Do you ever get the urge to build something fun, but you aren’t sure what to do? Well, I may just have some ideas to keep you entertained.
Let’s start with the incredibly cool projects created by Mohit Bhoite using a free-form wiring technique I sometimes refer to as “air-wire” and other times as “fly-wire.” (Do you happen to know the official name for this technique?) Mohit’s most recent creation is the Surya-280, a solar powered temperature monitor inspired by the Lunar Lander.

I love Mohit’s work, and I really want to recreate all of his cunning contraptions, but I keep on getting sidetracked by… Squirrel!
For example, my chum Alvin in the UK just pointed me at this Print-a-Sketch project on Hackady.com that allows you to turn any surface into a printed circuit board (PCB).
Obviously, you aren’t going to use this to generate next-generation embedded systems, but it would offer a wealth of possibilities when it comes to creating fun circuits to teach kids about electronics.
Meanwhile, I just received the latest newsletter from the folks at Hackaday.com, and the lead project really caught my eye. For the past couple of years, my son (Joseph the Commonsense Challenged) has been asking me to build a recreation of an old radio. What he wants is something that appears to work like a radio, with static playing when turning the tuning knob between “stations,” but that actually plays different genres of music on each “station,” with him being able to load his favorite selections.
I must admit that I’d quite like something like this myself, and I’ve been mulling a few ideas over in the back of my noggin, but then I saw this Radiation King Radio project. From what I can see, its creator — ZapWizard — has pretty much covered all of the bases.
I mean… come on… wouldn’t you like something like this yourself? Actually, I’m tempted to create two versions (and one for Joseph, of course). The first would be a small unit like the one shown in the video, but the second would be a bit larger — I’m thinking of a wooden cabinet looking like an antique vacuum tube radio — I might even give it glass panels in the front so you can see the vacuum tubes glowing inside.
Last but not least, my chum Charles Pfeil just sent me a link to a video of a Japanese Musical Bottle Train (and that’s not something you expect to hear yourself say more than once a day).
How about you? Do you have any fun projects you’d care to share with the rest of us (your own or something you’ve seen on the internet)?