Spider Walker Project

So I saw a video of a spider walker that someone made and was driving around at burning man, and I thought it would make a cool project to make a remote controlled miniature version.

The design will be somewhat based on the stick-figure animation shown on http://www.matrix.mechanicalspider.com/ as this gives a simple system which should be fairly easy to replicate.

This will be made on the laser cutter in order to machine precise "layers" and potentially can be driven using some micro gearmotors I have lying around, although these are small and potentially too weak to drive it.

In order to build it and get it laser cut I first have to build it in solidworks, but this also helps me prototype as I can set sizes and lengths and see whether these work in simulation without the cost and effort of building it first.

Building The Best Night Light Ever

So I saw an LED moon night light thing on firstin.co.nz for like $10, and immediately imagined hacking it with RGB LEDs and whatever else because it seemed such a waste of potential for it to only do what it was supposed to. Cycling through the phases every 10 minutes is all very well, but pulsing blue or red would look so much cooler, specially because the plastic faceplate would make anything look swish. It also refuses to turn on unless it is dark enough, but it does turn on automatically when the lights turn off.

Some of the ideas I had for it were:

• do selectable/changing colours
• do different modes e.g. pulsing, phases
• intensity setting via a potentiometer to save power/crank it bright during the day