Graduation Glasses

For my high school graduation, students walk onto the stage in pairs, and are expected to do something interesting (most do some variation of a dance move or handshake) when they meet in the middle, before going to their seats.  Having been to my sister's graduation last year, I knew ahead of time that I wanted to make my entrance more interesting and less awkward than the ones I had seen.

I built two pairs of glasses - one for me, one for my walk in partner - that, when turned on, display "2012" across the two pairs.  

MIT Tube Hack

This year in their early acceptance tubes, in honor of the 30th anniversery of the great balloon hack, the MIT admissions office sent a note encouraging us to hack our tubes.  Since there were an number of balloons included in the tube, I decided to make my tube hack a tribute to the the great balloon hack.  To fill the balloon, I built an electrolytic cell out of stainless steel washers.  When the cell is placed in water (with baking soda added to increase its conductivity), the current splits the water into oxygen and hydrogen.  This gas then fills the balloon.  When the oxygen-hydrogen mixture in the balloon comes in contact with a flame, the oxygen and hydrogen very quickly combust back into water, producing a very satisfying explosion.

Impossible Circuit

As you can see, the circuit consists of two switches, two LEDs, and a resistor in series (and yes, they actually are in series - there are no hidden wires).  So how does each switch control one LED?  Solution after the break:

Arduino Game Port Interface

A while back I got my hands on an old analog PC joystick, and since then I have been meaning to build an adapter make the joystick work over USB.  The adapter I finally built consists of an Arduino connected to a game port I hacked off an old sound card.  The Arduino reads the analog (x and y movement) and digital (buttons) inputs and then sends them to the computer over serial.  Then a Processing script running on the computer reads the serial data, and converts it into mouse movements and clicks using the Java Robot class.

Retro Rechargeable USB Booster

This project started when I found a 7805 voltage regulator when I was searching through old circuit board for useful parts to scavenge.  Since these chips are often used in DIY USB chargers, I decided to build such a charger, but with some major improvements over the typical 9V battery powered chargers housed in Altoids tins.

Shellback Dinghy

Back in the summer of 2007, I went to the Wooden Boat School in Maine with my granddad, and we took the Build a Shellback Dinghy class.  We made very slow progress on the boat after that, and it is only now finished.  The boat is made out of marine mahogany plywood, and it is just over 11 feet long.  It has a mast, spars and sail in addition to oarlocks, but they do not fit on the boat in my granddad's indoor wood shop.

iMac Mini

I started this project because I had a small pile of Macbook laptops and white iMacs in various states of functionality.  For this project, I used the stand and friction hinge from a 2006 iMac, the LCD from a Macbook that had coffee spilled on it, and the motherboard from a Macbook with a smashed screen.  The keyboard header on the motherboard was missing, so I had no way to use it in a laptop.  I decided to build a miniature iMac-like computer out of the parts I had.  As it turned out, I built the computer only to find out that the USB ports on the motherboard I used were dead, rendering the computer useless.  It was still a fun project though.