Being a father isn’t easy. You want to be with your kids and keep them safe, but you need to know when to give them a little freedom and trust. Then there is also the matter of getting your daily dose of gadgets and hunter drones. It’s a tricky balance!

This was the dilemma Paul Wallich faced with his son, but rather than remain overly protective and personally walk him to the bus each morning, he chose the altogether more awesome option of building a quadcopter drone to track his son to ensure he kept out of trouble.

The full details of the quadcopter can be seen over at IEEE Spectrum, but basically the drone has been designed to lock on to a GPS tracker hidden in his son’s backpack. The drone then follows his son for a set distance ensuring he is safe before returning back to base.

Not only a great concept for keeping your kids safe, but also an excellent way to improve your child’s imagination, who can now walk to school pretending they are being chased by Terminator style robotic drones.

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NASA isn’t exactly getting the same level of funding that it once did, but that does not mean that you can’t perform some exploratory rocket missions of your own. Have you ever wanted to have your own homemade rocket that could then record and collect data about its flight onto an on-board Apple iPhone? With this tutorial, now you can. It starts with a relatively straightforward model rocket, complete with parachute for re-entry, but it has also been equipped with a TI Bluetooth low energy SensorTag and and iPhone 4S. That’s because while the iPhone has an accelerometer and such, but it can only record to +/-2G. That’s not good enough for a rocket, so the TI SensorTag is included in the rocket. Remember that the rocket can pull up to 8Gs during the boost phase of the flight.

There are two options for recording. You can keep your iDevice on the ground and record the data remotely or, if you’re feeling brave, you can actually attach your iPhone 4S (the instructions will have to be modified if you want to use an iPhone 5) to the rocket’s payload. And this works in tandem with the techBASIC app. Get the full tutorial on how to build your rocket, equip it with the Sensor Tag, and get it all working with your on-board iPhone by visiting byteworks.us. Yes, you can be a “scientist” too.

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Also a member of Instructables, “Frenzy” calls his project “Primitive Transhumanism #2: Sixth Finger.” In effect, you get a robotic glove where there is an extra finger to the left hand. The “purpose is left ambiguous on purpose,” says Frenzy, “to engage the viewer on what these sorts of transformations can mean for the body. I encourage viewers of the piece to imagine a world where a primitive transhumanism could be advantageous.”

Yes, the project is a little on the ugly side at the moment with wires and circuitry everywhere, but you can see how this could be potentially cleaned up for some sort of commercial application. It uses an EMG Sensor from Advancer Technologies, which really lets you control that robotic sixth finger as if it were your own. As this kind of innovation continues, it may not be long before we can add even more complex appendages. Doctor Octopus, anyone?

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He’s a surplus aircraft parts dealer and he has already put together a couple of custom creations. He had a jet-powered Batmobile replica, for instance, as well as a jet-powered Datsun 280ZX. His latest creation is even more ambitious, because the jet-powered go-kart is so much smaller. This makes for potentially a much more exhilarating ride.

The custom go-kart is powered by a reclaimed Boeing 502-7 gas turbine engine, producing over 200 pounds of thrust. “The kart’s performance is absolutely amazing,” says Kettleman. “It’s so light and when that Boeing breaths, it takes your breath away … The low ground clearance and center of gravity makes it one with the road. The seating position and butterfly steering wheel start to make you think that you are piloting a fighter jet.”

And if going over 100mph isn’t enough for you, Kettleman is considering adding an afterburner for some flaming good fun, as well as a new exhaust nozzle for an even higher top speed. The custom jet-powered go-kart ultimately went for $8,100 on eBay. Given Kettleman’s history, it’s only a matter of time before we see another jet-powered beast.

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We’ve seen Tesla coils before, but nothing quite like this. Rob Flickenger has thrown caution to the wind and has built one extraordinary Tesla Gun. And it really works, complete with an incredible 20,000 volts and 2,000 amps of pure electrifying excitement.

Inspired by the Tesla Gun in The Five Fists of Science graphic novel, this real life Tesla gun is a handheld spark gap Tesla coil powered by a drill battery. It’s about the size of a small rifle and it is able to send out those crazy Tesla sparks at anything within about two feet of its business end. Naturally, it gets pretty hot and heavy pretty quickly, so all the components had to be up for the job.

There is definitely some MacGyver-ing going on with the 18V drill battery, plus the ferrite core of a flyback transformer that came by way of an old television set. The primary coil is made fom high voltage wire and high-density polyethylene insulation, while the secondary coil is made from 2.5-inch ABS pipe wrapped in 20-gauge enameled wire. You get the aluminum toroid out the business end.

Flickenger assures us that while electricity is dangerous, this is no more dangerous than a baseball bat. Tell that to the idiot who will inevitably try to recreate this toy and zap his way straight to the emergency room.

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The demonstration has the little electronic device being shoved up a nostril, but it could theoretically work under a number of different circumstances too. It’s designed to sense a draft (like your breathing), pulsing its light in response. I think it might be useful for detecting a drafty window.

Toward the end of the embedded video below, you’ll also see Akira showing off another creation: the HeartCap mini. Again working with an LED light (yellow this time), this presumably senses your heart beating and pulses its light rhythmically in time with your old ticker.

The post The Blue LED In Your Nose That Pulses When You Breathe (Video) appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Yeah, you could spend twenty bucks on an official accessory, but a little DIY hackery might be a little more fun. The idea behind the official accessory is that your Galaxy Tab 10.1 can gain a regular old USB port, letting you connect flash drives and the like. This hack is a little more adventurous, to be sure, but it’s cheaper than $20.

It’s not free, of course, since you’ll still need to pick up some parts. These include a dock connector from Kineteka, a couple of 10k ohm resistors, one donor USB extender cable, and some cable cleanup stuff like heat shrink and tape. You’ll need to do some chopping, splitting of wires, and soldering of resistors, so while it’s not the most complex of hacks, it’s not a plug and play affair either.

In any case, you can check out the full DIY tutorial on Careace.net, including a couple of pictures to help you along the way. All said, the parts will cost you about $10 plus your labor… I don’t know about you, but I think my time (and warranty) are worth the extra ten bucks. I’ll just buy the offiicial adapter, thanks.

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Leave it to people who either have too much time on their hands or are just too enthusiastic about creating weapons of minor destruction. Bearing some resemblance to ancient implements of war, what you see here is the giant Slingshot Cannon. It weighs about 200 pounds and is powerful enough to destroy a small car. With a giant rubber band.

Last year, the inventor made a little toy-sized model that was fully functional with its 8mm steel balls, but that was just a destructive little toy. This year’s model is ten times bigger. And thus, it takes on ten times the size when it comes to its ammunition too, stepping up to 80mm balls that can travel up to 200 meters. This looks like something that deserves to be on Deadliest Warrior, even if it’s not a historic weapon at all.

Power comes from six full Thera Band Gold straps per side, providing 72 times the power of regular “hunterbands” that you would find on something like Bart Simpson’s slingshot. There’s a winch to wind up that power and the cannon is height adjustable to give you better accuracy and range. Yes, it’s really just a big toy for a big boy, but you can destroy a beer keg and a car with this “toy.” Awesome.

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Radiation is poisoning is no laughing matter. Microsoft technical program manager Fabien Royer speaks from experience, seeing how he was in France during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Now that we are looking at the Fukashima plant, Royer has taken matters into his own hands and build a Geiger counter.

But this is no ordinary DIY Geiger counter (is there even such a thing?), since it’s a Twitter-enabled DIY Geiger counter. Put together during Royer’s free time, the DIY project makes use of a Netduino Plus kit too. Put it all together and you have a tweeting radiation detection system.

If you’re thinking that the US government is pulling the wool over our eyes regarding radiation from the Fukashima Nuclear Plant in Japan, you might want to hobble together one of these for your own home too. The extensive tutorial is going to be overwhelming for most, though, so you might just want to follow the original’s Twitter account instead.

The post The DIY Geiger Counter That Automatically Tweets Its Readings appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It’s not exactly practical to bring along your Vespa when you happen to be flying across the country. What if you could still have a scooter to take with you, though? What if it fit inside a suitcase for ease of transport? And what if it was almost entirely green too?

That’s fundamentally the idea dreamed up by one Terry Hope, the guy who has created what he calls the Kinetic Photovoltaic Vehicle (KPV). It’s a scooter that can be collapsed to fit inside a suitcase, but it also comes wrapped up with a series of solar panels for extra power on the go. If you do plug it into the wall, it’ll juice up in 15 or 45 minutes for 13 miles range.

This is totally a one-off project, but the current version sees a 396 W-h/24-volt battery, 28 W-h/12-volt booster battery, 10.8-volt ultracapacitor bank and a 12-volt kinetic generator, along with the 50-watt solar array with 14 monocrystalline cells across five panels. The 44 pound KPV can travel up to 20mph, but that’s obviously dependent on the heft of the driver too.

It’s a pretty neat contraption, albeit crude in appearance. Version 2 of the KPV will likely be more polished with lights, laser guidance, and a 7-inch tablet-esque display with WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and 3G/4G connectivity.

[GizMag via KPV]

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