Most were made when I was a child. The first was a power stealer that used radio waves to power an LED. The second was a large wooden glider around 5 feet long and wide. The third was a pair of glasses for reading while walking using a half-silvered mirror and a magnifying class to project miniaturized mirror-reversed book pages into my eye so I could read while walking between classes in college. The fourth was a studying shack I made while in grad school (which I commuted to, so I needed a private space for dedicated study time).
Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
521–530 of 694 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#522I made a chair: https://marvinklein.com/projects/chair
Some code was involved to optimize the layout of the pieces on the sheets of plywood they were cut out of, but that was maybe one percent of the project.
Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#523I 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…
Full AC of yours!!
Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#524I 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…
Love your channel
Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#525My 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 porta…
Are you milling with an alaskan mill or are you using a horizontal band saw? I'd really love to have space and money just keep a wood-mizer around. Do you have a kiln as well?
Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#526I'm a sucker for old games and good pixel art and I've built a pixel art frame powered by a LED matrix. It is not the most impressive thing I've built, but it is the one that brings me the most joy. Videos: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Stanko/retro-frame/dev/ret... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Stanko/retro-frame/dev/ret... I wanted something that has a feel of an art object and sits on the shelf, rather tha…
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Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#527I was so excited last year to get to work on a passion project, which has been at the back of my mind for 15 years. To design from the ground up, a guitar speaker or musical instrument speaker [1]. Something more than just a typical loudspeaker, which is optimized for things like cost or maximum sensitivity, or linearity. I wanted a design that subjectively sounded “good”. It turned out to be one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever worked on. I ended up with two different designs in the end, a standard single voice coil version, and series dual voice coil version. To me, and quite a few people I’ve let try them in different cabinets and with different guitar amps, they sound beautiful.
[1] https://1drv.ms/f/s!AppXGHhkkRjCk6lHhMAbkiMTE7lzlw?e=IdsZdw
Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#528I've been working on a RFID based music and story player for my daughter in spare time. https://www.github.com/ozfive/StoryBox
The other physical thing I built was a IR remote with a raspberry pi zero w for my Cambridge Audio CXA81 amp. I just recently put together and Android app with a couple buttons to interface to the API I wrote. https://github.com/ozfive/CXA81-IR-Remote-Server.
Both projects are mostly written in Go.
Don't get me started on the 2.5 years that I worked on custom AVOD systems for private jets and helicopters. I probably was the first person to integrate an Amazon Echo into a aircraft cabin to control the lighting/audio/video through voice over a satellite connection.
Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#529Probably OpenROV.
Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're in two gists here: https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/781f0137b361b51224dcab7... https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/b6f158b1278de307e48a200... I just hacked it together, but I do think it's not unreadable code
> but I do think it's not unreadable code hopefully your boolean conditionals are easier to read than that
The compiler will fix it.