Sometimes when I'm at the coffee shop I need to use more USB devices than my MacBook can support. I love Apple design and was disappointed to see that there weren't any aluminum hubs that matched my Macs, and really there didn't seem to be any that weren't junk - so I set out to design my own. This is a conceptual 3 port hub that follows Apple's "unibody" design. The hub has a simple mechanism that allows it to pop up with a touch to store its...
I have been having a lot of fun with an iPhone game called tilt to live. The game is relatively simple to play - you steer a ship around the screen by tilting the phone. You are trying to avoid enemies, pick up power-ups which you can use to kill enimies. It seemed like the type of game that a program could do very well at if you cive a computer the ability to tilt the phone and see what is going on. In this project I built a motion platform which I hope can be used to get a really high score in this or other tilt based games.
In the undergraduate BSME program at UNCC, Juniors are required to design and build a robot. I was tasked with designing a simple and lightweight robot to transfer simulated nuclear fuel rods.
Weighing in at 1.2lb, it is quite light - most of the weight due to the required batteries. Every detail of the robot was refined to reduce weight, increase integration. Nothing that wasn't required was used, and every gram of material that could be rem...
One of the things that I wanted to get my fiance this Christmas was an iPhone case. Normally cases are made of plastic or sometimes aluminum - I could make an aluminum case but I didn't think she would be into that, and an injection molder to get a high quality plastic case is not something I have (though I am slowly designing one - though it's nowhere near close to even being built). I stumbled upon a site that sold wooden cases. At around $130...
Ever since I cast the lily ring I knew I wanted to make my wife's engagement ring.
Luckily I had some experience casting from other projects. Without that I may have not attempted it because there is so little information on the subject. I hope this article will give enough information that anyone good with their hands can make their own. Note that I only carved the ring, I had a smith cast the ring for me. I would have loved to build all of...
For those not familiar with kiteboarding I will give a brief explanation. A kiteboarder, as the name suggests, rides on some time of board (in my case it will be a board similar to a wakeboard in the ocean), using a large kite to harness the wind to pull themselves around wherever they like. The kiteboarder is harnessed to the kite and controls it via a special control bar. There are a few different types of kites that can be used, with inflatabl...
Fresh off the air engine project, we were given the task to design and build something for our second project. I thought the air engine was neat, but a real engine is better. I spent a lot of time designing a two stroke engine which I detail the build of here.
If you want to build it for yourself you can download the plans here.
Cylinder
I decided to go ahead and get the hardest part completed first, so I started with the cylinder. I cut...
Download the plans HERE courtesy of the UNCC Engineering Department
For the first project in our sophomore design class we built a small air engine. We didn't actually design the engines, but built them to get us acquainted with the machines, what is possible to machine, what isn't etc. It was quite fun and we got a neat little paperweight out of it.
The air engine runs off of you guessed it: compressed air (or steam). This engine is called...
In this article I show how I cast a homemade ring using lost wax casting using an old bicycle turned into a centrifuge. A centrifuge allows much more intricate and detailed castings to be made, this instructable shows the creation of a ring, but almost anything small and metallic can be made using this process. A centrifuge spins a mold very quickly in a large arc forcing the molten metal into the mold. This is a very fun and rewarding project to...
In this article I show how I built a furnace - very similar to another design, just scaled down a bit. I designed a piece of jewelry, made a mold using the lost wax technique, cast the piece of jewelry then set a stone in it. All the materials are easily obtainable. It works with precious metals but if your on a budget and even cheap jewelry from Wal-mart can be melted down and used. It makes an attractive piece that carries a certain homemade ch...