Whyfore

Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..

Plastic Molding

plastic molding

Liquid plastic casting resins tend to be expensive and have set properties that limit your flexibility.  Mikey77 has come up with his own material out of materials so common, chances are you already have them. Best of all, you choose the color, viscosity, and set time yourself based on your needs.

He calls the stuff Oogoo, a name reminiscent of Sugru, an off the shelf product with very similar properties. In a nutshell, his recipe is very simple, just mix corn starch with silicone caulk.

The problem with silicone is that it takes a long time to dry from the outside in, the corn starch allows it to dry from the inside out, and very quickly. The ingredients are pretty safe and stable, so you can mix in your own dyes and other ingredients. Check out his full instructable here.

How to get Data off an old Hard Drive

When getting a new computer, there is always the issue of how to get your stuff off of the old one, which is often not even functional, like the time I knocked a full glass of water into my power supply (oops). This elegantly designed little product not only helps you with this problem, it also gives that old drive new purpose. It works on both IDE (old wide cables) and SATA (new little cables) drives, and lets you plug them into your USB port.

I always keep my old hard drives when I get a new machine, both for security reasons, and as backup, but then they changed the cables. This adapter not only lets you get your data off those old drives into your new computer, it also makes them into a better way to back up your data than DVDs, which I find unreliable, or the lesser capacity of flash drives. It supports the newer USB2 as well, so it works quickly (for USB).

Amazon has ’em for $18.

Or you can go straight to Buy.com:

 Cables Unlimited USB 2.0 to IDE & SATA Adapter Cable w/ Power

DIY Guitar Tuner

DIY guitar tuner

HackaDay has a fun little project up for those of you who play the guitar and have a do-it-yourself mentality. This little device can be used like a guitar pick. Using the buttons to select your note will cause the LEDs to flash at that frequency. The light will only be visible on the string when it’s in tune.

Or, for around ten bucks, you can save yourself some time and buy one pre-made.

Self Sharpening Pencil

Kuru_Toga-Mechanical_Pencil

This mechanical pencil from Japan has an internal gear system that automatically rotates the lead as you go, keeping it sharp at the tip. I’m he kind of person who will just walk into a pen store and spend fifteen minutes trying them all out to find the best ones. I can’t stand writing with those gummy-inked bic pens. that always leak, fail, and skip. It’s about time the rest of us started to appreciate quality again. It’s one of the things that made this country great. What we purchase makes a difference to what is made, who succeeds, and who does not. Buy quality. Buy Innovation. It will lead to more of the same.

This Kuru Toga pencil can be found at amazon

Electrically Conductive Wire Glue

electrically-conductive-wire-glue

If you ever have a delicate electrical project where you are afraid that the heat of soldering will damage tiny components or melt nearby materials, you should try out this electrically conductive Wire Glue. It isn’t terribly easy to work with, being runny and inflexible. but if you are in a delicate position, or you are trying to solder to things that solder just doesn’t like to stick to, it becomes an invaluable addition to any geek’s toolbox, and it is lead free.

Update: The stuff is water based, but after using it to glue together the leads for the under water portion of an electrolysis unit pulling around 80 volts, it has held up fine for weeks of under water load (as long as you let it fully cure first). It worked as advertised for our uses, but we haven’t tried replacing the ink in our inkjet and printing out a circuit board or anything. We leave that bit of fun to you.
The cheapest place I’ve found it is through ThinkGeek Gadgets

Amazon also carries Wire Glue, and it is still cheap enough you could just toss it on your next order and not feel like you spent anything.

Update: Chemtronics also has a line of electrically conductive epoxy and pens. After trying both in some pretty harsh and corrosive environments, I’ve found the Chemtronics stuff to be more durable. Amazon carries their stuff too.

Smart Tweezers

smart_tweezers

Whenever I go into a store like Radio Shack (great marketing on the name guys), I’m always a little shocked at how low tech it has remained. Behind the cell phones and overpriced video connectors that obviously are all that keeps them in business, there is a small section of simple electronic components and tools that look like they were some kind of Chinese surplus from the 80’s. Somewhere in the mix there will be a boxy over sized multimeter with a few functions on it and some giant tangly contacts. This is not an acceptable way to deal with modern electronics.

Enter the Smart Tweezer. The tips measure  capacitance, resistance,  inductance, and voltage. It will even graph out time varying voltage on the built in screen and identify components.

Unfortunately they aren’t cheap. They run about $300, when they are in stock.

Honorable Mentions for Jan 09

A few things that caught my eye but didn’t merit a post to themselves:

How to use butane and fire to mount a tire that has come off its rim

The Ibex has now set two huge scientific records. It was the first animal to be cloned after extinction, and subsequently the first animal to ever become extinct twice. Better luck next time guys, this has great promise.

USB drive that masquerades as a floppy drive for those annoying things like bios updates that still tend to require them.

Salad Sunrise: Oil and vinegar container that takes advantage of their relative weights to serve them from a single container.

Flashlight hose nozzle. Why you would garden in the dark is beyond me. Most people have lights in their yard. This thing needs to be water powered at least.

Washing machine built to take the whole basket. It looks great, but the more I think about it the less impressed I am.

Toaster Trebuchet catapults your toast with great accuracy.

Please consider this to be an open post as well. Feel free to post a link to your blog, throw up a link to something you think should be featured on this site, or talk about what is on your mind. All comments will be moderated, so don’t be spammy.

HUD for Billiards

These are some top notch geeks. They built a setup to compute and project the trajectories of pool shots directly onto their table. It doesn’t work terribly well, but I think it is mostly a problem of low end hardware and strange setup. Why didn’t they put the webcam by the projector, pointed at the mirror?  By having it in the corner they make things immensely more difficult to compute.

I think once Surface goes mainstream, innovations like this will come in a flood.