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

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481–490 of 694 posts

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

#481
My farm. In the past ten years, I have built the following things here (to name a few that I can remember):

1. three small creek-fed ponds (bonus: one has an island),

2. numerous outbuildings for various kinds of livestock,

3. a pair of portable outhouses,

4. several miles of perimeter and cross fencing,

5. two large greenhouses (20x50 and 30x90),

6. a built-in oak storage bench for the farmhouse entryway,

7. a portable covered milking stanchion that can service a cow or two goats,

8. a semi-permanent lumber mill capable of milling logs up to 30" around and 24' long,

In addition, I have performed endless upgrades and repairs to existing structures and equipment:

1. rewired and plumbed the wellhouse, adding new storage tanks,

2. maintained my fleet of trucks, heavy equipment, and dozens of other machines that contain small engines,

3. finished out the farmhouse basement to use as a dairy parlor,

I still have a few projects on my TODO list:

1. more outbuildings,

2. a 20' wood bridge across to the island in the lower pond,

3. hot tub (made from cedar that will be cut and milled here on the property), and

4. so much more....

It will never be "done".

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

#482
I made another programmer. My daughter just finished her first year of her CS degree. I hired her as an intern at my company and gave her a project that I thought would take several weeks. She proceeded to finish it in just a few days.

Watching her deploy her code to production for the first time...absolutely the most incredible feeling I've ever had. Way cooler than when I deployed my own code to production for the first time.

I'd be proud of her no matter what career she chose. But there's something absolutely amazing about being a part of your child's journey from crawling to coding.

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

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you make a reader like that back then? I'm assuming that these days, and such device would use a generic microcontroller, with most of the interesting logic in the software. (Insert snarky joke about it also requiring Electron and 16GB of RAM.)

IIRC, a credit card magstripe can be read with a regular cassette tape head. Which were, if not quite ubiquitous yet, common enough in the late 80's/early 90's. Converting the analog pulses to the card's 16-digit (or whatever) number was almost certainly done with discrete logic at first. I'm not sure what OP means about creating the "original" credit card reader, unless he was working for one the credit card compani…

Original as in first one to put magstrip reader on the gas pump on Florin Road, Sacramento, California 1981.

Philips started making compact tape recorder heads in 1963.

Magstrip on credit card has been around since 1969 (American Express) and on bank ATM card since 1971. I got my First Interstate ATM card in 1977 and got to hacking then.

Also, we sold accompanied magnetic cards then as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_card#History

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

#485
post #29

A fence on a ridge. High tensile wire, pickets and some other fancy stuff. All hills and transitions. 1 pedestrian gate and 1 wideish chainlink gate. Wood posts and tposts. Box braces and such.

I'm looking at doing some of that and having a hard time finding good resources. What did you use?

Here's some reference materials

http://fleen.org/fences

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

#486

I made a baseball bat that uses explosives to add a bunch of energy to your swing and hit a baseball really far. It uses the explosive blanks normally used to shoot nails into concrete (e.g. ramset). It worked way better than I expected, didn't have a kick, and turned out to be just a really neat thing to look at while sipping a frosty beverage. I also made a video about it if you're interested: https://youtu.be/Puo6…

Great channel. You had me as a subscriber after your pool stick video. Cool to see you post on hn.

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully you are reading and learning from the same place licensed electricians are learning from. Sounds like this guy didn't go to the right sources.

A lot of their learning is from experience.

Which, I should add, is true of most professions, including software development. If a non-developer jumped in to make an app, it would be miraculous if the app and the code base were up to the standards of a seasoned app developer.

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

#488

My telescope(s). It's a very rewarding hobby, from making the mirror (manual labor + measurements with interferometry), silvering it (a bit of chemistry), designing in CAD and building the actual usable telescope, there are a lot of moving parts to design, and steps that you can either do or delegate. I think anyone who likes manual work can find a piece of a telescope that's enjoyable to work on. The feeling you get…

Telescopes are often built simply (and rightly) as functional tools or instruments, and that's great of course, but I wanted to compliment you on making a non-ugly, aesthetically pleasing telescope; a bit of craftsmanship goes a long way, looks great man.

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

#489
I once made a circuit which would tun on an LED light when the ambient light fell below a certain threshold using an ATMEL microcontroller. It's actually very easy to do.

The coolest physical thing I tried to make (though it was mostly a failure) was a USB powered fan from scratch. I also tried to make the plastic casing from scratch using resins. I had made a mold for the casing but I had made it out of soft clay (if I remember right) and although the resulting plastic casing did solidify inside the mold and somewhat took the form of the mold, it was too brittle and the two halves of the casing didn't quite line up so they could not interlock neatly around the electronics. I didn't complete the project. I just did it out of curiosity.

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

#490
"DJ" (music) control for toddlers - colloquially referred to as "the buttons" in our family, they've brought substantial peace to our household & they've helped our kids improve at negotiation/compromise/etc.

Details here: https://dantonio.info/projects/the-buttons/

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