Make Your Own R2 Fish School Fish Training Wand!

I saw the R2 Fish school set and thought it was cool, so I made my own fish training wand for my fishie.
DOWNLOAD 3D (.stl) FILE HERE
It fits in a generic 1/4" diameter plastic drinking straw. A wire is attached to the top of it to pull it in and out of the straw.

LEGO Photo Sphere Taker

In my free time, I bike around my neighborhood. One of my favorite spots is Congress Springs Park, located along Joe's Trail. This project started when I wanted to take a photo of "Frank's Rest Stop" which I happened to come across while biking the length of Joe's trail to see the Cox Reservoir which services my house.

I wanted people who were interested in the trail to see this cool stop, so I opened the google street view app and found that I could take a photo sphere, which I did.

While fiddling around in the app, I saw that I could join adjacent photo spheres to create a path, like google street view.

Taking a photo sphere requires concentration and takes some time, so I made this contraption out of LEGO to aid me.

I went through many iterations of mechanisms and ideas to come to this one. All in all, I think the building of this thing took 20-30 hours in total, most of the time making improvements to the mechanisms and finding a way to mount it to a tripod.

I encountered many obstacles during the build. One of the first obstacles was the accuracy of the turning of the phone. I need to be very accurate because of google street view's app design. One of the problems with LEGO is that there is a lax tolerance in technic pieces, so there was 5-10 degrees of play in the rotating mechanism because the worm gear could slide on its axle. To counteract this problem, I 3d printed some 1/6 bushings (5mm inner diameter, 7mm outer) and fitted them on. This provided a very reliable turning mechanism. However, I soon discovered magnetic interference of the motors caused the iPhone's internal compass to screw up, thus losing rotational accuracy again. This app was eventually abandoned in favor of occipital's 360 panorama (explained below)

Another problem I encountered was the app. Google's street view app has some funky algorithm which corrects for your movement. It is hard to explain, but in short, I could not use the street view app. I ended up using an app by occipital called 360 panorama which worked much better. One problem is that the quality is not that great... (Flat image resolution from the app is 4096*2048. Google requires 5600 by 2300). Used Preview to bump up the resolution.

The first 360: (Please choose to load unsafe scripts to see the panoramas... I think they are safe.) <FIXED>
Some I took in Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park(more coming):
Google Maps Joe's Trail (coming soon):
Video+Pictures coming soon

In the making...

These are in the making:



Photo sphere maker (post finished) ((Remake in Progress))

Mini air conditioning(Halt)

Clock Mechanism (writing blog post) ((halt))

Lego Mechanical drawing machine (halt)

iPhone App (halt)

20mph (32 kmh) lego car (halted)

3d art (halted) ((Restarted)) (((in progress)))

dish washer (Halted)

Bottle flipper (halted)

Various sculptures (made 2) ((WGR in progress))

VW Beetle(in progress) ((finished, video up!))

Mail sorting/ Open CV Project(ideation) ((stop))

Arduino start (in progress)

LEGO Technic Umbrella

LEGO Umbrella

I was inspired to make an umbrella out of LEGOs after taking a stroll outside during a rainy storm. The umbrella I held was not strong. The fiberglass arms of the umbrella bent whilst the umbrella faced the wind. After a few minutes of battling the wind, a stiffer one T-boned me and blew the umbrella inside out. 

I thought I could make a stronger umbrella out of LEGO Technic parts.

The umbrella has 6 arms, for 6 is the largest divisor of a full circle I could find.

Pictured below are the bases for the top joint and center moving joint.

Assembled Umbrella, no legs

Umbrella Legs

Fully Assembled Umbrella

Unfortunately, the joints between the LEGO Technic beams using the two pin connectors is rather weak, so the umbrella bends a lot. (video?)

A second, more durable version might be built. Depends on the amount of LEGO beams I have left. (Update, I took apart the umbrella for another project... heh)

Lego Vending Machine (Elementary School)

This is a lego vending machine my brother and I build when I was in fourth grade. The mechanism to recognize quarters and dispense the candy was inspired by many other designs at the time, but the rest was designed by the two of us. There are three layers.

The bottom layer houses the slide to move the candy to the front. Next to that part is the coin safe where the quarters drop down into, along with a locking mechanism for that safe.

The second layer composes of the coin reception and mechanism to dispense candy. Coins smaller than quarters slip under the arm and fall into the coin safe. Unfortunately this means someone can put a washer the size of a quarter in and it will dispense candy...

The top layer holds all the candy which funnels into a 2x2 hole.

Because of a lack of bricks, the top was never finished.

Information on the previous versions
Because I was so young, I never thought to take pictures of earlier versions. The first version of this machine was slightly different from this final version. The major difference is in the placement of moving elements, specifically the coin pushing lever (the thing shaped like a F) and the dispenser, which dispenses the candy and is pushed by the coin. The original design had the candy dispenser closer to the customer, when viewed from the front. This was done to minimize the space the ramp to facilitate the movement of the candy to the customer's receptacle. However, this meant that the ramp to move the coin from the front of the machine had to go over the candy dispensing mechanism, which took a lot of space from the candy hopper on the top level and increased the complexity of the build. As a result, the F shaped coin pushing lever was moved to the front, and a ramp built into the arm allowed the coin to fall in place.