First projects

Yesterday, my friend and I built a Heron's fountain. Wikipedia has a good description of you don't know what that is. Here is a video of it (sorry for the format, it was taken on my phone), and here is a picture of the first version. The first version we tried to get away with using Slurpee straws (we biked a couple miles to get them because we had no car) which didn't work. So once we got a car, we bought aquarium tubing and it worked great. The most important thing is the seal at each bottle. We first tried impression material (yes, we just had some lying around), which worked ok, but it set pretty fast and was hard to get in small cracks. We read somewhere that PlayDoh would work well. It didn't. Turns out that it actually dissolves in water. Finally, we had a stroke of genius and used hot glue. It looked much better and worked great.

Today, I made version 1 of a business card with planetary gears in it. Here it is. The problem is that the card stock I used is 20 pound, and its a bit too thin to let the gears mesh. I am going to try it again with 40 pound, or any thicker I can find. I also cut it out by hand with a scalpel and scissors. Most people did it with a laser cutter or a CNC. I found an instructable on how to make a laser cutter with 2 scanners, but I thought of a better solution: a lego plotter. I know that the Mindstoms set came with instructions on building a printer, I just need to change the pen to a laser diode, which is not hard. Programming would probably be a pain though. But I'm sure there's some homebrew stuff out there.

Lots more projects in store. Barbie car should be starting soon.