Projects

Well, I really got myself into a mess here... I got this odd compulsion to crunch up some rare earth magnets into a powder to see if my neodymium dust would do anything interesting. I was hoping they would, for example, align themselves to form something stable on their own (it turns out you need to give it something to form on, and then you just end up with some funky graphite-looking stuff). It ended up attacking my skin. My question is this: Do I need to take precautions about neodymium toxicity or anything? Also, does anyone have any ideas about how to use ground-up rare earth magnet stuff? I was unable to find any good information about the toxicity …

Hello, Wasn't sure who this would interest, but I launched a weather balloon with a Canon A540 digital camera payload attached on September 5th, which was lost when the GPS device failed, then recovered by a farmer on Sept 21st, who then contacted me so I could retrieve it! The pictures are great, and just wanted to share my story. I am an aspiring engineer student who hopes to attend U Texas at Dallas in 2011. You can view additional information at my website: www.aerialparade.com Thanks for your time, and shoot me questions if you got em!

This thread is about surviving a major disaster with science! The objective of this thread is to post how you would survive with common everyday items. an example is if you found yourself in a post apocalyptic or natural disaster situation how would you filter water, generate electricity, protect yourself with common items such as barells, buckets, pipes, copper wire and so on. Use your physics, chemistry, biology and engineering skills to survive. Example: Using animal fat as fuel for a diesel generator. Lets hear what creative ways you would survive!

I want to make a rocket for an up coming art festival which some of you may know as burning man, each year the festival has a them and this year is metropolis. What I am planning to do is make a relatively large statue of lady liberty and have it be launched in the sky one night. I have looked up different designs and want to make it with a hybrid motor but because of the models large shape and possibly having to add counter weights because of its odd shape I need the lowest weight to thrust possible. Upon doing some research I am thinking N2O as the oxidizer and possibly paraffin wax with some reactive metals as the fuel grain. I would be willing to work with some h…

I have decided to make a coil gun as a home project. 1. Do i need special wire or will any copper wire do. My dad is an electrician and has rolls of wire for wiring a house. Can i strip it and use that? 2. What kind of capacitors should i use. I heard microwaves have big ones in them. 3. If i make the coil really long instead of just short would it make the projectile go faster? 4. Can i do something simple to hook it up like a circuit with negative hooked to the coil and positive through a light switch and out to the coil for a switch? Thanks in advance, Razer

Hi, im planning to build my first coilgun and i am planning to use my NXT as the timer (hacked motor port) which will let me vary the pulse time. It would be greatly appreciated if you could tell me what I've done wrong in this circuit (i think i need to put a diode in parallel with the coil to protect the capacitor). The schematic is attached below. Cheers!

For the past two months my brother-in-law and I have been working on a scratch built high-powered rocket. (By scratch built I mean it was not built from a kit.) It is 100% designed and constructed by us. I did purchase a few pre-fabricated parts: the nosecone, body tubes, the altimeter, and electronics bay. The motor was designed by us, though we initially started by experimenting with some designs on the internet and modified it with trial and error. The rocket fuel is homemade as well. It will have a dual-deployment recovery system (i.e. a drogue chute will deploy at apogee, and a main will deploy at a preset altitude) as well as an onboard video camera. Target alt…

I have an article, fullsize plans in PDF, and a video about building a model glider from foam plates, foam tray, and milk carton cardboard. http://www.hbci.com/~bkuhl/FoamJetII.htm Bill Kuhl

We have a hugh crow and pigeon population in my town. Discharge of fire arms in the city limits to control our crow and pigeon population is a NO NO control. Starlings destroy millions of dollars worth of row crop that can feed the hungry mass of humans. Zon guns only scare them from one tree to the next. 20 years ago our city boasted 60 crows but now our sky is black. Poison contol a no no Shooting a no no and a bullit into someones window. Electrocution of crows a no no the EPA will be at your door. I made a proposal to the US FISH and WILD LIFE SERVICE and they never heard of a new way to control thier numbers without killing them and environmentaly…

New to the forum and I noticed someone mentioned rockets. I have a short article on water rockets, with corresponding video and Power Point on my website. http://www.scienceguy.org/Articles/WaterRockets.aspx Bill Kuhl

Hi all. Never used one, never lived in a house with a fireplace or wood-burning stove, and would like to find out if installing one in my small house would be wise. The existing chimney has a 8" port hole on a side as there was one installed long ago. Just an image of what I would like: http://www.rickdenney.com/images/wood-stove-lores.jpg My concerns (from ignorance) is that such device uses the room air for combustion. That air has to creep-in into the room trough poor window and door seals, meaning that exterior cold air gets sucked-in, diminishing the heating purpose If such device could suck its combustion air from the crawling space under the hous…

Hi, the idea just popped into my head that it would be pretty cool if I could harness a large weather balloon to myself so that I could reduce my percieved weight to about 10% of what it normally is. Doing the math (or finding someone else who did it already, and extrapolating from there) I found I would want somewhere around 2,000 cubic feet of helium to get very roughly 90% of my weight as lift. I found several sites which sell weather balloons with an inflated diameter of 16'. Doing the math I discovered that should be able to hold 2,100 cubic feet of helium, which is still not enough to lift me off my feet. Here's where I come across the first problem, where…

I'm trying to build a miniature smoke machine as a part of my halloween costume, a steampunk imagining of The Joker. The end result I'm looking for is to emulate the acid spraying flower as seen in the 1989 Batman movie, where it is a brief puff of nefarious looking vapours*. some parameters: must be non toxic must not be a blatant fire hazard dc powered wearable I have been experimenting with heating a 20/80 glycol/H2O mixture. My first trials used a small copper tube wrapped with the heating element from a toaster, wired directly to a 12v lantern battery, which seemed to ALMOST work, it would sputter a small amount of fog while at rest, but if I forced any …

Is my project title valid? If so, what are the methods to test my project. Please help me out

Alright, for my school, every student has to do an Extended Application project in order to graduate. I decided that for mine I would like to design and possibly implement a Rainwater Collection System. I live in Oregon first of all, because to my understanding different states have different regulations. Here are a few questions I have. I understand that there are several permits involved (Plumbing, Electrical, Building, Etc.) A) Do I have to have the permit myself? Or is it required that the installers have it? Because I read that you have to be a certified electrician to have an electrical permit, same for plumbing (makes sense). What other hur…

I'm making a hexapod robot and I need some help with the math for the movement of it. Here is a bad sketch (I cant draw in paint and I dont have a scaner): First I'l try to explain the pictures, then my problem. On the first picture in first row is the leg looked from back, in xy axises. The fat line is the body of the robot, at the end of it is point "B", place where leg connects to the robot. Line "c" is the femur, and it is bent by angle "beta" from the robot. That is the angle at which the legs can go up and down relative to body. At angle "alpha", line "c" (femur) connects to line "b" (tibia). That is the angle at which the tibia can go up and down…

So I made an LED necklace using an 0603 LED that I soldered to two pieces of guitar string (was cheaper and less likely to kink than wire from hardware store). I stuck a little superglue on this and slid it into the hole of a transparent bead, then I soldered the other ends of the wires to two magnets and used them as a clasp, sticking a watch battery between them. It works great, but the entire weight of the necklace is on that itty bitty solder. I want to do one with more beads, but the solder won't hold. So is there a way to attach the LED without cutting the wire? I saw something like this on an episode of Kyle XY, so I'm attaching a screencap since a pict…

Has anyone else made one of these? I made one a little while ago using the instructions from a book called Bacteria: A Field Guide by Betsey Dexter Dyer, and so far its looking pretty cool. I put in things like a slice of baked potato, coffee grounds, oats, apple cider vinegar, pennies, dead leaves, and a couple of other items. I topped it all off with sand from the beach and seawater. I'm having difficulty trying to figure out where to store the thing though. I want it to stay relatively warm and completely exposed to light, but cant figure out where in my house I could do that. Any advice?

A friend of mine told me that it was possible to create a keyboard light that is powered by your computer easily. With a few instructions from him I made one and it works very well. Materials: USB Cable LED 100[math]\Omega[/math] Resistor Crimp Connectors Tools: Wire Cutters Pliers Take the USB cable and cut it just below the end that does not plug into the computer. Using the wire cutters strip the outer plastic coating of the cable. Once the outer coating is removed you should see four different wires. The red should be the positive, the black should be the negative, the others are for data transfer and a ground. Strip the coating of the red and…

I had a great idea one day when i was sick after watching Wall-e 4 times that it might be possible to build a robotic flower but im not sure where to order a kit from and i have no clue how to build it from scratch! I am fairly new to robotics and have attempted in the past to program a robot at the WSU robotics lab and...total failure! It went backwards three inches hit a wall and fell apart! But aside from just building this robotic wonder i am not to sure on what it's function might be? So any helpful websites or insights on this sticky situation would be great... thanks ever so much!

Hello everybody, I am working on a 3-stage coil accelerator (gun) called "Maggy" that is Arduino driven and Optical triggered (by SCR's), you should check it out and lemme know what I can improve http://sites.google.com/site/paulscoilguns/Home On that website you will also find my previous coil-accelerator projects, one of which is listed on the World's Coilgun Arsenal.

I am trying to build a coilgun. I have a photoflash capacitor with me. The 330V kind. I realized that the most important parts of building a coilgun was the switch and the capacitor charging. Okay, my question is, what kind of switch does not spark at 300V? I heard of SCR, but the country i am in does not have Radio Shacks. Any way to get SCRs from household appliances? Also, can i use normal (rubber insulated) wire for my coil, instead of enamel ones? I can't find enamalled wires here. Also. What is the relationship between size of projectile to speed? Bigger projectiles=faster? And. How should my coil be? Around small area of the barrel? Or big ar…

I was working on a wood working project, while listening to a pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack, when I got a splinter from a piece of birch plywood I was working on. Looking at the edge, I found that I had sanded it quite sharp, although it wasn't anywhere near sharp enough to cut anything beyond cheese. So the idea struck me, how hard would it be to make a wooden sword? I tried birch plywood, and that got a semi decent edge. I just now tried MDF, and that didn't sharpen at all (despite me attempting to fire harden it). The point just disintegrated to sawdust. I think there might be some wood out there that is dense and hard enough to hold a good edge. …

Hello peeps, I'm here to ask for help! I'm undertaking a large project of creating high quality 3d models and images for the use of educators and enthusiasts. They are going to be realistic 3d visualizations of the Wardenclyffe Tower, which was meant to house Nikola Tesla's magnifying transmitter. PROBLEM: There is very little accurate reference on this subject. Only historical pictures of low graphic quality. I've found some semi-detailed visual references, but only on certain sections of the unfinished structure. SOLUTION: I am looking for people of appropriate skills, such as engineering or drafting, to help collect and layout accurate details the tr…

Hello peeps, I'm here to ask for help! I'm taking it upon myself to create some images of high quality for the use of educators and enthusiasts. They are going to be realistic 3d visualizations of the wardenclyffe tower, Nikola Tesla's magnifying transmitter. PROBLEM: There is virtually NO accurate reference on this subject. Only historical pictures of low graphic quality. I've found some decent quality detailed graphics, but only on certain sections of the unfinished structure. SOLUTION: I am looking for a gifted engineer or someone of related skill to help draft the transmitter to accurate proportion based on the reference existing in our day (which i…