JVC’s W-VHS VCR made a splash in the analog tape world when it debuted in 1993, and with good cause. Engineers at the business decided to go all out on the tried-and-true VHS cassette casing, upgrading the tape and devising some ingenious ways to load high definition video onto it a few years before digital formats truly took hold. From the outside, the product appeared to be any ordinary VCR, but, surprise, under the hood, it is managing signals far beyond the capabilities of a standard VHS.
A roll of Scotch tape can do some truly unexpected things, such as completely replacing a camera lens. Maker okooptics puts this to the test in a recent project, transforming an ordinary sensor into a functioning camera using only Scotch tape, smart rigging, and some math after the fact.
Photo credit: Hackaday
A cassette tape squeezes a snapshot and then spits it out in an altered state. Jordan Blanchard, the mastermind behind this project, calls it the Digital-Analog Tape Picture Camera. It’s a handheld device that digitally captures still images, converts them to sound, saves them to standard cassette tapes, and then allows you to view them.
Kent Survival arrives in a stretch of woodland in a truck with ten boxes of huge plastic bricks, a real-life LEGO project, and sets out to build a livable shelter out of them. These bricks are essentially the same as their traditional LEGO counterparts, but scaled up to a much larger size: they come in 8-stud and 4-stud versions, totaling 1400 pieces. His idea was simple: build the thing and see if it was possible to turn a child’s play into a real shelter.
Windows 98 is not usually associated with kitchen appliances like toasters, but that all changed when the maker, named Throaty Mumbo, decided to create a Windows 98-running toaster that allows the user to make toast using the desktop.
The Margherita Hut is located at 14,940 feet (4,554 meters) above sea level on Punta Gnifetti, one of the steepest peaks in the Monte Rosa range and serves as a natural border between Italy and Switzerland. As previously said, this wooden hut is a bit of an oddity in that it is Europe’s tallest building while also serving as a simple refuge for climbers who can earn their stay by merely climbing the mountain. However, ‘earn’ means climbing up to it, which is not an easy feat.
The guitar strings hover there, kept in place solely by magnetic force. They are not being held in place by any pegs or bridges. That’s the work of Swedish maker Mattias Krantz, and it’s a really incredible sight.Traditional guitar strings require some form of physical point of connection to stay in place and under tension; without it, they go slack.
The ancient Egyptians were able to accomplish some incredible feats in flatness within their stone work, which continue to amaze engineers and historians to this very day. IntoTheMap takes a technical engineering approach to this to see if it can be explained, and how their flatness is actually achieved with the resources available to them.
Researchers at EPFL in Lausanne, in partnership with MIT, have developed a cutting-edge robotic hand that far outperforms typical fixed arm setups. This device can just drop off, walk around on its own across various terrains, pick up objects, and return to its original spot with ease, all while accomplishing jobs that other robotic systems fail to complete.
One log stands alone on an open area of land, waiting for the transformation to begin. Someone with a chainsaw approaches, and within minutes, that single piece of wood is split up and transformed into a steady burning fire capable of warming hands, boiling water, and cooking a meal. This invention, known as the Swedish Torch, takes scarcity and simply whacks it away with a few straight cuts and some dry tinder.