Halloween is coming right up, so it is time to post one of our favorite costumes to help get everyone in the spirit. This is a darned good looking bat costume you can make from a hoodie and an umbrella.
Yes, similar costumes have been made before. Even Martha‘s done it. However, our version is better.
Continue reading How to Build a Better Bat Costume
They look the same. They feel the same. What’s the difference? You’ll have to drop them to find out.
Continue reading Happy and Sad Balls
We ventured out of the lab today to check out the ArtCar Fest outside of the San Jose Museum of Art. We loved all the different construction techniques. Gluing, welding, riveting, painting, sewing – the list goes on. We took some pictures and put them in this set on flickr. Read on to see a few of our favorites.
Continue reading ArtCar Fest
You’ve got something that just looks boring. Maybe it’s too plain, or has been defaced by ugly corporate logos. You want to jazz it up, and you want it to be permanent. Here’s an easy way to make a fabulous multicolor paint job using stickers to mask your layers.
Continue reading How to paint things using stickers as stencils
Crispy wonton wrappers add cheerful crunch to an asian salad, but shouldn’t they be… more interesting? Presented here is the ideal upgrade. No more must you clutter your salad with amorphous crispies or chow mein noodles to obtain the requisite crunch: Crane Croutons will be your piece de resistance.
Continue reading Play with your food: Edible Origami. Crane croutons for your salad.
We had a lot of fantastic entries in our supercapacitor contest! We now have a Grand Prize winner, two Second Prize winners, and a number of honorable mentions. A big thank you to everyone that submitted entries!
The Grand Prize (ten supercapacitors) goes to Stephen Kupiec, for his winning entry, “Supercap Project Luxeon V Throwie”:
A Luxeon V LED driven off of a LuxDrives 3021 buckpuck has been sporadically putting out a very short bright flash every 15-30 min on my desk startling coworkers. But it hasn’t been connected to power in over a month. The buckpuck has been harvesting power from 220 microfarad electrolytic capacitor which is in the circuit as a power line conditioner. Given a 1 farad supercap coupled with a very low (10000:1) duty cycle flasher circuit, a very distracting flasher could be made.
We selected this entry both for its originality, as well as for taking advantage of the low internal resistance of the supercaps.
Two second prize winners will get five caps each:
Chad Norman‘s entry is funny enough that it’s hard to read with a straight face:
Dress them up, adding little tiny bits of plasticine/playdough and dress them all up real purdy like. Then, using stop motion techniques, animate an epic saga of romance, death, intrigue and action with the supercapacitors as the actors.
From Mike Saz comes another very practical idea for using supercaps:
Mod your wireless mouse. They’ll soak up a day’s worth of juice in seconds, and you can stop buying AA’s, or worse, nicads.
Read on for the (long) list of honorable mentions!
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest: We Have Winners!
On a costumed bike ride, my red Princess Bride dress wrapped around my seat stay repeatedly and caught in my rear cog once. Not quite a total loss, since it looked post-fire-swamp with the holes and black streaks. However, it made me determined to fix the problem. You can see how I did it on instructables.
Continue reading DIY skirt guards
The lab staff went on an outing to the Watsonville Fly-in and Air Show in May. It was an enjoyable small-town event with lots of small planes. The biggest was a Coast Guard C-130 Hercules that took a break from guarding the coast for a couple of fly-bys and a touch-n-go. We got slightly sunburnt and took some fun pictures.
Continue reading Watsonville Fly-in and Air Show
