This is a vinegar and bicarb-powered rocket that will blast into space! Well a few inches or feet!

UPDATE: We had lift off today (6/13/2010)!

In order to make it blow, you need to make the rocket and base airtight. I've uploaded Rocket Base 2, which has a larger diameter than Base 1, which is too small. Once you've printed #2 out, use sandpaper to make it smooth and exactly the same size as your rocket "engine". In the end, I found that the rocket itself was airtight enough. Also, I think that using modeling clay to fill the holes works too.

The Geneva Wheel is a simple mechanic base unit for converting a continuous rotation motion into an intermittent rotary motion. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_wheel Its used in clocks and similar mechanics.

This is a Peristaltic Pump designed in Sketchup. I have tried to design it with an eye towards printing on a MakerBot, but do not own one so I cannot test at this time.

It should accept 3/4 inch hose with a 1/8 inch wall thickness.

Three rotating concentric rings.

This is a PostScript program to generate optical encoder wheels (suitable for printing out on a transparency). Unlike similar programs, it is highly flexible and has many features, such as:
-Correct inside and outside diameters, regardless of line width.
-Quadrature capabilities, with adjustable phase difference.
-Automatic scaling of text size.
-Optional index track, with adjustable size or automatic fitting to segment size.
-Automatic page filling with cutting allowances.
-Most features can be turned on or off.

This is one of the first things I experimented with after getting my laser cutter. I wanted to see what could be done with the cutter besides marking and vector cutting, so I decided to experiment with etching channels in acrylic. This is a simple, mechanical "inverter" is the by-product of this and a recent discussion I had with a coworker about physical representations of logic gates.

On the "input" side, the plunger being pushed in represents a 1 on the input, and pulled out represents a zero. On the output, a pulled in plunger represents a 0, and pushed out a 1. This convention is used because the output is presumably being used as the input of the next gate in the chain.

I didn't have a program to easily print the original .EPS file so that I could print/cut it on the laser. I took the time to recreate it in Inkscape as a .SVG file. I put a 1"x1" reference square at the bottom to ensure anyone using the file will have the right dimensions.

Mine were made with blue acrylic because that's what I happened to have on hand at the time.

At the NYC Resistor laser cutting class I embedded one of Zach's planetary gears in one of Zach's planetary gears. This design was laser cut from black acrylic and sandwiched between two clear acrylic sheets.

I found that the inner circle in the front layer needed a smaller diameter to rotate smoothly. I also cut a gasket that sits between the front and gear layers. Otherwise the gears always contact both the front and back layers.

After class I took my project to dinner with a few friends where it was an interesting conversation piece.

Someone should turn these gears into something that can be 3-D printed.

An eight-legged big spider robot.

The design goal was to create a legged robot that is large enough to walk regular stairs and strong enough to lift simple loads. It also had to be simple enough to use regular RC-srevos and could be cut with my minimal CNC machine.

youtube.com/watch?v=gNXuzhop-u8

youtube.com/watch?v=mSzAuPa47WA

The build process is documented here:

roboternetz.de/phpBB2/zeigebeitrag.php?t=39810&highlight=

For Mothers day I made my mom a set of earings that double as a working planetary gear.

...sorry for the pun in the name.

An openly designed Creative Commons Licensed robot.

Note: New Version (Beta 2.1) posted 06/05/2009

New features: 12 legs instead of 8, "drop-in" center platform, 1:1.8 ratio gears, many small changes.

I only update this listing for major revisions of the walker, it's possible there's a minor revision posted at my site that is not here: 4volt.com/projects/jansen/

What you see here is the Jansen walker, a laser-cut robot, based on the Jansen Mechanism. It has 12 legs and scuttles similar to a crab walking sideways. The brain is a Arduino, and the legs are powered by 2 micro-servos modified for continuous rotation.

This project is heavily influenced by Theo Jansen's natural gearing mechanism, it’s a very efficient mechanical leg design for converting rotary motion into leg movements, and is very elegant in my opinion. The basis is the relative distance of the 12 joins, Jansen calls them "The 12 Holy Numbers". The numbers were developed with a genetic algorithm. In a couple of interviews that he wrote the evolver on a Atari STe computer and it took literally months of 1990’s processing power to find the solution.

For more info on Theo Jansen as well as some video and pictures see strandbeest.com.

I've marked this as non-commercial creative commons licensed, but it would be very easy for anyone get me to license a commercial version to almost anyone. For the most part I would just like to make sure I agree with the usage, and make sure I am aware of it.

See vimeo.com/4221721 for a video of the motion.
The home for this project is 4volt.com/Projects/Jansen/

Also, if you don't have a laser cutter, but would like a set of laser cut parts for this project see: 4volt.com/donate.aspx#jansen

This is the plastic extruder that we have developed over at MakerBot Industries. It is a primarily lasercut design which uses a pinch-wheel filament drive system and a nichrome heating element. It is heavily based on work we've done with the RepRap project and is compatible with the RepRap mounting system.

You can buy kits for this at the MakerBot Store: store.makerbot.com/featured-products/plastruder-kit-presale.html

Perhaps one of the funnest projects we have attempted around the .:oomlout:. offices. A five degrees of freedom robotic arm. While we have spent many hours twisting knobs to move pop cans from one point on our desk to another sadly it has not progressed much further.
The main reason for this is the sum total of math knowledge around the oomlout.com offices is about 4 (don't ask us to show our work on how we calculated this) so inverse kinematics is well beyond our reach.

We are releasing it in an imperfect form in the hope that the clever Thingiverse denizens will be able to make it better.

Why this isn't quite ready for sale:
-We lack any inverse kinematics program which makes moving the arm intelligently nearly impossible.
-Without software limits on the servos it is capable of stripping the low cost hobby servo motors (this is alright for testing as they are only five dollars) (we have stripped two in the life of our arm and both happened when we were asking it to do silly things) (this can be fixed by upgrading the servos)
-We haven't completed the 3d model or assembly instructions just yet, but by studying the photos it is possible to assemble. (think more jigsaw puzzle than lego set)
-The gripper, lets just say the gripper needs a little work.

That said it is an amazingly fun toy to play around with, and a good starting point if anyone has ever had a desire to make the perfect robotic arm (it is open source so you'd be free to make and sell your own)

(shameless plug)

For more details about becoming a Robotic Arm Developer visit our blog
(http://www.oomlout.com/blog)

This is a wooden whistle based on the traditional wooden organ pipe design. The internal pieces are traced from an old organ pipe diagram; they can be laminated together between the two end caps to make a whistle that really whistles.

This was cut from 1/8" basswood.

UPDATE (May 2011): a full chromatic octave of 13 pipes - thingiverse.com/thing:8736
Also I changed the license from all rights reserved to CC-BY-SA.

A calling card with working planetary gears. Astound your friends, frustrate your nemisii.

(Update: I've moved the gears slightly to the right, reducing the number of cut parts to assemble.)

This is a model of the classic pulp SciFi rocket, which takes the hero, the sidekick and the romantic interest, to the stars!

For something that fits in a 12"x12" sheet, this thing will tower nearly 15" tall, overawing any primitive aliens you are likely to meet. Well, the shorter ones anyway.

Heavily inspired by Herge's Tintin comics, which are a must read.

12 5-sided polygons that fit together to form a dodecahedron. This is probably the smallest buckyball that you could realistically make. There a solid version, and a "wired version", which is way way easier to put together. This is to mess with you geometry-lovers out there.

This is a 3D model of a section of the nave of a Gothic church.

I based the height to width ratio on the golden section,and the design of the arches on the basic Gothic proportions, so nothing very new. I hope to add the side alleys and some flying buttresses in a later version.

The only clever trick is the use of little cross-shaped pieces to hold the two parts of the pillars together, one at the base, and one at the top, resting on a little shelf. Since the pillar parts that slot into each other are rather long, you need this trick to keep them from sliding side to side.

This is the skeleton for a basic pentapodal robot.

I'm currently using cheap HS-311 servos for all joints. These don't really provide enough torque for the up/down shoulder joints as currently designed. I plan to shorten those members, and get more powerful servos to support them.

This 24" high game table is intended to be cut from a 2x4' panel of 3/4" stock material such as plywood or MDF. The legs slot together and the top is secured between tabs at their upper corners. The reversible top might be painted with, say a chessboard on one side and a backgammon board on the other.

A mobile based off the classic "Impossible Cube" optical illusion made famous by M.C. Escher, among others. As a bonus, I've included a Community Commons stencil typeface, also named Impossible Cube, which you can adapt for your own uses.

This is the first of my flatpack action figures. I've made lots of prototypes so that the tolerances are really tight and they basically snap together. If by chance you force it to much and it breaks, it is easy to fix it with a drop of superglue.

The MK-1 is a monkey on a mission to defeat the evil kitten empire.

With cymbals to clang and a knife and fork to eat with, the MK-1 is accessorized to make some noise and eat some dinner.

A prehensile tail means that it can carry the accessories in it's tail too!

One very special thing about this monkey is that you can hold it up to the light to see the skull inside it's head.

These are not for small children because they have small parts that are rather sharp.