wide, 12 feet long and 13.5 feet tall. It seats 6. I like to run it 180-210 °F.

Well, it was mobile until the axles ripped off on its maiden voyage. Now it's up on skids until I get the courage to throw another $4,000 at new axles (and wheels, tires and leaf springs since I have to go up to the next class).

Some photos at: https://imgur.com/a/em9gBDj

During the build I blogged a bit about the project at: http://seekingsauna.com

My brothers and my dad helped me disassemble a tiny house in someone's backyard in Cambridge in June 2021 during a heat wave: http://seekingsauna.com/building

There were quite a few gotchas, one being that once I installed the rafters I realized I had to reduce the pitch in order to be able to get under New England highway bridges (14 feet): http://seekingsauna.com/roof-snafu

I've been meaning to write about the accident (the axles completely sheared off one side of the trailer) that happened a bit over a year ago but have been too busy enjoying the sauna and working on some other projects!

Last spring, I had my dad woodwork a large (cabinet door sized?) solid silhouette of Michigan, where I live. I then drilled holes throughout it, ran WS2811 LEDs through the holes, and coded up live temperature data to be shown as a color spectrum. It's a nice piece of wall art!

https://github.com/leoherzog/michigan-temp-map

A few years ago I worked at a startup that let you send handwritten notes via an API. The machines that did this were basically 2.5 axis 3d printers, aka pen plotters which is not a new concept.

I was a software dev on one floor of a building working on the platform, and on the floor below us there was a fleet of about 100 of these machines that were producing the notes. Edit: There was a team of folks that maintained and operated these machines. They didn't write the software but without them the API would not have been able to function.

I really enjoyed interacting with these folks when I could. I got to build some QA UIs for them, and I took a lot of satisfaction out of using my knowledge of the platform to make a nice and efficient tool for them. You don't get to talk directly to your users often and it was a very enjoyable project for that reason.

Anyway, for a holiday party, I thought it would be cooler than a photo booth if we could find a way to make the robots draw the people that operated them. "Yeah sure, that would be cool good luck!"

Well, I actually made it work. With grit, determination, duct tape and jQuery I created a UI for generating vector path data from bitmap images so my "robot" could draw them. I hung out in a room and operated the photo booth all night and it was really fun. Nobody at work actually cared in a meaningful way but it was an extremely satisfying project for more than its aesthetic value.

https://facetrace-party.vercel.app

https://www.robotdrawsyou.com

I've figured out multi-pen workflows to do things like maps and really cool repeating pattern geometric artwork, but the project is kind of stuck because my career has been a struggle. I have my own dedicated machine / hardware to free me from the tyranny of the cloud, but turns out the "I'm gonna build it myself" path takes longer than expected. Who would have known?

I love it so much. I can't give up on it, but it really needs more attention than I can dedicate to it. If you think this is cool and you'd like to commission some artwork please get in touch I'd really like to make this happen.

I built a tomato dehydrator (partially dried freezer packs from our garden, estrattu from Santa Cruz dry farmed Early Girls). We haven't opened a can of tomatoes in decades. Using four stacks of consumer dehydrator trays was a nightmare so:

A full sheet pan cart, like used in bakeries. Eight full sheet pans, lined with silpat nonstick sheets. A 1500 watt wall heater, a home brewing temperature controller, and a crawl space fan controller that looks like it belongs in a stereo stack. Build a plywood box around the whole thing. I had to swap in a less sensitive thermal cutoff to keep the heater from shutting off. Now we can process 60 lbs of tomatoes at a go.

There was a lot to figure out, no equations to help guess scale. I should really document this on a web site, the plans out there are very sketchy and wouldn't accommodate our scale.

I built a new TV stand for myself. I grew up watching my dad, uncle and grandfather do all kinds of woodworking so it was time to dive in myself. It was a lot of work, but also very rewarding and I am really glad with how it turned out. Towards the end I kinda ran out of gas and so I ended up skimping on the legs with some premade ones. I would like to redo the legs at some point.

The most rewarding part was creating various tools out of wood to build the thing. In the same way that we build tools to make programming easier. I made a little jig so that I could cut all the upright pieces the same dimensions using a circular saw.

Here is an album of photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/whalesalad/albums/721777203103...

I made a rotary input device that provides software-defined "virtual" detents and end-stops, implemented using a BLDC gimbal motor. It can dynamically switch from completely smooth unbounded rotation, to having detents with configurable spacing and strength and "end-stops" that spring back if you try to rotate past them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip641WmY4pA

It's got a round LCD on the front of the knob (wired and supported via the hollow shaft of the motor) and uses the flex of the PCB and strain gauge sensors (in the latest revision, simply SMD resistors whose resistance changes when stretched) to detect when the knob is pressed down.

It's open source hardware and software - https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob

HN folks might appreciate that it communicates with host software on the computer via protobuf-encoded USB serial messages -- nanopb is awesome for embedded C protobuf support, and having the defined schema, autogenerated serialization code, and compile-time type safety is so much nicer than ArduinoJson or hand-written binary protocols!

I'd love to get it hooked up to some real software eventually (video editors or home-assistant control are my 2 main ideas), but it's really just been a fun project to tinker with and try out some new ideas and parts I've never used before.

I made a player piano from scratch ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atJ_YsPFDjQ (improved since I took the video).

I do a LOT of custom stuff (mechanics, woodworking, house rebuilding, electronics, ...) but this is my favorite one yet, kind of sad I'm bad at showing the stuff I make :D

If you have any idea of what kind of job I could do to make use of all these skills I would be happy to have your thoughts !

I like building bikes. I have four now that are all frame up builds, and I've used it to get pretty good at fixing and diagnosing issues too the point friends come to me. I've also learned to build wheels though that's very much a work in progress.

I also roast coffee. I exclusively buy green to roast for myself and friends and haven't bought roasted coffee in over a year!

I learned to sew and made a frame bag or two for my bike, and have made some shorts, pants, working on some skirts.

I keep fresh water planted aquariums and have learned to set those up. they are fun and very pretty.

I struggle with creative projects, so these types of things above - skilled, short projects, I guess - are my bread and butter. I'm learning guitar again but I'm not very musically creative either so we'll see how it goes this time.

I've built a few cool things over the years. For a while I was on the Making and Science team at Google and it was my job. I helped contribute to the "physical google doodle" (where all the letters had interactive exhibits that kids could play with) and turned a shapeoko into a microscope. We used it to watch daphnia- at some point the daphnia "gave birth" and a mom who was watching said "we just saw the miracle of life!"

I built a Galton Board to demonstrate the Central Limit Theorem, I want to re-do it in all-acrylic and aluminum at some point and add an automated mechanism.

These days I build small motorized microscopes and use them to track tardigrades using an object detector. When the tardigrade moves, the detector detects the center of the tardigrade and moves it to the center of the image. This tracks tardigrades for hours at a time!

Ultimately, I'd like to make interesting nanoscale systems but the scope is as far as I've got.

For me it might be a system that's a hybrid of lighting and low-resolution video. It's installed in a food hall that turns into a night club after hours, so by day it looks like large glass and steel pendant lights, with circadian-scheduled blackbody colors (varying white temperature that follows the sunlight temp and goes deep orange-red in the evening), but after cocktail hour it kicks over into a dynamic, audio-responsive, stochastic, durational video/lighting sculpture that has lots of hidden behavior and a 'rich inner life', as I like to say. https://hardwork.party/rosetta-hall-2019/

It was a huge labor of love and took a lot of faith from the owners of the space - faith I feel was rewarded, because it's been running for almost 3 years now and it still gets a cheer from the crowd when it kicks over into party mode.

1. A dove soft toy, that can tuck its wings:

- stencil: https://github.com/azriel91/dove_stencil/

- wings tucked: https://github.com/azriel91/dove_stencil/blob/main/photos/20...

Made this because one of my friends said she liked things with character, and I knew that a handmade soft toy wasn't "enough", and so letting it tuck its wings was that character.

2. Many ambigrams (words that when rotated upside down, read as the word). These ones are names for friends / acquaintances

- blog: https://cards.azriel.im/

- different names: https://cards.azriel.im/2018/09/kevin-fiona.html

- colour inversion: https://cards.azriel.im/2018/01/carlo.html

I still make them occasionally, just haven't updated the blog

edit: ah it's not markdown, links were codified

I'll brag for a minute

I created what I think is a novel painting technique that I have now made significant iterative improvement on over the last 4 or so years. I now have a large portfolio of medium-large scale paintings using this technique.

https://www.instagram.com/kemendoart/

The technique is a variation of a "fresco" which is applying watercolor to fresh plaster. This is a very old method that tends to survive long periods because it is making a material/mineral change in the composite medium in a way that embeds pigments into plaster - making it durable to degradation in ways that other methods aren't.

I take this further by blending the pigment into water and then adding lime plaster so that the plaster itself is pigmented, and then you work with the pigmented plaster much like you would work with oil on canvas. I make my own wooden frame "canvases" by hand and have had to deal with warping and cracking.

The challenges are numerous and there's nobody to follow or ask for help or advice because as far as I'm aware nobody has developed a practice for this. In many cases I've had to make my own pigment (For example I ground up Kingsford Charcoal for black pigment on "Untitled 7" which gave it more of a concrete texture)

The biggest challenge however is with pigments - not only are they hard to make and expensive to buy - but when mixing with lime plaster they get IMMEDIATELY washed out so that bright and bold colors are extremely hard to make.

I am currently working on my latest piece and this thread made me upload my latest progress to show: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvptIU1urzD/

In order to get the depth of pigment I want I am experimenting with soaking my unset plaster with tons of pigmented water. So far it's working!

My next set of experiments is to figure out a new frame material that will not decompose faster than the plaster. My fear is that in a 100 years the wood will have degraded and that will cause the whole thing to fall apart, so I need to figure out how to get the plaster to adhere to stone somehow.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/kemendoart/

Dunno why nobody has said anything like this, but I make some awesome bread (baguettes, mainly) and pizza.

What's great is not only that you get to eat the results, but whether it turns out well or badly, you get to repeat it all over again--and again, and again, and again.

It’s far from what I do now, but as an undergrad I built an automatic guitar tuner. It had a PIC32 microcontroller that read the sound waves on GPIO pins and did some cross-correlations to figure out the frequency (sort of a poor man’s FFT, but faster since it was less general). It used an FPGA to drive a stepper motor to turn the guitar pins towards the correct frequency. Code was all C and Verilog.

I built a two-story straw bale house with lime exterior stucco and clay plaster on the interior walls.

Many details in the house use reclaimed/salvaged lumber (fake box beams on the ceiling, deep window sills in every window, wood paneling, fireplace mantel, pantry shelves, etc).

I had construction skills at the start of the project due to my dad who is a contractor. But through the project I started doing some finer woodworking and ended up with some hand tool woodworking skills and was able to all the trim: recessed baseboard (bent around curves some places), door casings, window details, some custom cabinetry, etc.

I made a rotary mobile phone: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/

Also an e-ink display that shows my calendar (and home power usage):

https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/

Also a LED stick that lets you add images to photos in the real world:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/behold-ledonardo/

And a toy bus that shows you when the next real bus is coming:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/bus-stop-bus/

A 3D-printer-etched PCB: https://www.stavros.io/posts/make-pcbs-at-home/

My favorite thing that I've built is printer prop for a ballet piece about how horrible working with printers is. I had to gut the printer, which was a lot of fun, then figure out a way for it to make the noises we wanted when the dancers interacted with it. I was super happy with how it turned out, allowing the dancers to interact and run the printer while they were dancing.

Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CrT5HqKP2ts/?utm_source=ig_web_c...

Bonus: Built a new set of tweeter for my old pair of speakers, and look and sound beautiful! https://www.printables.com/model/518598-bw-cdm-7nt-tweeter-a...

Cradle I built with my hands for my son, and managed to finish it well before he was born. Still very proud every time I look at it. About to be used for the next one :-)

https://ibb.co/PQ38tcG https://ibb.co/tXv9dsy https://ibb.co/3FXR4Vn

* modular synth - not pre-build modules, but from circuit schematics (yusynth) upwards: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WemnJZp1ecTxksjb6

* 2-axis camera gimbal - my first fully 3d-printed design. I will try to use this for astrophotograhy target tracking when the weather permits but I haven't been able to actually field test this yet: https://photos.app.goo.gl/a7VxYy77NaH48XP56

Does a garden count? In a small, urban plot I grow grapes, tomatoes, strawberries, mint, elderberries, and carrots.

A work in progress but I'm building a modular synthesizer. I've built the power supply and have the VCO started on a strip board. Planning on adding some bits to that, making a step sequencer, and some filters.

A titanium road bike frame. UBI in Ashland OR USA had a 2 week course during which you learn to and complete a frame. You didn't need prior experience but I took a welding course in a community college beforehand.

Two Daft Punk outfits with about 70m of EL wire coupled with arduinos plugged into LED arrays stuck inside bicycle helmets. Turned out pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHrWllxRLgQ

Wrote the step-by-step and uploaded the code onto Instructables, it's still there ~15 years later:

https://www.instructables.com/How-To-Make-Two-Daft-Punk-Outf...

I made them with my girlfriend (now wife/co-founder) for my 30th, was lots of fun.

Some stuff I'm particularly proud of:

- Most of the furniture and art [1] that I've made. I'm a very analytical person and physical creative outlets where I just create things that "feel good" really help me unwind... Even if those projects are pretty difficult for my often times rudimentary skills. There's a small gallery on my personal website.

- My own company [2] that makes titanium hand-blown glassware for whisky and spirits. They're made in Europe, so I don't personally craft them, but the glasses are my design and I learned how to 3D print prototypes - so "made" might vary based on your definition. Tangible things are just really cool and grounding.

[1] https://bryanmgreen.com/crafts

[2] https://bennuaine.com

Probably the last rally car I had, which I "unrolled" myself. It was a 6+ month project of working on it before and after work. The previous owner had rolled it after owning it for two decades. 1982 Dodge Omni.

It's interesting because rally involves a large rule set for safety, and you also have to make the car survive harsh conditions.

Had to do body work, replaced and rebuilt a couple engines, and redid a lot of the wiring. I did it in a rented RV parking lot. I would take the engine hoist out of storage, assemble it at the lot, and then tear down everything at the end of the day and do it again.

Did a lot of rallycrosses, rally sprints, and a couple stage rallies that it DNFd due to mechanical failures on the last stage on both events. Very frustrating, but that's rally :)

At one point it did a stage with the temp gauge pegged at 400F. The co-driver and I were standing around in start control for the next stage while it idled, and I looked down at the temp gauge (mounted bottom center console) and saw the reading and was concerned - do I shut it off? Will it start back up? This was 12hrs into the event, so I was super tired.

The answer was surprisingly yes, and we fixed the cooling system for the next stage, but it broke halfway and eventually the freeze plugs blew out and we stopped due to concerns of hot steam coming into the cabin.

It drove off the trailer the next day! Headgasket blew across every cylinder.

New head and we entered in HDT. It did okay, but then the rear suspension fell out (!) On the last stage of 1st day. We spent so much time on the front it never occurred to us to check the rear suspension mounts...

When I entered that event I asked the co-driver what he thought and then tried to close his door, but it would not latch. Had to rebuild the mechanism before tech that morning. Foreshadowing at its best.

I think I'll stick to cars made in this century.

A modular synthesizer! I designed the case in CAD, put it online for free, and it got kinda popular in the DIY synth community. Some companies are making it.

I built all modules from scratch with my own circuit designs too. Mostly novel designs, especially in oscillators and filters. A lot of JFETs being used to control voltages, amplitudes, etc. It was unstable and non-linear but had its charm :)

I made a replica of the… device that a popular video game called Counter Strike uses in game[1]

I designed and 3D printed everything myself including the circuit board, and overall it was a really fun project to work on. There were some areas I could have been more accurate to what the in game model looks like but maybe in a version 2.

It’s a cool thing that sits on my desk and does not leave the house.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/csgo/comments/10vvupj/i_made_a_repl...

I once built a “solar chime” using broken solar panel pieces, a microcontroller, battery, wind chime, motor and two magnets.

The idea was simple: when the sun comes up, chime.

It would charge up the battery during the day, lose current over night, and when current came back in the morning it would spin up a magnet using the motor (hidden under a platform) which would then cause the chime to activate (after attaching a magnet to the central chime string).

The whole thing resembled a flower in a pot, with a wind chime hanging off it.

After I finished, a guy came up to ask what it was. He and I were both a bit delirious as it was 6 or 7am after a long night of hacking. I demoed the solar chime and he exclaimed: “wow, it’s like analog to digital to analog!”

I now thing about most things that way.

Due to two things:

1. I'm a bit of a klutz

2. I'm somewhat of a perfectionist-closeted-as-a-realist-for-money kind of person, so physical things that I make/do never scratch that "must be perfect" itch.

...I almost never make anything physical (other than food? Is that cheating?). However!

First tiny backstory: Around 5 years ago I had a Clevo shitbox laptop for gaming (all I could afford then). It was loud and overheated (obviously). It was back in the "desktop replacement" days when there was a weird trend craze of putting desktop GPUs and CPUs into huge laptops, at the peril of...everyone?

So after a few months of having it, I decided to integrate an AIO water cooler "onto" (into?) it.

From a Youtube videos I learned the ins-and-outs of molex, lapping copper (how to not breath in ultra toxic metal dust was a welcome bonus), 12V and 24V switching power supplies, soldering, wire stripping, etc., then I just stuck the AIO cooler on with thermal adhesive, hooked it all up with a nice rocker switch and electric wizbangs, and I had a cute little switchable AIO cooler for my gaming laptop.

It looked gross, but actually resulted in a ~10% gaming perf boost and made it a lot more quiet (the AIO was taking a tonne of heat from the CPU where most of the heat and gaming bottlenecks came from.

It really did look hilarious. It was a fun story when guests came round for food/drinks/whatever; I would often get asked about what the heck it even is, as it just looked like some kid hot-glue-gunned a bunch of random wires, fans, and boxes to the back and under-side of a laptop.

One of my favorites is an RC boat made out of metal. It turns out that you can get 0.3mm thick, tin plated steel, cut it with scissors, bend it, and solder it together with a normal soldering iron.

Another other one would be a split keyboard, for which I designed and built everything (case, pcb, plate, software) from scratch.

I make a lot of marijuana paraphernalia (stash boxes, rolling trays, pipes) all from wood. Its a great stress reliever (the wood work, not the weed - never mix the two), and people love them and buy them.

With each new product, I try to add a new skill to it. So for my stash boxes [1] (I've only made 3 so far -- all prototypes), I have an "air-tight" lid that requires being within 0.001-inches, and the lid incorporates a rolling tray on the underside, so you open it, flip it over, it reseats inside the box, and you have a stable tray to grind you herbs and roll a joint. I haven't figured out mass production on it yet, though, so each one takes me about 2 hours of work, and none of them are perfect, but that is the fun part of it. Figuring out how to make something is easy, figuring out how to make it more than once and quickly is a challenge.

1: https://instagram.com/p/CvpUKVBLph3/

Built "Free Enterprise" (AKA 'Big Bird") with Dave Elliot. My boss was Tom Jewett. That plane along with the golden Q2 shown at Oshkosh 1981.

I'd be super impressed if anyone knew my name ;-) (Fred Jiran would know me) (plus, I was hired by Boeing in 1985 and worked in MR&D Composite Primary Structures)

P.S. G. Michael Huffman is a BFL (big fat liar). He came on after Dave and I completed the aircraft, INCLUDING the landing dolly. Actually, I give 95% credit to Dave there, he did most of the final work, since he was a registered A&P.

When I was 18 years old in high school, I found the video online of Mercury beating heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6631u7d4E0

Being young I thought I had discovered free energy, so I set about making this. I carefully setup an experiment in the school fume cupboard, and then experimented with different container radius until I was able to setup an oscillating standing wave. I then put styrofoam that had magnitized nails on the surface, held in place by copper coils wrapped around plastic hollowed out pens, and the vertical motion of the floating styrofoam magnetized nails induced a small current in the coils.

My chemistry teacher then spent a good few days explaining to me why the chemical reaction runs out eventually and how the laws of conservation of energy worked. It was an amazing learning experience and sparked a lifelong interest in chemistry.

I've made a bunch of cancer-causing virus as a grad student. After all the COVID lab leak stuff, it's become a story I need to preface with the fact that it was all zero-risk in terms of leaking out of the lab, and the only person at risk was myself.

The virus was specifically missing the ability to replicate, but it did have the ability to infect cells in a dish. That means it was just BSL-2 stuff. Our lab studied cancer, so we'd mostly infect them with cancer-causing things like a mutated PI3K that would fluoresce so we could track it in the cell with a microscope. If people are curious, we'd mostly work with lentivirus.

It's a dream of mind to make some of the cool sorts of mechanical things people are posting here. I have multiple drawers with arduinos and components, but so far my projects hit a wall because of my lack of skill hehe. Practice makes perfect!

I wrote and illustrated a childrens book for my daughter who had open heart surgery as a baby. https://www.amazon.com/Zip-Line-David-Humpherys/dp/147919609...

Putting my DeLorean on the train tracks at the original filming location for Back to the Future III:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBo1DvKzRJ4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLU4RPWjTY8

(we'd never tested it before the day, so we didn't realize the train wheels wouldn't fit over the brake calipers... so no brakes lol)

This is a partial cheat, because there was software involved, by the coolest physical thing I've made is probably the photobooth I put together for my wedding, combining an old laptop with a broken hinge (which allowed it to become a cheap touch screen), my Sony A6300 and big Epson photo printer, all crammed into some ikea shelves that I boxed up with some stiff cardboard and decorated as nicely as I could to match our thankfully fairly rustic wedding [1].

It was very simple to use, completely automated, took no maintenance other than loading some paper every few hours, and people were free to print as many high-quality 10x15cm photos as they wanted, and if I recall correct, that number was somewhere in the region of 200. There's something special about a physical print compared to seeing a picture on a screen.

The reason I think it's cool is because even 5 years later, I still visit friends and family and see photos printed from the photobooth framed on their walls, and I've had multiple friends use it for their weddings too!

I think the advantage of keeping it unmanned and simple was that older couples had a bit more confidence to get up, press one big button, and get a photo without any fuss. We had an actual wedding photographer there too, and they got plenty of wonderful photos, but mostly of the wedding party. It's only been a few years since my wedding, but unfortunately, some older guests are no longer with us, and the photobooth has left us with some wonderful photos to remember them by, which otherwise I don't think we'd have.

Very DIY, bit in my rather biased option, very cool.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ONFa9AU.jpg (the photobooth in action)

[2] https://i.imgur.com/DcldyHV.jpg (my wife and I taken using photobooth - we still have the damn ring of ivy floating round the house!)

During Covid I bought a sewing machine and taught myself to sew - then I made my daughter's matching dresses (and a ton of other stuff including toys, bags, etc!) I definitely became a bit obsessed for a while...

I still get a bit impressed with myself when I build a new Cigar Box guitar. Build something that can actually make music, using nothing but, usually, spare parts and almost completely out of wood is pretty cool.

One of my neighbors recently had their move away to college and him and his wife were finally throwing out some of his old things. There was enough things to make them a nice three string using bits of an old desk and a metal arts and craft box.

Gave them them the completed guitar around Thanksgiving and they ended up giving it to their son, who had started playing guitar while at away at school, for a Christmas gift.

I like to think he'll continue to own, and use, those small bits of his childhood as he moves further into adulthood.

Search for "in case of revolution break glass" and you'll see a bunch of photos of copies, some even for sale, of a physical meme that a friend and I built over a decade ago. You'll also see the original mixed in there somewhere :-) It's still in my apartment.

(Credit goes mostly to my friend for the construction, though it was my idea and I placed the lettering by hand.)

I made a farm table from reclaimed lumber.

https://imgur.com/a/QDrUJzu

My family uses it everyday.

A flying Delorean.

No seriously, it was a model suspended above a maglev bed. I then added an Arduino, MP3 player IC, and IR detector so that it played BTTF quotes as you walk past.

I've also repurposed an old 2.1 gaming chair hifi into an all in 1, custom "T" shape 3d printed gun metal/copper case, base speaker underneath, left right on top, controls in middle.

Possibly a garden - growing lesser known varieties of fruits can veggies is something I find interesting.

Or maybe making a traditional bow. Identifying types of wood, reading the grain, and turning it into a bow is interesting. I think most people have this concept that wood is this rigid thing, but seeing a traditional bow on a tillering tree is something else.

I was told the Snoo was the bees knees of baby rockers. Damn it was pricey (1600) bucks. I luckily saw a friend's model in action. Figured it can't be hard to make! Bought myself an Arduino, a stepper motor, a few trips to home depot to get some 2*6s (needed a bit of experimentation here) as a base and a lazy Susan swivel. Voila! Hard work but a lot of fun as I not only had a working rocker (definitely wasn't as pretty as the Snoo but also learn a lot of mechanical engineering in the process. Oh yeah I did rent the Snoo for a month so the baby would have something while I was working at it.

Shoes. I've made plenty of clothes, bags, and other sewing things. But shoes is a cut above.

I also documented the process on this 'Shoes from scratch'series on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1gv5yv3DoZNdz-LJFykg6mMf...

I used to be deep into the mechanical keyboards rabbit hole.

On of the nicest switches out there are worn in with time, so I created a machine that wore them in by pressing them multiple times. Never got to finish it but used it quite a bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctWl4Hy6DAc

Other than children, the coolest thing I have made is a medical device. It’s only Class I (requiring no pre-market approvals) but I still had to register with the FDA before selling it.

At first I was making software while selling my device on the side. The feedback from patients and practitioners was so encouraging that I couldn’t bear to keep making software despite the generous compensation.

The majority of the device is 3D-printed and the remainder is formed in 3D-printed molds. I have over a dozen printers and one full-time employee keeping them going. Hoping the business will make enough to start paying me, too!

Cliche response but has to be said, a daughter.

I made another programmer. My daughter just finished her first year of her CS degree. I hired her as an intern at my company and gave her a project that I thought would take several weeks. She proceeded to finish it in just a few days.

Watching her deploy her code to production for the first time...absolutely the most incredible feeling I've ever had. Way cooler than when I deployed my own code to production for the first time.

I'd be proud of her no matter what career she chose. But there's something absolutely amazing about being a part of your child's journey from crawling to coding.

Took an old 42U rackmount cabinet and turned it into a dehydrator, last year. Cleaned it out and used light diffuser grille for shelving, a little table fan for air movement and a simple speed controller. Ugly fruits make great dried fruit snacks.

Software may become involved. i'm playing with ideas for adding temp / humidity sensors and putting the fan's speed under the control of something that switches it based on time and those sensor readings. The in/out vent baffles could be actuated by servos. It completely lacks blinkenlights, which deficiency keeps me from showing it off more.

Children. They are not made in a night, or in nine months, they are made over the years you raise them. When they are sick and you care them, when you are sick and you care them, in the sleepless nights when you ruminate about the world in which you brought them, etc. I'm sure it doesn't stop until you die.

A quantum physicist, a neurobiologist, and a manufacturing engineer!

I feel like I got to split and parallelize my life four ways (I still count!) so I can do more of the things I always wanted to do.

I did have a co-maker, wasn’t all me!

Solar powered synth and step sequencer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_A0B1R-tZg

Made only from components locally available in Zambia.

This was a very long time ago, but it's what comes to mind.

In middle school we had an egg drop competition where we needed to make a device that would allow a raw egg to survive a fall from the ladder on the back of a fire truck. The device was subject to various limitations like not having a parachute or an engine.

Everyone else had these elaborate contraptions with springs and whatnot. My solution was a bunch of egg cartons bound together with twine. I made it in half an hour. It was the only one that survived the first round.

I think you could have dropped it out of a plane.

A set of clay tablets that depict the Sumerian/Babylonian epic of creation.

https://whispers.neophilus.net/

Some sweaters I've knit:

Embrace Octopus Sweater https://www.ravelry.com/projects/cristoperb/embrace-octopus-...

Handsome Chris Pullover https://www.ravelry.com/projects/cristoperb/the-handsome-chr...

Building a hardware business is hard, but it teaches you a lot about product management, supply chains, and empathy.

A few years ago, I launched Bedtime Bulb [0], a light bulb meant to be used before sleep. Since then, my team has reached 10s of thousands of customers, and the reception has been overwhelmingly positive.

It hasn't all been rosy, however. We learned a lot from customers about where the product fell short and what features were missing. We had to pull the product from some markets due to performance issues. We learned the hard way about customs issues, damage in shipping, and much more.

Unfortunately, hardware has long and expensive iteration cycles. But my biggest advice would be to stick with it and continue to learn if you have some feedback from the market that this could be successful. My biggest role models both went through long periods of failure: James Dyson's 5,000+ prototypes and Tony Fadell's years of building ahead-of-their-time products.

And stick with it we did. We are going to release a new version of the bulb in coming months that fix all the issues of the previous product, as well as introduce some new features we think will move the lighting space forward. And we are combining our vision and additional feature requests to release even more advanced products.

[0] https://bedtimebulb.com

It is software-related, but also physical: pong with the bats moved by exercise bikes: http://lushprojects.com/cyclepong2/

It's been around more than 15 years in various forms now, but people still love playing it. If you're in London it is at https://www.novelty-automation.com/

My dining table. It's a trestle design, made from walnut, breadboard ends, wedged and drawbored tenon joinery for the base assembly, and large enough to fit 10-12 people around for Thanksgiving. The lumber cost $1,400 and it took over a month to build, but it really transformed our dining room.

Some day, I look forward to building a guitar and a telescope, either of which have the potential to take that title away from my dining table, but that will be several years down the road for me.

I have done projects pretty much all my adult life. Woodworking, electronics...

This minimalist "speaker table" has integrated full-range drivers and subwoofer:

https://imgur.com/RIVRfea

A Raspberry Pi running a Mac emulator:

https://imgur.com/XgnGYH9

The world's first ice-climbing robot https://eos.org/articles/meet-iceworm-nasas-new-ice-climbing... .

My father runs a car wash and I built a vacuum cleaner that accepted coins using coin acceptor from Aliexpress and Arduino. That was fun but it lasted only a few months until the device got too dirty from open weather to recognize coins properly.

Guitar straps made with handwoven Peruvian textiles:

https://originalfuzz.com/collections/peruvian-guitar-straps

I spent a lot of my time in graduate school fabricating transmission diffraction gratings using electron beam lithography.

Turns out making a bunch of nanometer-scale straight metal lines one a flat surface is a lot harder than you would think.

I build a house! And by that I mean I buld it with my hands: I layed every brick. Did all the rebar & concrete. Did the roofing. Mounted the windows. Installed the electrical. calculated and build the heating ...

Besides of a few smaller crafts, I did most of it myself A and with some help of the family and friends.

But I'm still pretty proud of it. This was my corona project.

Not nearly as cool as most responses but the other day I re-hung our house's back door as the hinge had snapped. I had to chisel new slots for the bigger hinges in the frame and the door. No way as neat as a proper carpenter would do but very satifying especially when you open and close the door for the first time and it doesn't catch the frame and the lock still lines up.

The silliest thing I built was a hot-tub water heater system for one of those inflatable Intex hot tubs. Running the heat off 1500W was stupidly inefficient, so I went out and acquired one of those tankless propane-powered hot water heaters and rigged it to a commercial RV water pump and a 20# propane tank to circulate water into the hot tub that way. It heated the tub up from ~50* faucet to 104* hot in about 3 hours, instead of closer to 30 on 120V power.

The other thing I built is more of a lifehack living with sleep apnea. My CPAP's humidifier failed, and instead of replacing it with another proprietary humidifier, I bought an external CPAP humidifier[1] and then realized I could, with some clever plumbing, rig up a water pump from an external gallon jug of water to automatically re-fill my humidifier in the morning at the push (and hold) of a button. I took an oxygen-insertion tee, 12v pump, and some tubing and a check valve and attached the pump to the oxygen line on one of the inlets of the humidifier chamber. When you push the button, water flows through, through the check valve, and immediately down into the chamber.

Here's a snapshot of an early test: https://i.imgur.com/vund22E.png

It's been tweaked a little bit since then but it's my FAVORITE thing on my nightstand now. (And yes - that is a recalled DreamStation 1 - I personally opened it and repaired the defect foam myself. I don't trust the replacement device they sent me any farther than harvesting the motor from it when my old machine fails.)

[1] https://www.fphcare.com/us/homecare/sleep-apnea/cpap-devices...

I started painting miniatures last year. It's fun. This is only the fifth model I've completed. Definitely a novice, just trying to get the techniques down.

https://imgur.com/a/7tBD8AS

My girlfriend used to do research with rats — she asked for a "Spliter" Clanrat.

As a teenager, a friend and I built an underwater rocket, with the idea that a solid model rocket engine would burn when submerged, provided we could get it lit. We started with an Estes model rocket (https://estesrockets.com/products/mosquito IIRC), inserted the engine and igniter, and sealed the entire exhaust end of the engine with hot glue, as well as around the seams elsewhere. We installed a standard launch pad in a big trash bin filled with water (our original idea of swimming into a lake was quickly scrapped) and wired everything up.

It worked. The rocket actually launched from underwater! But by the time it reached the surface, the drag of the water had ripped two of the fins off, so the in-air portion was pretty wild. We even caught the whole thing on 8mm film (this was in the early 90s).

I made a “pizza wrap” that had butter chicken with cheese on top. I’ve never topped it since.

A shoe sole cleaner, which I call the "Sole Glo". Made out of mahogany and oak for the body, a small reclaimed motor, a couple toilet brushes, and some basic wiring with a pressure switch. It actuates when you step on it and does a great job of cleaning snow off your shoes. I've made 4 of them, plus the prototype.

I was at an alternative/private school, and while lots of it sucked, they did value doing things with your hands, so something I made were:

* a bowl made out of copper, with a fitting lid

* a three-legged stool

* a very fine pair of salad servers, plus a wooden letter opener

* my own apron (sewn on a mechanical sewing machine)

* a bowl made out of cherry tree

If you count perishable items, probably my semolina soufflee :-)

I made a spinning LED sphere that has 72 addressable RGB LEDs on a 3-spoke "propeller" that spins on 2 axes. This is still a work in progress, as I need to design the final control board PCB so that it's not a bunch of breadboard wires, but the main physical assembly is complete.

* Got and learned how to use a 3D printer

* Learned parametric CAD in Fusion 360 to design the main assemblies that the motors, slip rings, and propeller attaches to.

* Learned how to design PCBs and had them made

* Re-learned soldering and did SMD soldering for the first time

* Learned some ESP32 programming to control it with bluetooth (I have plans to have a robust live-editor so you can control the light patterns from a tablet - currently on pause)

Video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/xYPSHeebGzZP7Mw47

I built a few custom scientific measurement equipment over the years during my Postdoc and at a biotech startup.

System to monitor crystallization/freezing of ice in 2-5nm diameter pores within silica (coated on molybdenum mirror) by infrared absorption (https://lylegordon.ca/researchoverview.jpg).

Micro-rheometer to measure viscosity of samples as small of 3uL of liquid (this was an improvement on a NIST design that didn't require calibration of capillary diameter)

Porosimeter to measure active (flow through) pore size (5-50nm) in tiny membranes that only flow a few microliters per minute of helium (gas).

Custom time-resolved pycnometer to measure flow rates of membranes attached to a closed volume, detect leaks, and measure the internal volume.

I've rebuilt most of the electrical system in an RV I recently bought. It started out with a basic "shore power" system as the dominant source of electricity along with a couple lead acid batteries. I've replaced the old batteries with LiFePO4 (lithium) batteries, swapped out the AC->DC charger/converter with one that can charge lithium, extended the main AC power cable into a central electrical bay, installed a 2000W inverter, installed a hardwired EMS/surge protector, and a transfer switch to automatically switch main power to the inverter whenever it's powered on. Next is to install dual 400W solar panel systems (it could have been a single 800W system, but it was actually cheaper with a dual 400W system).

Ultimately I'm going to live in this RV and work remotely as I travel.

I made a spice rack out of unit size lumber which was strong enough to survive nuclear war.

I made a bed-desk combo when I was 16 which was similarly robust but that time modulated through my dad's sense of 'less would be more here'

I used Victor Papanek's books to get plywood "H" sections made which formed a modular bookcase I continue to use, which has been through 5 houses across 30 years now. The unit scale included a cassette tape minimum size alongside standard paperback and large format/LP scale.

I made another nuclear bomb proof wooden thing, a cassette storage case which doubled as a suitcase to move the entire collection around and then hang it on the wall. in hindsight, 90 tapes of cajun music and "my mix tape" was less in need of portability than I thought.

A 9 foot long recumbent trike with compound low gearing:

https://youtu.be/o3SEndDnVXg

A 3D-printed Gravitrax marble-run piece ‘for my kids’ during COVID lockdown.

A rather similar official piece has recently been released.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cvpz8UAoZfb/

I wrote, illustrated and self-published a book about mental health, psychedelics, sex and meaning in life. It's meant as an anti-dote to self-help (while diving into those topics) and a memoir of a strange part of my life where I had to rebuild my mental health from scratch.

I was incredibly proud to have copies in my hand, and it's sold around 100 copies, which is more than the 5 I expected.

You can buy it here (and read reviews):

https://neontomo.com/book

You can download for free (bc I care about freedom of information):

https://archive.org/details/recovery-from-ego-death

A band saw!

https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2019/January/i-built-a-ban...

(I purchased the plans for it, though. It was not my design.)

Here's some art I've made by carving linoleum blocks and then printing them on paper: https://imgur.com/a/gdRTrYp

For many of them there's usually multiple images or ideas expressed within, but it's difficult to get people to share their thoughts or feedback beyond a simple comment that they think it looks cool. The most rewarding feedback is when someone spots an unintended detail or interpretation which I hadn't considered during their creation. I think a key aspect of art is in the act of interpretation by part of the viewer. The creation of beauty in the interaction between art and a mind.

My wife and I made a robot for our wedding to be the "flower girl" and "ring bearer". In the months leading up to the wedding, we realized we hadn't asked any of the nieces or nephews and that we wanted to add something unique to our wedding. She's a mechanical engineer and I'm a software engineer with electronics experience, so we threw something together. My only regret is that we didn't get the robot on camera during the wedding because it worked so great!

https://imgur.com/a/lY9CqCT

After leaving my old job, I realized that I loved the device design work I had been doing, I just didn't like the work environment... So I started my own company and designed my own fine pointing device, sensors, controller and software.

The company didn't go anywhere because it turns out that business is hard when you don't like to self promote, but I am incredibly proud of the end result. It has high bandwidth, <100nm RMS jitter, a nice network interface, and incorporates reinforcement learning-based controller tuning

Check it out here if you'd like: https://www.rockymountainservo.com

Several years ago I bought a sailboat that was sitting on a rusted out trailer, and I decided to build a new trailer for it from scratch. Proud moments were when I finished that part that the bow of the boat sits on with the crank thingy and my wife asked where I bought it, and when I went to register it at the state patrol the inspector didn't believe I made it myself. Anyway, the kicker was that since I live in Washington State I had to show all the receipts for the materials to prove they had been taxed, and the total came to....almost exactly the cost of buying a new galvanized trailer off the shelf. Yeah.

A engagement ring for my wife. Made it out of a piece of wire coat-hanger that I hammered down and polished, then mounted a small cubic zirconia gem to it. Probably took a couple of days to make.

We're still happily married six years later. :)

I went to art school for college, and one of my internships was working with a guy who did facial prosthetics using medical-grade silicone.

I made a couple of eyes and ears, and kept some of the discarded ones we used during testing. I still show people for fun every now and then because they look extremely realistic.

I don't have any pictures available but I do a link to some of my old artwork (I don't really make art anymore):

https://www.behance.net/gallery/2201575/Drawings-2010-2011

As a kid in high school I built an FM transmitter including etching the PCB at home and everything. Even thought it was not super high-powered (you're not supposed to build a high-power FM transmitter, especially back then when radio was not digital) it was super fun to be able to speak to this little thing I built and hear it come out from the radio.

As an adult, I built a clone of a Fender Champ guitar amp, completely handwired with an eyelet board like they did back in the day. It sounds amazing for such a simple circuit and is actually an object I enjoy using as opposed to a toy like the FM transmitter was.

I took a Shapeoko 4 Pro CNC, which is a belt driven machine, and redesigned it around ballscrews for the X and Y motion. I reverse engineered the stock machine and rebuilt it in CAD, and made the new parts using the existing Shapeoko. It was made out of 6061-T6 aluminum, and some 3D printed components.

I'm also pretty happy with some of the cutting boards I've made: https://www.longtailwoodcraft.com/images/cube-board.jpg

Brass coin:

https://youtu.be/te130KONPP4

In my old career, I built high speed fluorescence microscopes with lasers and fancy cameras. The scope parts were off the shelf, but the software was mine entirely. So were the firmware tunings for all the outboard equipment! Manufacturers in the 2000s would give you nice technical manuals with "enter at your own risk" appendixes with all the control settings. Was real fun eking out another 20ms~ from a filter wheel with some custom acceleration parameters and balancing. I used Ryan Geiss' milkdrop timing code (http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html), an absolute gem for Win32 timing quirks.

More recently I've: put an entire exhaust on my car due to manufacturer telling me it would be 2k to replace, rebuilt my garage door frame, reroofed part of my garage, and repointed my historic brick garage wall.

For the repointing, I had to get lime mortar which is rare in the US but here in PA we have a lot of old stone. DeGruchy's NHS to the rescue, color matched and everything. The labor is over the top, but the tools are cheap. I paid for this once and they did it so badly I decided it's simply not worth it. It should last another 50-100y!

It was a long time ago but I and 3,000 other people built the Edwin H. Gott, the last 1,000 foot ore carrier on the Great lakes. I got a summer job as a welder at Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. The Gott is on Lake Erie this evening. https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/EDWIN-H.-GOTT/CU...

I assembled an Airbus A380-800 model. I had no prior experience in assembling models however I used to play Lego as a kid. This model took about 2 weeks to complete and I did it during my sabbatical. It was a bit harder than I thought it would be and I did unrecoverable mistakes when gluing and using the stickers but overall it was a great feeling to have it done. Now it has its dedicated space in the living room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBwNPSXeh1A

I built a super cheap "traditional" dry sauna. It's basically an electric burner, a pot to increase surface area and humidity, a 25 foot roll of thermal foil, and a sleeping bag as the ceiling. I disassembled the burner, removed all the plastic pieces, and short circuited the safety cutoff. It's jank AF, but in the end less than 100$. AFAIK there aren't any dry saunas under $1000 - the heater alone is ~$200. Mine is also portable, so it's in the garage in summer and in the laundry room in winter. There are portable infrared saunas for ~$100, but most studies are on the "dry" type. I rubber band a block of ice to my phone and do my reading/social media in there, so the time cost is reduced. It's pitch black in there, so I have a very bright night light. No problems with air circulation - it doesn't get stuffy, even when I throw a dash of water in the pot. https://i.imgur.com/Lml7Vms.jpg

2 years in and I haven't burned down the house... yet. I've since added more ceramic around the pot so burning myself would be very difficult.

(Reference to my post from the last time this article was posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495062 )

Workbench with inbuilt table saw and router, from that I’m building many cool and insanely rewarding things.

Building my own mechanical keyboards and learning to paint with gouache (not that super amazing end result, but is for me super cool to have a physical painting at the end of a session).

SmartPoi, the Android WiFi controlled Persistence-Of-Vision LED equipment I use in my flashy light juggling shows every week.

When I bought my remote controlled juggling equipment I thought I had everything, then I found out about Pixel Poi(TM) - which at the time were unobtainable for the kind of budget I was on. I actaully cried. For real.

Video that made me cry -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWeUQowxVlM - the good stuff starts about halfway.

I knew I had to have them, so this set me on a 10 year journey over 5 prototypes (including an early one on stripboard with 120 hand soldered LED's!) where I taught myself to program, 3d CAD, design circuit boards - even did a full Stanford U course on networking. It gave me the skills to survive the pandemic financially by making a living doing remote coding jobs (I'm a professional juggler and magician).

The project lives on today in my show and in the future at http://magicpoi.circusscientist.com - where I am bulding it out to be a full platform for IOT flashy light equipment.

I once built an elevator for a vacuum robot in my old dorm which had two floors. The elevator was moving twice per day to each floor. Was as cheap as buying a second vacuum robot.

Video of the device in action: https://youtu.be/F_gTlU9w7dQ

Image documentation of the build: https://imgur.io/gallery/y1dB4zr

Just a simple thing compared to the epic works of art and engineering seen elsewhere in this thread, but it pleases me and that is enough.

Don't even have a name for it, but I trapped a bunch of small bearing balls between a couple sheets of acrylic, so they are free to move but only in 2 dimensions.

It is so relaxing to handle, it's a hefty thing with around 4500 2mm balls in it. I like holding it on my lap and swishing around until I manage to form them into a single lattice. As the thousands of little balls roll, they make a sound that is the mix of raining, a stream, or a million Lego pieces being dug through.

There is a video of it here: https://twitter.com/kroltan/status/1385386058913832963

While building it with my dad, we weren't sure how to fix the acrylic plates together, so we used some double-sided tape. My dad raised the board before his eyes, but a terrifying crack was heard, and the smile that was on his face turned into a frown at the exact same rate the level of the balls dropped from the frame.

We spent the next 2 hours sweeping his workshop to retrieve all the balls, and then fixed it with double sided tape, glue, and an outer "framing" of a fabric tape which is really good under tension.

My family and I built a two story house as a family cabin in 1992-4, which was a cool experience, albeit exhausting and humbling. The only things we didn't do were the foundation and some of the finish drywall. Everything else we did mostly in a single summer, from the first floor joists to the roof (which we did in 90F weather!). Great experience, really helped me understand what is behind the walls of my future homes.

I'd say my son, but really my wife is the one that built him ;)

One of my favorite things that I’ve made in terms of utility is a little leather belt holster for my AirPods. I wear it almost every day and enjoy the functionality of it. I made it for the first generation AirPods case, but it still fits the wider AirPods Pro case sideways, so I didn’t have to make a new one for those.

https://zef.studio/projects/airpods-holster

I was a co-builder of “the funhouse”.

Have a look - https://funhouse.house

My ex and I built a large physical love note to each other by way of turning what started as her boring studio apartment into an interactive art installation we would live together in and build.

It’s now an exhibit in Manhattan and over 100k people have moved through the whimsy and magic at a huge scale… and yet, it started with a huge crush between a nerd and an artist.

Laptop case broke so I bought a bunch of corkboard and mounted the laptop guts as a hanging desk top.

An almost complete set of helicopter flight controls for XPlane out of wood, aluminum, potentiometers and USB controllers. Works exceptionally well for a virtual Huey.

"DJ" (music) control for toddlers - colloquially referred to as "the buttons" in our family, they've brought substantial peace to our household & they've helped our kids improve at negotiation/compromise/etc.

Details here: https://dantonio.info/projects/the-buttons/

Light-up ocarinas that change color as you play https://youtu.be/z8TVICcIt_0

You can buy them here: https://www.songbirdocarina.com/collections/synesthesia-ocar...

P.S. I did something way fancier than a Fourier here.

Shoes. I've made plenty of clothes, bags, and other more common sewing things. But making shoes is a cut above.

And I recorded the process in an attempt to show that it's not even that hard in this 'Shoes from scratch' series on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1gv5yv3DoZNdz-LJFykg6mMf...

Sudiball telescope mounts

I like visual astronomy and manual pointing (star hopping). Build a 12.5" Dobsonian (with Dobson) and it was great.

I also love doing public outreach (sidewalk astronomy). Wanted robust, portable, mount for larger mirrors. Ball scopes tick many of the desirable trade offs for me I put a 16" mirror in one and it was a favorite for years.

but balls do have drawbacks, lack of physical access to back of mirror, poor ventilation, how to lift into vehicle ... and they can be stunningly expensive to buy.

Sudiballs are my answer to how to easily construct precise light weight spherical analogs in the comfort of your own home with materials lying around.

HN crowd could likely think of them as wire frames of spheres in meat space.

There are of course many (infinite) ways to choose a wire frame representation of a sphere. So we choose one that provides convenience IRL.

The "wires" in the wire frame are the edges of some sheet material such as plywood cut into arcs.

By following the geometry of an octahedron, three planes (sheet material) intersect at right angles which (surprise) is exactly what our household tools saws, drills, routers, lasers etc, are designed to cut.

There are other details to make it work, ensuring the wire frame is always touching the base at least three points. Eroding the edges of the edges to be one with the sphere ...

But all doable by you.

[] https://ix.cs.uoregon.edu/~tomc/Hobbies/Astronomy/ATM/index....

2 things: - Converted a Ford Transit panel van into a camper van that landed up being way higher quality than it had any right to be for my first one. I then lived in it for 6 months through winter in the North East of England and it was great. - Coffee table from a large slab of cedar, I flattened it with a router and a jig and several hours of patience, put a bevel on the top edge and it looks great.

Started a company to build chip testers. Didn't go anywhere, but I had a ton of fun doing the hardware and software. One specific example is writing a Linux driver to interact with your IP block running on the FPGA. Got to see what happens on the other side of the kernel.

https://www.geminicomplex.com/

I made an art installation around a large circular LED array that can display patterns generated on a computer with shaders:

https://youtu.be/LBZls9jwa0g

(I designed all the mechanical hardware and the current electrical design & software used in the video, but other people have helped over the years, too)

Probably this Arts & Crafts style cabinet I made, with glass work from a friend and a local blacksmith I hired to make the door pulls. https://www.smokingonabike.com/2020/10/21/project-completed-...

Posting for a friend: he built a tape recorder as a youth growing up in post-WWII Germany (1949).

https://sites.google.com/site/randyelwin/home/projects/build...

The coolest physical thing I've made?

I make small gametes, and I found someone who makes large gametes. We put them together and made mutated replicas of ourselves. The first experiment has been running over 3,500 days. The second experiment has been running almost 1,400 days, but it's currently significantly louder and more prone to violence. We're very proud of them both.

I built a house myself.

I made handles for a bunch of axes and hammers. I have them hanging on the wall in the garage for when my daughters bring boys around.

I was so excited last year to get to work on a passion project, which has been at the back of my mind for 15 years. To design from the ground up, a guitar speaker or musical instrument speaker [1]. Something more than just a typical loudspeaker, which is optimized for things like cost or maximum sensitivity, or linearity. I wanted a design that subjectively sounded “good”. It turned out to be one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever worked on. I ended up with two different designs in the end, a standard single voice coil version, and series dual voice coil version. To me, and quite a few people I’ve let try them in different cabinets and with different guitar amps, they sound beautiful.

[1] https://1drv.ms/f/s!AppXGHhkkRjCk6lHhMAbkiMTE7lzlw?e=IdsZdw

When we were still dating, my wife milled a Starfleet chevron from aluminum as a present for me. I proposed shortly thereafter.

I made a robot that cheers every time the Green Bay Packers score (American football).

https://imgur.com/a/JeiDCYR

The chassis is 3D printed and a Raspberry Pi is hiding, with a couple of speakers, in the base. The Pi connects via WiFi to the local network and checks ESPN’s publicly available JSON for that day’s game to determine if the score has changed.

I gifted it to a friend that owns a bar and wanted him to be able to move to new networks and reconfigure without using a computer. So, I wrote some python scripts that interface with the GPIO pins on the Pi to reset the device and broadcast a WiFi network and web interface that can be used to connect to other networks.

That last bit now has over 500 stars on GitHub!

https://github.com/jasbur/RaspiWiFi

A battery-powered sky camera I put together using a raspberry pi pico that connects over wifi to send photos every hour. Ended up going crazy and making a custom PCB for it. Need to do more work on the battery life + camera exposure levels, but overall I'm pretty happy with it, especially how reliable it is given my minimal C skills.

I've been working on a RFID based music and story player for my daughter in spare time. https://www.github.com/ozfive/StoryBox

The other physical thing I built was a IR remote with a raspberry pi zero w for my Cambridge Audio CXA81 amp. I just recently put together and Android app with a couple buttons to interface to the API I wrote. https://github.com/ozfive/CXA81-IR-Remote-Server.

Both projects are mostly written in Go.

Don't get me started on the 2.5 years that I worked on custom AVOD systems for private jets and helicopters. I probably was the first person to integrate an Amazon Echo into a aircraft cabin to control the lighting/audio/video through voice over a satellite connection.

Probably the pneumatic solenoid actuated golf ball cannon I built for my senior.... computer science degree.... project.

I was only able to get one photogate muzzle velocity measurement at the time, but 357 m/s* isn't too shabby for compressed air and a golf ball.

To scale drawing (I literally measured the thing and put the shapes into AutoCAD): https://i.imgur.com/kklUYLf.png - the green crosshairs are the balance point

Parts/schematic: https://i.imgur.com/rHo1IO8.png - the valve is just an OTS sprinkler valve

*357 m/s just cracks Mach I: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=357+m%2Fs

Not the coolest, but a thing I've shared publicly that's whimsical and was fun to make.

A Super Mario Question Block (wood, brass, copper) https://wittman.org/blog/mario-question-block/

I got really into Indian classical music at one point some years back. I was learning to play the tabla drums from a really skilled teacher that I got connected with through a friend. Was a great opportunity to learn an interesting skill and related to my overall musical interests.

Anyway, I got a basic set of tabla drums that came with a pair of supporting rings and covers. But the rings and covers weren't very good quality. So I went to hobby lobby and my hardware store and bought some piping, plywood, fabric, and lace and made a very nice set of rings and covers by hand. Was a really fun project and came out very nicely. My teacher couldn't believe I went to all the trouble.

Another honorable mention is that I did Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard computer project. Took a long time and I learned a lot about EE.

This is a bit of a strange one, but I made a free-to-play game that produces “art” posters as a form of monetization. Still a work in progress, but I was able to finally produce a poster from the game, which felt gratifying.

Might post it on Show HN one of these days. Still needs some work though.

I built 2 muskulokeletal humanoid robots with my team. They use tendons to imitate the human muscles. It's also probably the most hugged robot in the world, as we let people hug them at events, which significantly helps dispersing fears of robots. One of them is now a permanent exhibit of the world's largest science museum in Munich. [1] Also university of Oxford has a shoulder using it to grow human tendons.[2]

[1] https://devanthro.com/story/ [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-022-00004-9

Recently, I've delved into creating and modifying electric guitars. Here are some of the enhancements and modifications I've made:

- Pickups: Upgraded to Fleor's pickups, which are both excellent and budget-friendly. - Blender Knob: Replaced the traditional pickup selector switch with a blender knob. Most blender knobs aren’t designed effectively. I've found using a dual potentiometer (stereo fader) with a center detent to be the only way that sounds really good. I’m currently exploring slider pots that can be seamlessly integrated into the pickup selector's position. - Configuration: Transitioned to SS or HS configurations on my Strats. The middle pickup tone falls short, but blending the neck/bridge results in a phenomenal sound. - Noise Reduction: Lined the electronic compartments with copper tape. This ensures the guitar remains silent, even when utilizing high-output pickups. - Tone Knob: Modified the typical frequency-adjustable low-pass filter to be a push-pull between low-pass and high-pass. This results in a crisp, punchy funk sound. - Bridge: Converted my Strat's tremolo system to a hardtail using wood epoxy and by repurposing the existing bridge components. - Luthier Skills: I've been enriching my knowledge via Stew Mac videos on YouTube, especially on *expertly* setting truss rods. This expertise has significantly enhanced the playability of my guitars, eliminating any fret buzz. - Design: Ventured into laser engraving on headstocks, pickguards, and bodies, which adds distinct details to the look of each guitar.

Regarding tone, the type of wood in an electric guitar plays an extremely minor role. The primary influencers are the electronics and components in contact with the strings (e.g., nut, frets, bridge). Currently, my go-to instrument is a $65 Monoprice Tele, spruced up with roughly $130 worth of parts and an old Seymour Duncan pickup. Some additional upgrades include a Fleor hotrail tele bridge pickup, engraved bridge with roller saddles, and locking tuners. It plays and sounds incredible. Basically, any electric guitar with a neck that plays well can be made to sound good with improved electronics.

I once made a "therapeutic bartender" machine in a rapid prototyping class. It showed different drinks on the screen and used computer vision to estimate your happiness with each option (how big did you smile?). It then pumped and stirred a drink from a cooler full of ingredients.

I have a Fairchild K-20 [1] lens from WW2 and I created a 3D printed camera for it so I can shoot large format 4x5 inch film handheld.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_K-20

I once made a circuit which would tun on an LED light when the ambient light fell below a certain threshold using an ATMEL microcontroller. It's actually very easy to do.

The coolest physical thing I tried to make (though it was mostly a failure) was a USB powered fan from scratch. I also tried to make the plastic casing from scratch using resins. I had made a mold for the casing but I had made it out of soft clay (if I remember right) and although the resulting plastic casing did solidify inside the mold and somewhat took the form of the mold, it was too brittle and the two halves of the casing didn't quite line up so they could not interlock neatly around the electronics. I didn't complete the project. I just did it out of curiosity.

A synthesizer played by pumping energy into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huYJa2Du57g

Because the volume should track how hard you play and stopping to change/recharge batteries takes away the fun!

My father lost the first joint of his left ring finger to cancer in the nailbed. I designed a tight fitting single joint replacement part which has elastic loops to his watch for keeping it on tight. I've created 3x so far with minor improvements each time.

I once built a custom wooden bookshelf from scratch. It was both a challenging and rewarding experience. I learned about woodworking techniques and design considerations.

It's amazing how crafting something tangible can provide a sense of accomplishment and connection with your space.

When I was in high school, I was looking around a charity shop and I noticed a basket containing a few circuit boards with familiar looking ports. One of them had a website printed on it. I was curious and it cost basically nothing, so I bought it and looked it up when I got home.

Turns out it was for a build-your-own MP3 player kit. It had slots for old SDR RAM, an IDE hard drive, and power connections for an ATX PSU. Turns out, I had the parts I needed from some old pcs I had gotten from my uncle. I inserted the RAM, copied some MP3s onto the IDE hard drive, put it all in a shoebox, figured out how to short a connector on the PSU to start it - and it worked!

It wasn't pretty, and the sound was noisy as heck, but it was a fun adventure. :)

I learned the basics of electrics and rewired my house. While doing that i also learned how to "make" network cables and everything. That in turn has lead to some cool house automation for lights pool and more and now i can make my own homekit adapters too =)

I’ve been building a mobile workshop which lets me bring all my tools anywhere in the country. Including welders, two metal lathes, 3D printers, woodworking tools, an electronics workbench, an anvil and forge, and a foundry setup to melt and cast aluminum and bronze. The whole shop runs entirely on electricity and I have deployable arrays of solar panels to power the whole thing and charge my electric car. I’m even adding a small living area at the front. I’ve been documenting my progress at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8n8vml-zgaCbXwYD_Q2jZzok...

This Wemos D1 mini dev board was my first PCB, I learned how to design PCBs and made this: https://github.com/fellowgeek/wemos-d1-mini-dev-board

An RC airplane, built out of an old arrow I found in a field, some foam boards cut for the wings using the Kline-Fogelmann wing form [1], and various sundry electronics rescued from the parts bin, including a DVD motor to power the prop.

The feeling of elation I felt when I first chucked it into the sky and off it flew .. can't be explained. I've been making planes for 30 years, but this was my first KFM airfoil, and it was just so neat to see it fly around.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kline–Fogleman_airfoil

I spent a few years when I was younger learning to cook better... pretty much immersed myself in it when not working. Watched a LOT of cooking videos, the entire Good Eats series, and more. Never made anything especially cool, just got pretty good at sauce work, and understanding how some ingredients and techniques come together. I might have gone to cooking/culinary school in the evenings, but never did well in formalized education environments.

The fairly irony is I now pretty much have to eat very simply, Diabetes, FODMAP and Histamine Intolerance. I eat something I shouldn't at least once a week and usually pay for it for at least a day after.

I think my personal favorite physical thing that I made was a music box that plays of the voyager golden record. I made it as a Christmas present for my girlfriend. It is light actuated so when you open the box it starts playing a track from the record, skipping one track ahead each time it is opened. It mostly uses off the shelf components for the electronics, and found and decorated the box (sanding/staining/varnish on the outside, and a watercolor painting on the inside. It took quite a lot of effort to get the audio formatted and compressed enough to get it all working, but I think it is really a beautiful object on several levels.

it’s not finished but I’m working on an astrolabe https://mastodon.social/@jes5199/110454794966272609

Used my local makerspace’s laser cutter to make multi-layered wooden pieces off of vector designs I bought on etsy:

https://www.design-dekor.de/

Cleared trees (only those necessary), installed water service, excavated and built a 4000 sq ft irregularly-shaped driveway using DOT methods. Everything modelled and planned down to the inch in 3D using SketchUp. (Buildings to come)

An Ascham (a case for archery gear):

https://www.lumberjocks.com/showcase/archery-case-ascham-of-...

Holds my Bear Custom Kodiak Takedown, half-a-dozen arrows, armguard, tassel for cleaning arrows, belt, and various other accouterments --- everything but the quiver (which I attach to the case using a leather strap).

I need to revisit it to have better proportions for the arrow holder and to work up a quiver option which I both like, and which fits inside the next version.

I made one of those Word Clocks using an arduino, glass, wood, paint, a couple buttons, and a laser cutter.

I painted a pane of glass white, then black, and created the file for all the letter to say the time as well as happy birthday. Took it to a laser cutter to etch it into the glass.

Made a backing with leds programmed to display correctly the date and time, iterate through colors, modes, etc.

I also made it in Hebrew too. I have the code somewhere if others are interested in making it.

Edit: Here is the code in case anyone else wants to use it https://github.com/imlasky/wordclock

I made a robot that could replicate a painting (that you made using the robot). The robot was controlled by a Wacom tablet so it had 3 dimensions of input (x, y, and z for pen pressure). It was able to replicate its own paintings using just dead reckoning. Was fun programming custom Arduino code to drive the motors.

https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robot...

You pick: a windmill, a refurbishing + automation of a grand piano, a workshop, a CNC plasmacutter. I love projects and I always have one or more things on the go (usually one for good weather and one for bad weather).

When I look at what my parents have achieved, I feel remarkably unskilled by comparison. Perhaps that's partly because I've only ever been a renter, not a homeowner. I've not had occasion to learn how to install ceilings, lay tiles, build fences, or fix plumbing. I suppose I should put more effort into smaller pieces. I've done some painting in the past. (One painting I did hung on my grandparents' wall for many years. They're both dead now, and I don't know where it is.) I'm making a start on making some mediaeval clothes.

(Well, I had a lot of help from my dad...)

A 3-D chess board. No, not one of those lame ones that you can put on your desk with 3 boards. And no, not like the one on Star Trek either.

It was a full cube (8 x 8 x 8). Major pieces on boards 1 and 8, pawns on 2 and 7. The moves for the pieces project to three dimensions in a fairly straight-forward manner. Pawns can only queen on the farthest board from their start, on the farthest row.

The whole thing stood five feet tall, and you were constantly squatting to see what was going on across the boards.

I even once convinced a friend to play a game with me. Once.

I made a soccerball vase out of maple and walnut: https://photos.app.goo.gl/5Qh2RQiRmdRPjZdQ8

Most were made when I was a child. The first was a power stealer that used radio waves to power an LED. The second was a large wooden glider around 5 feet long and wide. The third was a pair of glasses for reading while walking using a half-silvered mirror and a magnifying class to project miniaturized mirror-reversed book pages into my eye so I could read while walking between classes in college. The fourth was a studying shack I made while in grad school (which I commuted to, so I needed a private space for dedicated study time).

I've built several mechanical wristwatches. Including assembling one movement from scratch (so difficult I've not been tempted to repeat this, I'll stick to storebought for new projects)

I've been working on this thing(https://entropyandsons.com/products/fr4xtal) for about 4 years and it's almost done. It's a video synthesizer that uses pixel shaders and complex analysis to make interactive art. My Instagram act (https://instagram.com/entropyandsons) has a bunch of media.

Coolest of all time is probably the touchscreen that you can use in an MRI[1]. But my current favorite is a low-impedance guitar pickup[2].

[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10820839B2/en

[2]: https://alexshroyer.com/posts/2023-01-01-Low-Impedance-Picku...

I have long had an art practice. Some of it involves software, but much of it doesnt, like this 6' x 9' abstract https://www.instagram.com/p/Cvd9-WTLqPN/ or this drawing of a few random redditors: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvnvbTcPC78/

I made a silverware holder custom-fit to my silverware.

I found a half-inch thick HDPE cutting board at a restaurant supply store, cut it to fit my drawer, then drilled holes in it and inserted short wooden dowels to hold the stacks of silverware in place. To position the dowels, I wrapped a nail in tape to match the diameter of the dowels, then placed my silverware on the board, slid the nail up next to it, and gave it a tap to mark the board where the holes needed to be drilled.

It worked really well and was quite easy to do. I highly recommend it.

A few years back [I turned a Furby into an Amazon Echo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCOsM-4NEKs)

A fence on a ridge. High tensile wire, pickets and some other fancy stuff. All hills and transitions. 1 pedestrian gate and 1 wideish chainlink gate. Wood posts and tposts. Box braces and such.

I made a cyclekart, this one: https://www.cyclekartclub.com/registry/2012-CycleKart-Custom...

It's got a 6.5 HP Honda GX200 engine, a Comet torque converter and top speed of around 35-40 mph. More about cyclekarts: https://www.cyclekarts.com/

The coolest thing I made is probably my two-tier, 3-kettle, 240v E-HERMS homebrewing system, but that was probably only about 15% fabrication and 85% integrating off-the-shelf hardware.

For some reason, the thing that still feels the coolest was the RC hovercraft (converted from RC airplane parts) that a friend and I made for a science fair. It was a bit silly because it wasn't cordless, but that attribute doubled as a nice safety feature given that this was being piloted in a gymnasium full of kids.

I put together a "reverse trivia" card game called Inquiring Minds structured around the mechanics of classic card game, Rummy.

Rather than each player attempting to answer questions as individuals, players need to come up with their own questions, and are rewarded when they can demonstrate some piece of trivia that nobody else in the room knows.

https://specular-realms.com/inquiring-minds

I assembled an automatic watch for about 100£. I wanted to buy an automatic watch (I was planning on something reasonable, around 1k-3k) but none of the watches pleased me completely.

I bought a Miyota movement, a case, hands, a face, a leather strap and a bunch of tools. It wasn't easy to assemble it and there is definitely not a lot of documentation online, but it wasn't impossible either.

It looks great, it's exactly how I wanted my automatic watch to look like. Highly recommend the experience.

A long time ago I made a needlepoint for my mother out of one of her favorite photos. I thought needlepoint was interesting because it's basically pixel art except much more laborious since each pixel requires a physical stitch. I ended up writing a program to transform the photo into a needlepoint pattern, and for a while I turned it into a website for folks wanting to generate their own patterns.

I wish I had the patience to do something like that today, but there are so many other distractions.

A turbo Miata. Not that unique but it was a collection of all the fabrication I did in the last few years. Taught myself how to weld and it was super fun to make things for it.

I’m designing and building a series of clocks that don’t tell you what time it is.

https://digitalhorology.com

A device that levitated tungsten filaments in halogen bulbs so they wouldn't sag as they were "seasoned". I used a DC current and an electromagnet to allow the Lorenz force to cancel out gravity. That was a one off, but I thought it was cool.

---

I worked in a shop making gears for a few years... I made most of the drive gears for the Marvel 8 bandsaw between 2016 and 2020. I also made lots of other gears. I'm sure that most of them will be in use for decades.

RFID Blocking Wallets! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka4eg9Kl6hI&t=104s

Just made bread for the first time in my life yesterday. It felt like a mixture of chemistry, alchemy and witchcraft!

A 20x20 transforming tubular steel sculpture for Burning Man. Learned how to calculate structural limits of steel structures, how to weld, swedge, cope, bend. Made 350 3-way joints out of just tube. Assembled over 3 days in different configurations and finally served as a human cat-shelf and platform for spray-painted art on sheets. Fucker was heavy... next time I'm using aluminum.

Next up this fall: a kinetic wooden sculpture that destroys itself with fire

I'm currently putting the finishing touches on a rock climbing crag together with some friends.

While focusing on the digital realm all my life, it's nice to have something tangible that I know people will enjoy for a long time.

It's in Puerto Rico if you want to visit:

https://www.mountainproject.com/area/124580883/el-semil-vill...

Hardwood desktop for a sit/stand desk frame. Made from walnut planks ranging in width from 3-6" and length of ~5ft bought via mail order. Hardest part was jointing the boards (making the edges flat/square) using a router instead of a jointer, which I don't have (yet). Probably too much waste material but you learn as you go.

The fun thing about wood projects is you can cover up mistakes pretty easily and for big mistakes just make the project smaller.

To me, it was Aidlab, a smart chest strap that collects and analyzes various biosignals, which I co-created.

This is a picture of my co-founder Karol and me, holding the first prototype of Aidlab : https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-44d4794da932b128c2bf6...

(plot twist - it wasn't a chest strap at first haha)

In university I made a Muon imaging system that kind of worked: https://www.instagram.com/p/BTar-wghXFB/

Started with a single detector: https://www.instagram.com/p/BSz_rZ1h_sN/

Do robots count? https://youtu.be/VbIDXe5o5yM

My startup builds (friendly) security guard robots, and now has a fleet of >100 deployed around the world.

Long ago when we were seed stage I spent Christmas morning finishing soldering in the first unit to hit our first customer delivery a few weeks later. Was a good time :)

Lots of blood sweat and tears scaling from there...

A 4 axis CNC mill. It ended up at an auto supplier making key fobs for a major automaker (because I needed the cash more than I needed the tool at the time).

I have knit a number of scarves. They're kinda cool because I knit partial rows from each side. While they are rectangular in that the number of stitches across each row is constant, the tensions in the scarf make them wavy.

I made doohickeys to add homekit controlled dimming and convenient physical switching to my bedside reading lamps.

I am in the middle of making a farmhouse table out of walnut. It is very precise work that I am not used to.

I made a wifi controlled blender in college. 3d printed the frame, put a website on a small pi etc. used that thing for 3 years before i bought a new one

I just cut a walking trail through a stand of trees on our property, and I'm in the process of putting in a deer fence so my dog can run around and chase squirrels in those same trees without terrorizing the neighbours, he's still learning his manners and he needs to run off leash like ten times a day.

This is already by far the coolest thing I've ever done, and I haven't even started with the light show.

I don't know about cool, but I made this black and gold display of Ra on the solar barque, versus the serpent Apep, for the solar eclipse here.

Don't know if it'd qualify as "cool", but the most useful thing I've made is a chicken coop and run

https://antipaucity.com/2021/11/19/the-coop-with-lots-of-in-...

I 3D printed an ABENICS mechanism. I don't have much of a mechanical engineering background so it was very cool to learn how to do this.

https://blog.ty-porter.dev/3d%20printing/mechanical%20engine...

I helped build several FRC[1] robots when I was in high-school, and now as a mentor for my team, who were able to make it to the international FIRST Championship for the first time this year

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Robotics_Competition

I made an electric longboard a few years ago. Before they where popular, and you cant buy or legally use it in germany anyways.

It worked pretty well. I guess it could drive s.th. like 35 km/h for 10 km. It even had brake energy recouperation. A higher topspeed would be no problem, but its already very dangerous^^

It was a very simple design. Just a brushless outrunner attached with friction to one of the wheels.

A ceramic millennium falcon. The idea was stuck in my head for a while and was keeping me awake at night ( yes I know it is crazy but I am jus saying what happened behind the scene )

https://instagram.com/p/Co_HdYVp1BP/

I built a step stool that turned out really gorgeous. Walnut lumber, hand-cut angled dovetail joints. Plans were based on https://thewoodwhispererguild.com/product/dovetailed-step-st...

Although if you ask my kids, the answer would be their treehouse.

I designed and sold a faceplate mod for the Behringer Neutron semi-modular synth. I sold a few thousand before shutting down in late 2020. There were two varieties - here's what they look like (search Google for Behringer Neutron to see the stock look):

https://imgur.com/a/ezbg3py

I've started making guitars from bulletproof polycarbonate.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4fiQF6o3C3joso5vbH-q4Q

I made an outbuilding and an artistic deck out of ipe hardwood: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNQhDP-uAqRITl2aA6SqUjD...

I've drilled a hole in a fridge to put inside temperature and humidity probes, a fan, and a dehumidifier to turn it into a meat curing chamber.

EDIT: if you're in London and you want it, I'm giving it away as I'm moving to a smaller flat. Just message me and come pick it up.

A small thing. I made some braised bronze chess pieces. https://photos.app.goo.gl/rN3xkgxybeY7WP9K9

Was really happy with the design, considering I just made it up on the spot. I had previously carved a few chess sets before though out of wood.

I am into boats, actually. I have built a plywood kayak-style boat, that I am not that proud of, but I am very proud of the 1965 Boston Whaler I restored. Looking for my next one!

Would also like to become better versed in the operation of outboards. I am looking at finding an old carbonated 2-stroke to rebuild.

Also built a sauna recently. Love it!

It was a DIY pre-covid project. It was meant for me to locate my bike in an open-air parking lot meant for two-wheelers. The circuit wasn't perfect. Here are some videos/pics:

https://imgur.com/a/fv2oiZ7

Ps: it is a failed project, but enjoyable.

I made a VESA mount for my iPad [1]. It wasn't exactly brain surgery [2], but I thought it was cool!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jMZtt37vgY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

Somehow I’ve ended up making ceramics. I use OpenSCAD to turn 3D models into slices, laser cut templates from them, then use them to hand-cut and assemble the model. I’m not very good at it, which results in a hybrid look of machined and handcrafted I like.

Some mighty impressive posts here!

Rather more modestly - made a esp32 PWM fan controller that hooks into home assistant. Nothing wild, but it did open my eyes to the fact that I can duplicate most IoT stuff on my own terms despite being an amateur. And that in turn has takes it from "IoT - not in my house" to "yes lets do more IoT".

I enjoy building bicycle wheels (mountain bikes) and get satisfaction when they survive rigorous abuse during race season!

I made a kind of theremin based on an Arduino and cheap distance sensors (HC-SR05). It's basically a MIDI controller that emits CC values relative to the distance of the player's hands.

Here's me playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgH-WU-9CZA

I built (with my partner) a crazy all-aluminum camper trailer:

https://luxurylandyacht.wordpress.com/

I've built some small boats and stuff, but this was a whole-nuther dimension Took about 11 months of pretty intense almost-every-day work by two people.

A habitable "shed" to serve as an office. In the near future that might be displaced by an underfloor heating system.

A bit late, but I built a BattleBot back during the original show days. Never finished/competed though - I was in high school and couldn't make anything competitive with my birthday money. Learned a lot about radio controllers and aluminum angle bars! Taught my younger brother and we battled in the driveway.

A walking bike with a wheel in the front and 6 Theo Jansen type legs in the back

https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-aileen-cannon-comes-out-...

A few years ago I built some teeny tiny solar powered electronic satellites - https://harrisonbroadbent.com/electronics/tinysat

(Inspired by mohit bhoite who does stuff like this... Just 1000x better)

I built a small alarm clock with 2 states: night and day, to try to prevent my daughter from waking us up at 6 in the morning! Just uploaded a small write-up here https://cosmith.fr/projects/nightbox

I made a chair: https://marvinklein.com/projects/chair

Some code was involved to optimize the layout of the pieces on the sheets of plywood they were cut out of, but that was maybe one percent of the project.

A lot of furnitures for our home. Like a lot of software engineers, I have a thing for woodworking. I started with a footstool, then I made a simple cabinet, a mirror frame, cabinet with drawers, 3 wardrobes, a kitchen island, another footstool, shelves, a workbench, a desk, and some experimental stuff.

I learned PCB design from roughly nothing over the last 7 months to create a custom PCB that integrates with GitHub Actions for a CI/CD pipeline for my novel operating system's kernel test harness to test on bare metal.

It looks amazing and feels really good to have completed. Might do a write-up on it.

I’m a hobbyist woodworker. Amongst others, I made this « floating table » : https://www.lairdubois.fr/creations/13006-table-flottante-a-...

Some fancy PCBs rulers for a senior design class: http://evan.widloski.com/projects/uiuc_ruler/index.html

Though I guess technically the PCB fan made them.

A class-A, solid state, single ended headphone amplifier, not my design, turned out to be very nice sounding: https://github.com/Wanderingidea/Formula3HP-headphone-amplif...

I made an antique clock that tells you the weather forecast https://thisispete.com/work/prototyping/weather_clock

Dreamland with the Flux Foundation for Burning Man, was a fun thing helped bring to life. It's hard to choose 'coolest' though.

https://www.fluxfoundation.org/dreamland/

I 3D printed Arno Klein’s brain from a CT Scan at the Paul Allen Brain Institute in a basement on Capitol Hill back in 2012. It captured all internal folds and was quite interesting to watch it print and see the inside of his brain.

Cheers Arno, hope your Halloween adventures are still going strong!

Back in the days of the Amiga, me and a friend were in high school and we were obsessed with Formula 1GP from Microprose so we took a couple of joysticks apart and we built ourselves the pedals and a wheel with gear shifts. It was pretty trashy looking but worked remarkably well.

I 'designed' and built a small trebuchet at 15yo. It was fun. Inspired by Age of Empires II.

I converted our old dining table into a board game table.

I had no idea what I was doing and never done any woodworking before.

https://imgur.com/gallery/TTEPVLw

Today it's covered in Lego from the kids...

I built an 8' wide spherical display out of an advertising balloon, a hemispherical security mirror, and a conference room projector.

Then I wrote a 3D engine that could render to it and took the whole thing to Burning Man. Worked pretty well, though contrast was crappy.

I made a CNC carve a big (3 ft x 2 ft) 3d map of california out of wood. you can see similar projects here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoquTHsvKns&t=676s

Not a huge deal, but I created an Arc Reactor using micropython and neopixels! https://www.afox.dev/posts/arc-reactor

I made a 6 foot long LED staff with 1,500 LEDs. It had a huge custom battery inside it and it lasted for hours and hours. I got really into programming LEDs and making great patterns, but it was a lot of work keeping it running and replacing LEDs as they failed.

A thrust vectoring rocket! It was my sanity project during the pandemic. Flew many times and even flew two stages with slight software mods:

https://github.com/AdamMarciniak/CygnusX1

With others? I'd say the CMU Terregator in 1983 Solo? Probably the stone wall in my backyard.

Fender 1957 Deluxe tube amp clone. Built the box, soldered the components (from a kit and a diagram), then upholstered it with tweed. Super fun and satisfying project, looks like a new (old) amp you’d buy at a store.

I welded a huge bike trailer out of old bikes and EMT. For the coupling between the bike and the trailer I used a two bike forks, and JB welded the hubs together to create a universal joint. It worked wonderfully and I could haul 20 or more bikes on it.

Made a heavy Fibonacci clock using concrete! https://jurgen.si/posts/concrete-fibonacci-clock/

Can't decide between

- a mini trailer for camping. It has drawers with cutlery and camping stuff and a roof top tent on top. It's lightweight so I can move it easily in the campgrounds far from my car.

- a guitar from a kit

- fixed my garage sagging roof by lifting it up and rebuilding trusses

I used to be heavily into building terrains, physical dungeons and other props for tabletop gaming. I wish I still had my old pictures! At one point, I considered taking on commissioned work for castles, fortresses, modular tile-based dungeons...

I built a canoe out of plywood with no wood working experience. It was very difficult, and involved a lot more epoxy, sanding and clamps than I expected. But in the end I could float around Town Lake in Austin and adventure to snake island.

I designed, built, and flew rocket to 20k ft. In a year or two I’m trying for 100k Ft.

I made a 14ft oar to scull my sailing boat, a 9ton gaff cutter. Worked surprisingly well.

Wooden version of Scrabble! I need to update the site with pictures of the tiles. https://felipecortez.net/woodworking/

An entire 1000 sq ft condo -- was a 1920's hovel on the top floor of a walkup, now is a modern living space with a great layout, fantastic light, and all the amenities.

Took me four years of evenings and weekends while working full-time to fund it.

Apart from a bunch of high speed wireless communications chips, this:

https://foundrytechnologies.com/relay.php

About 50% of the work on this was software, to be clear.

I created a successfully funded boardgame on Kickstarter that basically turned UNO into a fast pace action game.

https://www.swiftwave.io/

This whole thread is amazing, bookmarking it, too many rabbit holes for one day.

A double decker bedside table for bunk beds so that both the bottom bunk and the top bunk have a bedside table for a light/alarm clock/ glass of water/book/ etc. super simple, but effective…

Even though I've drawn pictures, built toys and contraptions contraptions out of wood, made a rube golderg machine

Still...

The thing I'm the proudest about...

Is that time I opened a jammed coaxial cable with nothing but two butter knives.

I made a volcano out of plaster of Paris. The cool bit was that for the eruption I used potassium permanganate in the volcano’s cone and poured glycerin on it to ignite the volcano.

A very tiny multimeter that also fits into Leatherman multitools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdZaFzpeRUQ

Not sure if it counts but my Eurorack modular synth is definitly my most loved phyiscal thing and it’s kind of built (from modules). Still habe to get into soldering my own modules..

My siblings and I replaced my parents' rickety exterior stairs. It was super gratifying to make their house safer and save them thousands of dollars while having fun.

A pair of cargo pants. During COVID I learned to use a sewing machine and patterns. I made them the right length, material, and put pockets where _I_ wanted pockets.

A vacuum-tube driven Tesla Multiplier (like a Tesla coil but the traditional secondary is separated into resonant and coupling components).

I also built a betatron.

I made a turntable that spins cars around at 12 rpm, which doesn't sound like a lot but when it's your car spinning around at 12 rpm, it's a lot.

I occasionally smear paint on canvases :-)

https://www.krickelkrackel.com

A (somewhat) working crossbow made out of scavenged multi-strand copper wire, about as long as my thumb, long since lost somewhere around the house.

I built a pikler triangle out of solid oak with all brass hardware. Painted it with my wife using milk paints.

Came out very nice, learned a lot of woodworking skills.

- a coffee table! - a crochet stuffed animal! - lots of baskets out of wood! - a tanned deer hide! (it was very hard and gross to flesh the hide.)

Built a leg vise stand out of an old truck brake drum. Very simple construction but I think it's cool and a great use of reused material.

A simple robot that plays a toy:

https://github.com/schubart/donald

There are sure a lot of really neat people on HN. Very impressed with all these projects. All of them are very cool!

https://vimeo.com/124065314

few children's books

I created a child, what can be cooler than this? :)

I made an injection molded product with almost no CAD background. came out alright ;)

Probably just a chaise longue surviving the salty, damp air outside like a champ.

Mealsquares, a nutritionally complete meal bar made from whole foods. v1.0 soon.

A de-novo peptide that adopts beta structure in solution and is thixotropic.

I made a shovel. Coming to market soon and it's great.

Robots that build houses, check us out, www.botbuilt.com

Wooden puzzle boxes.

I used to made of ritual black candles

Full side dragon staff from Skyrim.

Piano stand from grey oak wood

I’ve made a physical Unix clock

unix.date

A few years back (2015 - ok, more than a few) I built a pair of RC tanks to demonstrate the use of ardunino communication libraries. While it was for our local code camp, the hardware build was the most challenging bit with the highest learning curve.

The "tanks" had shields for front, rear, and each side that took damage separately. A main cannon with switchable weapons did different amounts of damage based on how much energy the weapon used.

Different weapons had different types of simulated kick-back ... the rapid fire machine-gun type weapon had a rapid shaking kick back while the mega-super-weapon was a super whomp kick-back. I don't recall if I got around to implementing physical effects when your tank was hit.

Control was using hacked up thrift store-sourced PC joysticks. (and by hacked-up, I do mean hacked-up. Soldered directly to potentiometers and spliced into a controlling arduino that tracked tank status etc)

All controllers and tanks were mesh-networked using cheap 2.4ghz nrf24L01+ wireless (but not wifi) chips. My idealistic final vision was massive multi-player games with selectable features.

- large games with selectable friendly fire

- different damage consequences

- scrambling opponents weapons or drive systems, drive systems degrading as they took fire, flakey shields

- communicating with a central computer for viewing game progress and tracking stats

- vastly improved system information displays (vs the cheap LCDs)

- fpv camera with a HUD woulda been sooo cool.

I knew it was going to be a huge learning curve - I was familiar with basic arduino functionality but hadn't done much beyond basic sensor reading and light blinking. I had to learn how to integrate a LOT of hardware and deal with real world complications. (sunlight plays merry havoc when using IR as your weapon-shooting and shield-receiving) I started 3-4 months before the presentation date and (of course) was still swapping out hardware and tweaking software the night before.

"trailer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7uAQrak1iA&ab_channel=Aaron...

presentation notes: https://github.com/adbacker/duinobattletanks/blob/master/doc...

code: https://github.com/adbacker/duinobattletanks/tree/master

Probably OpenROV.

Two children. Still amazed how they came to be!

Ice cube

a daughter

kids

does my kid count?

A child.