Center for the Advancement of Mischief

A glowing ping pong ball is cool. A hundred glowing ping pong balls are cooler. So here’s a quick way to turn an ordinary string of Christmas lights into a great party decoration.

First you’ll need some materials.

• A string of Christmas lights
• As many Ping Pong balls as lights on the string. You can get a gross(144) for under $20 on eBay.

You will also need something to put a hole in the Ping Pong ball and some hot glue to hold them in place.

Preparing the Ping Pong Balls

In order to get the ping pong balls over the lightbulb you will need to put a hole in them. There are several ways to do this such as a drill, exacto knife or by poking a hole in it with a nail. A nail is the quickest method, but you will need to spend more time later gluing the balls to the lights. With a clean hole just smaller than the bulb the ping pong ball will stay in place without needing glue. You will need to prepare as many ping pong balls as you have lights, if it’s a long string it probably has 100.

The best method I found for putting holes in the ping pong balls uses a c-clamp, some paper towels, and a drill. I folded a 1.5 inch wide strip of paper towel over on itself several times so that it would fit on the plates of the c-clamp and taped one on both sides of the clamp. Next I adjusted the clamp so that it holds the ball just enough that it doesn’t slip when you drill into it. Because of the give in the paper towel you can pull the ball out and press another one in without needing to readjust the clamp. If anyone finds a better method please share in the comments.

To drill the hole in the ball you will need a drill bit that is slightly smaller than the Christmas light bulb. I found that approximately 3/16″ was good, but make sure to test fit a few before drilling the rest of the balls. I found I got the cleanest hole by first pressing the bit against the ball so it depressed slightly then running the drill at medium to high speed while applying light pressure. A drill press would be very helpful at this step, but is not necessary. As always, please exercise care when using power tools.

Building the lights

Once you have holes in all of the ping pong balls, you can slide a ping pong ball over each light.

If the holes are tight enough that they won’t be easily knocked off of the bulbs, you can stop here. If the holes are too loose or you choose to use a nail to puncture holes, you will need to use hot glue to ensure the ping pong balls stay in place. Using the glue gun, run a small bead of hot glue where the base of the light meets the ping pong ball.

Finally, repeat for the next 99 or so bulbs.

Enjoy.

Tags: Uncategorized // 456 Comments »

Yesterday the light bulb in my hall burned out, a clear sign that it was time to make a light bulb oil lamp.  This is a great project you can complete in under 15 minutes, yet the end result is very impressive. There are two Instructables that were posted a while ago describing the process. Light Bulb Lamp and Light Bulb Lamp: Another Option. While both Instrucables are similar in how to hollow out the bulb, they provide different options for holding the wick in place. The first suggests using the cap from a Jones Soda bottle which happens to mesh perfectly with the threads on the bulb.  The second option is to cut a cover out of an aluminum can that covers the hole in the bulb and has a tab to keep it in place. This method is a little more work but keeps the bulb looking more like a light bulb.  I chose a compromise between the two methods and used a bottle cap as the top of the lamp.  It sits nicely on the top of the light bulb but still leaves the threads visible. This allowed me to wrap a coat hanger around the threads to make a stand.

Here are some tips for making your own:

• Use a more workable wire than a coat hanger. It was difficult to get the curve right with a coat hanger so the bulb could be screwed in properly.
• When making the base make sure it has plenty of area to support the bulb. I ran out of coat hanger and mine is not as stable as I would like.
• Rubbing alcohol does not work well as fuel because it burns too fast. A wider wick might help with this.

Now you just have to wait for a light to burn out or use this as an excuse to switch to compact florescent bulbs. Either way you’ll have a much cooler lamp when you’re done.

Tags: Projects // 778 Comments »

It’s been too long since I’ve posted on here.  The transition back to school didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked, but now that things have settled down we’ll get back to posting some cool projects.  We’ve been coming up with some more projects to do during the second half of the summer and have a few projects on the drawing board (which happens to be a large sheet of Plexiglas propped against my wall).  Stay tuned over the next few days for some project updates.

Tags: Uncategorized // 696 Comments »

It’s been a busy week. I haven’t had time today to sit down and write this until now, so let’s jump right into it.

First off we have a relatively tame, yet cool nonetheless, Instructable on how to use a Credit Card as a Cable Organizer.

While were on the somewhat serious, there was an article on Wired about the growing desire of industries to have complete control over your electronic devices. I’ve Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch

Now on to the fun stuff.  I’ve never had the desire to make a grinder out of a hard drive, but now that I’ve seen it, I want one. Turn your old hard drive into a sander/grinder

Make wrote about this Digimech clock. It uses a kind of mechanical negative 7 segment display to reveal the numbers, needless to say, it’s very cool.

The last two projects don’t need any description besides the title.

• Paintball Sentry Gun
• Ultrasonic Radar USB Missile Launcher

I enjoy sharing some of the cool links I come accross each week, but what I’d really like to do is to post about projects our readers are doing.  In a few days I’ll add a contact form so you can send us links to your projects with a short description and I’ll post them here every friday. Until I get the submition form up, feel free to post about your projects in the comments.

Tags: Links // 476 Comments »

This past semester a few of us worked on building a robot for the Trinity Fire Fighting Competition.  A short time line and many beginner mistakes kept our robot on lab bench, but we learned a ton and will be back and better prepared for next year. These are some things we learned through the process about how to be more effective as a group.

Have a strong leader. This person should be someone who can keep the group on track and make sure everything that needs to get done is done.  The leader needs to hold themselves and each group member accountable for his or her responsibilities. The group leader also needs to be someone who won’t usurp control and will make sure all the members of the group have a say.

Have clear goals. Make a list of everything that needs to be done in order to complete the project; don’t leave anything out. Outline how you’re going to get everything done and make a time line to keep things moving along.

Delegate tasks. Keep idle time to a minimum by making sure everyone has something to do before meetings.  Since you already have a list of all the tasks, it should be easy to determine what needs to be done and how many people you’ll need on each task.

Share the load. Having a diverse skill set is a great benefit, but everyone in your group should have some basic skills so you don’t get to a point where you’re waiting on one person to do something. Everyone should be have some basic soldering skills and be able to do basic coding.  If they don’t, teach them early on, there won’t be time once it comes down to the last week and there’s a million things to do.

Do incremental testing. If you wait until the last minute to test everything, nothing is going to work.  Write code in chucks you can easily test and make sure you’re testing the code with the actual hardware configuration you’ll be using in the final product.

Make a check list. At the competition there will be a ton of distractions and you’ll probably be sleep deprived. Having a crutch can prevent fatal mistakes like forgetting to connect the batteries.  It also makes sure you stay consistent when setting up the robot.

Leave extra time. You’ll want plenty of time before the competition to test everything and have time to optimize your algorithms.  Because things always take longer than expected, it’s nice to have a buffer so you don’t miss the deadline.

Don’t be afraid to change course. If something is not going to work, stop.  There’s no point wasting time and energy trying to fix something that is inherently flawed.  If things aren’t going smoothly, see if you might need to go in a different direction. Think of different ways you can solve the problem and evaluate whether you can salvage what you have or if you need to start fresh.

Don’t be afraid to fail. The only way you can truly fail, is to not learn from mistakes. Think about your failures and use the lessons learned to get ahead in the future.

Tags: Robotics // 806 Comments »

Every Maker needs inspiration.  Very rarely do great ideas just pop into our heads out of the blue. Often our greatest ideas and innovations come from a wide variety of sources. Inspiration might come form seeing a better way of doing something or by combining seemingly unrelated ideas or processes into an exciting new project.  Sometimes seeing what someone else has made will strike just the right note and give you the inspiration to come up with your next great project, which might not have anything to do with the project that set off the idea.  We need to be exposed to lots of different projects from all sorts of fields because you never know what might inspire your next big idea. In that spirit I’d like to share some projects that have been floating around the DIY Community this past week to help fuel your creativity.

This Bunk bed night stand immediately caught my eye because I’ve had a bunk bed most of my life, and I know plenty of people have bunk/loft beds at school.  It cleverly uses storage hooks to support the shelf, and I’m sure the idea could be extrapolated to many useful variations.

A common thread in DIY is repurposing everyday objects.  One of the most versatile mediums is cardboard.  Here’s just one example of cardboard furniture, this time taking the form of a Portable Cardboard Table. A less common, but not unheard of, building material is umbrellas. The umbrella house uses zippered umbrellas to form a geodesic dome shelter. Five gallon buckets always prove useful in projects whether to haul stuff around or as an integral part of the final product, one example is to use a bucket to Grow Tomatoes Upside Down.

Another great class of projects are tools that expand your production abilities.  One such project is to build a Vacuum Former. Not only is it a great project in itself, but it opens up manufacturing methods not normally not available to hobbyists.  Another very useful project is a DIY Camcorder. You can hack a “disposable” video camera for reuse, making a cheep camera perfect for use in high risk situations, like as a model rocket flight recorder.

Do you have any projects that have inspired you?  We’d love to here your story. And as always, We’d love to hear about the projects you’ve been working on.

Tags: Links // 371 Comments »

This is the last part in the Saleboat Series. You can read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 Here.

So, needless to say, we were ecstatic at this point in the story. After a day of riding downhill, confusing parents and scaring their children, we decided it was time for the lake. We also figured it was in our best interest to ensure it wouldn’t sink beforehand. Luckily, we know a guy with a pond.

Let’s set the mood. It was a rainy August day, the kind that make the strongest of sailors quiver, but with only two days of summer remaining we had no choice but to brave it. We organized the shopping cart into the bed of Steve’s truck. It fit perfectly, and was a rather majestic sight.

After getting to the pond, reassembling the boat, and adjusting the steering for water we were finally ready for our maiden voyage. It was pouring with no wind so the sail was useless. We put up the mast anyway and decided we’d pull the craft behind a canoe to test flotation and steering.

After a valiant struggle to move the cart through four inches of mud we finally got it in the pond. I stepped into the vessel. It didn’t collapse. Good start. I sat down, leaned back, felt relieved when nothing gave. After I gained some confidence in the craft, Drew pushed the cart in until the wheels were off the ground. I was not only above the water, I was completely dry. Things were looking up. Too much up. The cart was flipping backwards.

Luckily, by sitting by the mast I was able to balance the craft. The flotation worked perfectly; the basket never touched the water. The rudder was a little weak, but it turned the moving cart at a noticeable speed. We were ready for the big league: “State” Lake.

Unfortunately the State wasen’t. After giving us a permit to launch our experimental vehicle a park ranger, upon only brief visual inspection and video evidence demonstrating otherwise, deemed it “unseaworthy” (i.e. an umbrella term used by the government to ban things that are legal by the books) and took said permit away. We are currently fighting that sanction, with officials agreeing with us, so who knows what the Saleboat will do in the future? Be sure to check our Facebook page for current and future photos and a short video of the cart in the water.

Tags: Projects, Saleboat // 450 Comments »

Arduino

The Arduino is the microcontroller board I like to use for most projects that need electric control. It’s open-source, powerful enough for most applications, and programed in c/c++. It’s also based on the Atmel AVR, which makes it easy to port your prototype to a dedicated circuit. The best part about this microcontroller is the community that supports it. You can find a solution to most problems and there’s a good chance there’s a library or at least some code examples to get you started.

Mice

We needed optical encoders for a project we were working on this weekend to determine the exact position and speed of a rotating arm. Enter Mice. Old computer mice are a great resource for scrounging robotics parts. In older ball mice you’ll find at least two optical encoders and two buttons, newer ball mice have even more. If you have an optical mouse, don’t worry, that sensor’s easy to interface too. My initial thought was to take the encoders off and connect them directly to the Arduino, but then I remembered reading that there’s already an IC on the mouse that decodes the sensors for you. That would greatly simplify the software for the project, but we still need a way to get data from the mouse IC? As it turns out, the PS/2 Protocol used by most mice was designed to talk directly to the microcontroller on the PC, which makes it trivial to interface directly with the Arduino, no extra components required.

The Internet (and why it’s awesome)

Now we have an idea of what we want to do, but there’s still some gaps in our knowledge. What is the pinout of the mouse, and how exactly are we going to get the Arduino to talk to the mouse and get usable data back? Here’s where the Internet comes in. A quick search lead me to a PS/2 library for the Arduino complete with and example program. At this point we have a library to talk to and receive data from the mouse, but we still needed to understand how the mouse talks to the microcontroller, back to the search bar. I quickly found a site describing how the protocol works. It only takes a few minutes of reading to get a good enough understanding of the protocol to figure out how the example program works, and consequently how to bend it to our will. Now it’s time to play with some hardware. After stripping some wires and a quick check with the multimeter to figure out which wires correspond to which pins, we have a microcontroller spitting out raw data from a computer mouse.

It will still take a fair amount of effort to customize the program to get it to where I need it for our project, but because of the internet, hardest part of getting started, figuring out a new technology, is out of the way in just a few hours.

Tags: Arduino // 487 Comments »

One of the great things about DIY is doing something for no other purpose than to prove you can. There’s something special about projects that don’t make your life easier or solve a nagging problem, they’re just cool. Take for example this Giant Spider Bot Walker. It’s a giant steel structure that doesn’t look particularly fast or nimble, or practical at all, but that doesn’t make it any less awesome. Or this awesome project to build an electron gun from scratch. An electron gun an impressive undertaking, but the only real purpose is to learn how it works and experience of building one. But thats the whole point, the most important thing we get out of almost any project is knowledge.

Everything we do we should be a quest to learn new things, new techniques, new technology, or just a new way to approach an old problem. But this doesn’t mean we should approach things from a purely academic point of view. We learn by doing cool things. A great way to get started in any hobby is by building kits. But the real value in kits is hacking them to make them your own. Take for example the Konway Kube Kit a variation of the Conway’s Game of Life Kit. Once you progress beyond kits you can start tackling your own projects like building robots to play Guitar Hero.

Occasionally a need arises that gives us the opportunity to use the skills we acquired to build something with a purpose. As is the case with Instructables users Mockfish’s cable car lift. Sometimes we might have some goal to accomplish, say detect lightning to take picture of it. You could use the open source arduino to make a lightning camera trigger.

While learning is the ultimate goal, the most important thing is to have fun. There’s a great how to on Hack a Day about how to build an RGB Combination Lock. Theres no real need for an electronic combination door lock that uses colors for the sequence, but sometimes we don’t need a purpose, “because it looks cool” will more than suffice.

Thanks for reading. I took a bit of a different approach to this post this week, I hope you enjoyed. Let me know what you think in the comments. And as always, we’d love to hear about any projects your working on.

Tags: Links // 446 Comments »

So I recently acquired an old desk to use for my computer/design work. It’s a nice desk, stable, just the right size and all that; but unfortunately the top of the desk was completely cut up and filthy. I don’t think I need to explain how hard it is to set up equipment over holes in a table while your arm sticks to the desk.

Now, for the record, there are cover sheets designed for this purpose. I can even admit that I was going to run down to a store and pick some of it up. Luckily, as I was walking out the door I thought, “What would Red Green do?”. The answer for anyone familiar with Red’s teachings will have guessed the answer by now. Anyone else can go look it up now. Seriously. We’ll be here when you get back. Everyone good? So we’re going to make a duct tape table cover.

First, run a strip of duct tape down the end of the desk you’ll be sitting at, while wrapping the excess around the side. The tape should be flush with the edge. Now put the next strip as close to where the first one ends. Try not to overlap so the cover will be as smooth as possible. Do this all the way down the table.


Now we want to run a strip of duct tape along each edge of the table to keep the edges from coming up. The strip should start at the top of the table and wrap around the bottom. Then flip the table and tape over the edges on the bottom.


The tape should hold pretty securely if you’ve taken your time. Make sure to smooth out all the air bubbles and creases. The longevity of the cover will increase if you do this on a dry day. The duct tape will give you an attractive and durable cover that prevents water damage as well as objects sliding. It also makes a great place to show off a Facebook page on an old computer monitor (*wink*)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article written from the very desk shown here. I think we’ve all learned that when you have a problem, just ask WWRGD. So until next time, “Keep your stick on the ice.”

Tags: How To, Projects // 437 Comments »