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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?

#281

Post by bombcar »

bhouston wrote: post #27
aliljet wrote: post #21

I built a house myself.

Amazing. Would love to do it myself, but how the hell did you find the time?

A house costs $x dollars. You save up money and take time off to do it, or you do it in the evenings.

Here's a good YouTube channel with a father/son (experienced) team doing just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiOwwhoiKug

Note that they're doing a rebuild of an existing house, but the general idea is the same - live in a trailer/old house while you build a garage with an apartment above it, and then move into that apartment and build the main house. This is quite common in more rural areas, such that you can see it even 40 years later; the garage will have an apartment above it, or the barn will have some rooms.

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

#282

Post by mips_avatar »

kmm wrote: post #77

A few years ago I made a "string art" portrait for my girlfriend at the time. It's made from a continuous† 2 km long black thread, woven around a loom made from a bicycle wheel rim. I'm still very proud of how it turned out. †OK fine, it broke at a few points and I had to knot the ends together, but it's the principle that counts. https://imgur.com/gallery/ljoJeal I really wanted to make something creative for her, b…

This is so beautiful, thank you for sharing. My favorite HN comment of the year

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

#283

Post by AndrewKemendo »

shimon wrote: post #234
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #189

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 surviv…

Interesting technique. Are there some similarities to the Venetian Plaster technique? (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfGbryICt0A )

The primary difference is that "Venetian plaster" process is specifically intended to mimic the look of marble or stone and so the method doesn't really veer too far outside of that for materials or process.

These kind of artists seem to only use quartz or other "smooth" acrylic plasters and pigments that don't have the same structure and are generally thin and temporary (less than 20 years expected age) - so not limestone the same kind of lime aggregates like tadelakt which is what I use.

I'm attempting to make something that can last 2000+ years - somewhere between an oil painting and a marble sculpture.

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

#284

Post by jameswatling »

kmm wrote: post #77

A few years ago I made a "string art" portrait for my girlfriend at the time. It's made from a continuous† 2 km long black thread, woven around a loom made from a bicycle wheel rim. I'm still very proud of how it turned out. †OK fine, it broke at a few points and I had to knot the ends together, but it's the principle that counts. https://imgur.com/gallery/ljoJeal I really wanted to make something creative for her, b…

This is awesome, and am so tempted to try.... one question, how long did it take to physically complete this! Also I know you had to "repair" the string a few times, but is this a 2mi single thread?

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

#285

Post by jimbooonooo »

After leaving my old job, I realized that I loved the device design work I had been doing, I just didn't like the work environment... So I started my own company and designed my own fine pointing device, sensors, controller and software.

The company didn't go anywhere because it turns out that business is hard when you don't like to self promote, but I am incredibly proud of the end result. It has high bandwidth, Check it out here if you'd like: https://www.rockymountainservo.com

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

#286

Post by elliottkember »

I made a 6 foot long LED staff with 1,500 LEDs. It had a huge custom battery inside it and it lasted for hours and hours. I got really into programming LEDs and making great patterns, but it was a lot of work keeping it running and replacing LEDs as they failed.

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

#287

Post by s0rce »

jimbooonooo wrote: post #285

After leaving my old job, I realized that I loved the device design work I had been doing, I just didn't like the work environment... So I started my own company and designed my own fine pointing device, sensors, controller and software. The company didn't go anywhere because it turns out that business is hard when you don't like to self promote, but I am incredibly proud of the end result. It has high bandwidth, Che…

neat, I don't think I have any use for this, just used a few pre-assembled laser galvos for optical coherence tomography but I love the super niche small companies selling hyper-specialized instrumentation.

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

#288

Post by IAmGraydon »

I designed and sold a faceplate mod for the Behringer Neutron semi-modular synth. I sold a few thousand before shutting down in late 2020. There were two varieties - here's what they look like (search Google for Behringer Neutron to see the stock look):

https://imgur.com/a/ezbg3py

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

#289

Post by neontomo »

I wrote, illustrated and self-published a book about mental health, psychedelics, sex and meaning in life. It's meant as an anti-dote to self-help (while diving into those topics) and a memoir of a strange part of my life where I had to rebuild my mental health from scratch.

I was incredibly proud to have copies in my hand, and it's sold around 100 copies, which is more than the 5 I expected.

You can buy it here (and read reviews):

https://neontomo.com/book

You can download for free (bc I care about freedom of information):

https://archive.org/details/recovery-from-ego-death

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

#290

Post by hathchip »

phdelightful wrote: post #197

It’s far from what I do now, but as an undergrad I built an automatic guitar tuner. It had a PIC32 microcontroller that read the sound waves on GPIO pins and did some cross-correlations to figure out the frequency (sort of a poor man’s FFT, but faster since it was less general). It used an FPGA to drive a stepper motor to turn the guitar pins towards the correct frequency. Code was all C and Verilog.

This sounds awesome.

How does it work exactly? Does the use pluck the strings while the machine turns the knobs?

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