Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

This is already by far the coolest thing I've ever done, and I haven't even started with the light show.

Being young I thought I had discovered free energy, so I set about making this. I carefully setup an experiment in the school fume cupboard, and then experimented with different container radius until I was able to setup an oscillating standing wave. I then put styrofoam that had magnitized nails on the surface, held in place by copper coils wrapped around plastic hollowed out pens, and the vertical motion of the floating styrofoam magnetized nails induced a small current in the coils.

My chemistry teacher then spent a good few days explaining to me why the chemical reaction runs out eventually and how the laws of conservation of energy worked. It was an amazing learning experience and sparked a lifelong interest in chemistry.

I joined a 5 year electrical apprenticeship after highschool. I spent many days between 2006 and 2012 building out crazy electrical systems in these giant warehouse looking buildings in Northern Virginia, for DuPont Fabros and Digital Reality.

I had no idea exactly what the purpose of these server farms were for, but they just told us “if we build it they will come” lol.

I had always wondered who “they” was, and who was renting so much server space.

Eventually we heard that Amazon was leasing some of these buildings, but it was crazy to think that an online bookstore needed such crazy infrastructure.

Flash forward to today and these buildings are called “us-east-1” lol..

I was a software dev on one floor of a building working on the platform, and on the floor below us there was a fleet of about 100 of these machines that were producing the notes. Edit: There was a team of folks that maintained and operated these machines. They didn't write the software but without them the API would not have been able to function.

I really enjoyed interacting with these folks when I could. I got to build some QA UIs for them, and I took a lot of satisfaction out of using my knowledge of the platform to make a nice and efficient tool for them. You don't get to talk directly to your users often and it was a very enjoyable project for that reason.

Anyway, for a holiday party, I thought it would be cooler than a photo booth if we could find a way to make the robots draw the people that operated them. "Yeah sure, that would be cool good luck!"

Well, I actually made it work. With grit, determination, duct tape and jQuery I created a UI for generating vector path data from bitmap images so my "robot" could draw them. I hung out in a room and operated the photo booth all night and it was really fun. Nobody at work actually cared in a meaningful way but it was an extremely satisfying project for more than its aesthetic value.

https://facetrace-party.vercel.app

https://www.robotdrawsyou.com

I've figured out multi-pen workflows to do things like maps and really cool repeating pattern geometric artwork, but the project is kind of stuck because my career has been a struggle. I have my own dedicated machine / hardware to free me from the tyranny of the cloud, but turns out the "I'm gonna build it myself" path takes longer than expected. Who would have known?

I love it so much. I can't give up on it, but it really needs more attention than I can dedicate to it. If you think this is cool and you'd like to commission some artwork please get in touch I'd really like to make this happen.

- a mini trailer for camping. It has drawers with cutlery and camping stuff and a roof top tent on top. It's lightweight so I can move it easily in the campgrounds far from my car.

- a guitar from a kit

- fixed my garage sagging roof by lifting it up and rebuilding trusses