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

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

#181

Post by anfractuosity »

robviren wrote: post #18

This one is physical and digital. I personally patented, designed, built, and deployed a novel ultrasonic inspection device that encoded position/orientation using IR (Just like motion capture in movies). Actually used it in the field at a nuclear plant. The value pitch is that is allowed for fast deployment (manual scanning), but could also record coverage ensuring nothing was missed. Fast deployment was important t…

That sounds really fascinating, could you post the patent no. or a link to more information? I bought a cheap NDT ultrasonic 'scope' to play with recently, to see if I can potentially measure specific gravity via it.

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

#182

Post by aaronbrethorst »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #118
bicx wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost old enough to send into the mines and start paying rent!

This joke is funny because no one currently living has to make this choice.

::cough:: https://www.epi.org/blog/iowa-governor-signs-one-of-the-most...

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

#183

Post by jfsantos »

As a kid in high school I built an FM transmitter including etching the PCB at home and everything. Even thought it was not super high-powered (you're not supposed to build a high-power FM transmitter, especially back then when radio was not digital) it was super fun to be able to speak to this little thing I built and hear it come out from the radio.

As an adult, I built a clone of a Fender Champ guitar amp, completely handwired with an eyelet board like they did back in the day. It sounds amazing for such a simple circuit and is actually an object I enjoy using as opposed to a toy like the FM transmitter was.

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

#184

Post by fcoury »

I used to be deep into the mechanical keyboards rabbit hole.

On of the nicest switches out there are worn in with time, so I created a machine that wore them in by pressing them multiple times. Never got to finish it but used it quite a bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctWl4Hy6DAc

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

#186

Post by doctorhandshake »

For me it might be a system that's a hybrid of lighting and low-resolution video. It's installed in a food hall that turns into a night club after hours, so by day it looks like large glass and steel pendant lights, with circadian-scheduled blackbody colors (varying white temperature that follows the sunlight temp and goes deep orange-red in the evening), but after cocktail hour it kicks over into a dynamic, audio-responsive, stochastic, durational video/lighting sculpture that has lots of hidden behavior and a 'rich inner life', as I like to say. https://hardwork.party/rosetta-hall-2019/

It was a huge labor of love and took a lot of faith from the owners of the space - faith I feel was rewarded, because it's been running for almost 3 years now and it still gets a cheer from the crowd when it kicks over into party mode.

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

#187

Post by cactacea »

After doing the vanlife thing for a few years and rewiring the auxiliary battery system in my rig a couple of times I decided to scratch an itch and created a PCB with Wago connectors to greatly simplify the process and eliminate as many crimped ring connections as possible. Nearly everything for a small 12V auxiliary system plugs directly in on the PCB: DC-DC charger, start battery, aux battery and all accessories.

Now that I've scratched the itch I've found that there's a bit of a market for a product like this so I have started a side business to start selling them:

https://www.tesotaoverland.com/product/apds

Feedback so far has been enormously positive. They're not a great fit if you have a ton of equipment or high-current devices but for smaller setups in vans, 4wd vehicles, off-road trailers, etc it really simplifies the installation process.

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

#189

Post by AndrewKemendo »

I'll brag for a minute

I created what I think is a novel painting technique that I have now made significant iterative improvement on over the last 4 or so years. I now have a large portfolio of medium-large scale paintings using this technique.

https://www.instagram.com/kemendoart/

The technique is a variation of a "fresco" which is applying watercolor to fresh plaster. This is a very old method that tends to survive long periods because it is making a material/mineral change in the composite medium in a way that embeds pigments into plaster - making it durable to degradation in ways that other methods aren't.

I take this further by blending the pigment into water and then adding lime plaster so that the plaster itself is pigmented, and then you work with the pigmented plaster much like you would work with oil on canvas. I make my own wooden frame "canvases" by hand and have had to deal with warping and cracking.

The challenges are numerous and there's nobody to follow or ask for help or advice because as far as I'm aware nobody has developed a practice for this. In many cases I've had to make my own pigment (For example I ground up Kingsford Charcoal for black pigment on "Untitled 7" which gave it more of a concrete texture)

The biggest challenge however is with pigments - not only are they hard to make and expensive to buy - but when mixing with lime plaster they get IMMEDIATELY washed out so that bright and bold colors are extremely hard to make.

I am currently working on my latest piece and this thread made me upload my latest progress to show: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvptIU1urzD/

In order to get the depth of pigment I want I am experimenting with soaking my unset plaster with tons of pigmented water. So far it's working!

My next set of experiments is to figure out a new frame material that will not decompose faster than the plaster. My fear is that in a 100 years the wood will have degraded and that will cause the whole thing to fall apart, so I need to figure out how to get the plaster to adhere to stone somehow.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/kemendoart/

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

#190

Post by hoofhearted »

alberth wrote: post #169
hoofhearted wrote: post #115

I helped build “The Cloud” without really knowing it lol.. 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 wil…

Am I understanding this correctly, basically a Colo was acquired by Amazon? It’s pedantic but colo existed for decades before AWS. It’s the software layer from AWS that made it “The Cloud” (quicker access to hardware & billing by the second, not month)

But to answer your reply further, yes colocating already existed in the northern Virginia area because of Arpanet, the internet exchange, and AOL all being in the area pre 2000’s.

DuPont had been building in Datacenter Alley for a number of years already, but the buildings were way smaller; and the systems less complex. ACC1, 2 and 3 are all still there in operation today and have been retrofitted a number of times since 2000. Today, those tiny DC’s are apart of the bigger network in the area; and are just connected together via private fiber loops.

https://maps.apple.com/?ll=39.022237,-77.457433&q=Dropped%20...

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