Center for the Advancement of Mischief

At the Center for the Advancement of Mischief, we love spontaneity and useless contraptions as much as any of you, but every

now and then it”s good to do something with purpose. On that note, I”d like to announce our plans to enter the Trinity Firebot competition next spring. The goal of the competition is to build an autonomous robot capable of locating and extinguishing a fire in a maze. I know, the idea of extinguishing fires seems counterintuitive to this group”s mission statement, but a fire extinguisher could be replaced by, say, a flamethrower (hint for future project). We”ll post updates while this project continues.

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At the Center for the Advancement of Mischief we generally applaud the pursuit of degrees in Science and Engineering and shame those in the “education” of Liberal Arts. We are aware, however, that a few (maybe

10) of the millions of people with such degrees not only use them for a career, but become important for it. This segment recognizes those lucky few who got lucky enough to be a success after following a life path doomed for homelessness. Today”s lucky winner is Heather Joseph-Witham, resident folklorist of the Discovery Channel”s hit show “Mythbusters” After enduring the horrors of receiving a BA in the quasi-respectable field of political science she continued her “education” at UCLA by receiving a Doctorate in their Folklore and Mythology Program. She”s used her knowledge to run the gauntlet of television specials before landing a recurring role on Mythbusters before being cut from the show in the early second season. When not making a documentary about vampires and appearing smug on her website (http://www.heatherjosephwitham.com/), she now does what all masters of useless professions do, and teaches the very same useless knowledge that gives her a job. Unfortunately, all of

her students who follow in her path will wind up homeless, unless, of course, some of them are lucky bastards

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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.

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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
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  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.

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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

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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.

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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.

• pokies onlinecom/2008/06/27/paintball-sentry-gun/”> Paintball Sentry Gun
• Ultrasonic Radar USB Missile Launcher

I enjoy sharing some of the cool links I come across 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 submission form up, feel free to post about your projects in the comments

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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.

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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.

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