Autonomous Anti-Mouse Sentry Turret

For Bad Ideas I built a computer controlled anti-mouse sentry turret.  The turret uses a video feed from a webcam and a slightly modified version of the Project Sentry Gun Processing code to track mouse-sized objects that move across the camera's field of view.  It fires at the objects using a hacked electric airsoft gun on a pan/tilt servo platform.

Motorized Projector Screen

After the winter break, I brought a projector I got from old high school's recycling pile back to my dorm with me.   I made a screen for the projector from some blackout fabric, and motorized the raising and lowering of the screen with a small gear motor and some other parts I found.

PocketBoard

PocketBoard is a 14.5" long skateboard designed to be the opposite of my electric scooter: It is a small, simple and reliable vehicle for going short distances quickly.  At roughly 5% the weight of the scooter and some small fraction of the volume, I can easily store it in a backpack or even my laptop bag when I'm not riding it.  It has a solid oak deck with inlayed aluminum plates, and (what I assume to be) standard skateboard trucks, along with some soft 60mm diameter wheels.

PocketBoard V2 keeps the same shape and footprint, but has an aluminum deck made from the side panel of a PowerMac G5 case.

PocketBoard's rather short build thread can be found here.

Monitor Arm

By a combination of luck and keeping a close eye on the reuse mailing list, I have acquired a pair of nice, large computer monitors: A 24" 1920 x 1200 SyncMaster 245BW and a 25" 1920 x 1080 HP 2509m.  Both screens were easily repaired by replacing dead capacitors on their power supply and inverter boards.  Due to the small size of the stock dorm room desks, the two monitors plus my laptop could not actually fit on my desk with space left for anything else, so I built a monitor arm that bolts to my loft out of some 80/20 extrusion.

Nyan Hat

I present Nyan Hat, possibly my silliest and most useless project yet.  Nyan Hat was spawned from a late-night discussion involving at various times Halloween, hats, and Nyan Cat, and went from idea to completion in just over two weeks.

Loft

Using wood left over from the REX shenanigans in the East Campus courtyard, my roommate and I built a double loft in our room.  We put up the loft in record time - we only had to sleep in our institute-provided beds for a total of one night before we could sleep in the loft.  The design we used was based on another loft down the hall.  It spans the entire room, so there are no supports in the middle of the floor, and it is tall enough to walk under without having to duck.  It also includes integrated speaker mounts, a cruft shelf, and LED strip lighting.

Blacksmithing: Year 3

For the third year running, I spent a week in the blacksmithing shop at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina.  Following the trend I set during my last two visits, I continued working on cool but useless mechanical things.  This time around, I made gears.