A Mini 4WD model car has been modified with a mechanism that makes it jump. Creator Zeru designed custom parts for 3D printing and uses rubber bands, rather than an additional powered actuator, as the energy source for the jump.
After several prototypes and adjustments, the car successfully reached a jump height of roughly 40 centimeters using ten rubber bands. The creator sums up the motivation simply: jumping is romantic.
A toy built to race forward gets ten rubber bands so it can develop performance in an entirely new direction. The car has started aiming for the sky.
A motor-free, semi-automatic playing-card launcher fires one card each time its trigger is pulled. It uses a suction cup of the kind found on toy projectiles to pick up a single card at a time.
A catapult-style mechanism launches the cards, which are positioned at a slight angle to help them fly straight. Creator tekelili refined the design through several prototypes and demonstrated a card sticking into a cucumber.
An entire mechanism picks up and launches individual playing cards, all without a motor. A harmless deck of cards has somehow acquired the machinery of a projectile launcher.
A fully FDM-printed mechanical calculator performs addition and multiplication by setting digits and turning a hand crank. It uses no electronics; rotations through printed gears perform the calculation, including a mechanical carry mechanism.
3D All Workshop spent about two months developing the design. Because FDM-printed gears are sensitive to tolerances, the mechanism went through roughly one hundred design iterations before it worked reliably.
A cheap calculator can produce the answer instantly, but this one required roughly a hundred mechanical redesigns just to make the gears cooperate. Building the calculator is vastly more work than doing the calculation.
The Long Clock uses a roughly 2.3-meter rail mounted on the ceiling, with a single hand slowly traveling along it to show the time. It was built so children watching movies would notice time passing through a large visible mechanical movement rather than an alarm.
Mechanically, it is essentially a one-axis CNC machine. The build reuses a roughly three-meter aluminum extrusion, linear rails, a stepper motor and other parts salvaged from older projects. A carriage moves the pointer along an elongated clock face. It was created by freefoote.
The problem was simply not having a clock in the room, and the solution was not to buy one but to mount a 2.3-meter CNC mechanism on the ceiling. The clock itself is harder to ignore than the time.
Janken Automaton is a simple rock-paper-scissors AI that works without electricity. Players can compete directly against the device.
The machine records the player's previous moves and chooses the hand with the highest probability of winning based on the player's tendencies. Players can also repeat a fixed pattern to see whether the device learns it, or simply watch where the ball rolls inside the mechanism. It was created by Yuki Tsuneyoshi of the Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Film and New Media.
It is a rock-paper-scissors AI with no electricity, but playing to win is only one option: you can also test whether it learns your pattern or just watch the ball roll.
A toy built to race forward gets ten rubber bands so it can develop performance in an entirely new direction. The car has started aiming for the sky.