Well, I'm buzzing. I like hacking toys. Not so much because we learned anything specific. But because it opened my eyes to what you can do with these things, and made me unafraid to do it.
Ben and I hit the limit of our technical abilities, and the possibilities of our bits of toys, by lunchtime.
But I'm quite proud of the conceptual leap we managed to make in constructing this. We took a remote-controlled car and turned it into...a remote-controlled car. But one that works far less well and is much more complicated. In fact we turned a cat, a helicopter and a car into this. The helicopter is operated remotely, when you turn the rotors the vibrations set of a contact mic that used to trigger a miaowing sound in a little cat. That's been unplugged from the cat's speaker and connected via relay to the car's motor. We wrapped the mic in cotton wool and tape so it wouldn't be sensitive enough that the motion of the car would trigger it and keep it going forever. It worked quite well. (You know, in a pointlessly stupid, but satisfying to us, kind of way.) Turn the rotors on the helicopter and the car drives off.
tinker machine from russelldavies on Vimeo.
(It didn't start again because the battery kept falling out.)
I can see how you might find that a little underwhelming, but don't just the workshop by our feeble efforts, some people made some rather magical things, hopefully they'll turn up online somewhere. And, I don't think the thing is the point, the point is how we're now looking at the world slightly differently.
You've neglected to mention that the original car wasn't working when we found it. So we made it come to life again. Which is amazing, obviously.
Posted by: Ben | January 13, 2008 at 05:59 PM
You probably saw this one, but if not, enjoy:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=221
Posted by: paul isakson | January 19, 2008 at 05:46 AM