DIY

Watch: How to make your own working 'Iron Man' armor

Have you ever dreamed of being Tony Stark, with the ability to turn your body into a machine? Well, you now might just have the chance to be part robot, or at least the ability to create your own repulsor.

Advancer Technologies uses electromyography to help fans of the "Iron Man" movies have their very own hand armor. This type of science is typically used to test the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles. The glove is controlled by the wearer simply flexing and relaxing their forearm muscles. … Read more

Amazing dad builds son a spaceship simulator

When it comes to make-believe, kids are pretty canny -- a simple refrigerator box can fly them to the moon. But inspired by physicists and educators Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan, one dad has gone above and beyond in getting his son into space.

Before Noah was born, Daniel Sherrouse was already planning the spaceship simulator he would build to instill in Noah a love of the stars. "When my wife told me she was pregnant, I slammed my fist down on the table and said 'Gosh darn it, my kid is going to have a better life than me!'" … Read more

Warm yourself on Bender's shiny metal belly

Sure, you could go out and get an outdoor heater, but we think we prefer the solution of a U.K. engineer who goes by the name "Rob Halftroll." He built himself a wood stove in the shape of one of our favorite lovable rascals of all time, Bender Bending Rodriguez from "Futurama."

Halftroll started with five old metal gas bottles -- two at 29 pounds, one at 42 pounds, and two big boys at 104 pounds -- and cut them into pieces to form Bender's body and head, welding all the pieces together as he went. Tube steel forms the arms, legs and fingers, and a chimney juts out from behind his head, neatly concealed.

It's actually quite a fiddly and involved process. Our hats have to come off to Halftroll, who did all his bending human style to create a wood-burning heater we'd never, ever be able to stop showing off -- and which, even in spite of itself, would be quite useful to humans. … Read more

Printing images with fire

If you have some random bits of wood floating around that you just don't know what to do with, perhaps you could take a leaf out of Lucien Langton's book. The 25-year-old student at the Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL) in France has built a functioning printer for wood that uses fire as a medium.

FireWriter consists of a repurposed inkjet printer controlled with Arduino Uno, a calibration module equipped with an optical sensor and fitted with a Dremel torch loaded with a mixture of butane and propane that burns at up to 1200 degrees Celsius.

A black-and-white image has to be fed into Processing software; it then creates a Wiring script that's fed back to the Arduino unit. … Read more

AT-AT Walker walker assists young surgery patient

Stephanie Kaloi's 4-year-old son recently went through surgery and came home with his knees immobilized and a walker to help him get around. That's a big damper on the normally active life of any young kid. After sending out an Instagram of the walker, a friend suggested that it looked a bit like an AT-AT. Soon, a pint-sized "Star Wars" AT-AT Walker walker was born.

Comic artist Ben Dewey volunteered his skills to translate the movie machine into a form that would fit on the walker. The walker now has AT-AT legs and a head and a control panel featuring the leader of the Imperial forces, Darth Vader himself. I guess this makes the tyke a Sith Lord-in-training.… Read more

DIY: Hack a rotating time-lapse tripod

There's something about time-lapse videos that grabs your attention a little more than your average YouTube video. Especially popular on Vimeo, these videos often capture scenes like a starry night, a cityscape, or snow piling up over the course of a particularly rough storm.

Sometimes, the camera stays in one spot, monitoring a scene from just one angle. But the most beautiful time lapses involve movement -- the camera pans across the scene over the course of an hour (or longer) to capture change over time on a 360-degree angle.

It sounds complicated. Like, too much work. But, the … Read more

R2-D2 light-up bra goes beep and boop on your bust

R2-D2's iconic droid look has inspired quite a few products, ranging from speakers to a rolling suitcase. Instructables user seamster took a look at R2-D2 and zoomed in on the "Star Wars" robot's head. What did it remind him of? Why, a bra, of course.

Most people would giggle about the idea and then move on, but seamster set about making not one, but two R2-D2 bras. He also posted painstakingly detailed instructions for making your own from scratch on Instructables.… Read more

Tidy up your Android phone before putting it on the block

There are a lot of tempting reasons to upgrade your phone these days. In fact, here are five of them. But what do you do with your old phone?

Well, you could turn it into a dedicated media player, or perhaps recycle it. But why not try to sell it?

Selling your old Android phone can be an easy way to make a little money. But before you let it go, you'll want to make sure you've backed up any important information and deleted any trace of your personal data. So let's walk through the process.

The … Read more

Home networking explained, part 5: Setting up a home router

Editors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series. For the other parts, check out the related stories section below.

It might seem like a daunting task to set up a new home router. But it doesn't have to be if you understand the most common way routers are managed: through the Web interface. The hardest part of using the Web interface is getting to it. Once you have gotten there, the rest, at least most of it, is self-explanatory.

Note: Almost all home routers on the market come with an Web interface, which is a Web page … Read more