- A No. 1 Philips Screwdriver
- Metric Caliper ( Metric ruler will also work)
- Sharpie or other marker
- Pen and Paper
- 3d Printer
- Computer
Optional
- Drinking Straw
- Scissors
In the past couple years there has been quite a bit of activity into r&d of tiny insect/drone/ornithopter type vehicles. Two intriguing designs I've been following are Harvard's RoboBee and Cornell's Ornithopter. While some designs, like Harvard's, are out of reach of the average DIYer (check out their white paper, it's awesome) the Cornell 3D printed ornithopter is attainable and I took it as a challenge to make my own. Cornell's use of 3D printing techniques makes it easy to try out and make modifications. Unfortunately they don't give out their files and they built theirs on a 3D printer that cost 100k. My work has been to model my own design off of their work, but make it using commonly available 3D printers. You can see the results below. Quickly I would like to discuss how amazing desktop 3D printers are. So far I have been able to make two versions: the first is blue and printed by my schools 3D printer (6.07 grams), the second is clear plastic and made by a Makerbot Replicator 2 (4.729 grams). For a reference point Cornell's weighed 3.89 grams. Between my first and second designs the weight of the wings has gone from 4 grams to 2.6 grams because the wing thickness went from 0.02 inches to 0.008 inches (200 microns). With the last batch of prints I also made a test wing with a 100 micron thickness that weighed 0.477 grams, multiply that by 4 (for the other half of the wing and then the second wing) and you have a total wing weight of 1.908 grams. You can see pictures of these measurements below. 
The majority of the parts for this design are 3d printed. The rest are as follows. 
Deadspin
Gawker
Gizmodo
io9
Jalopnik
Jezebel
Kotaku
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This is a 4 band Mechanical Color Code Resistor Calculator, The idea of making this Mechanical Resistor came when I accidentally dropped my box of resistors and all resistors (1300 of them) got mixed up. ooops! . Thank god there's an APP for that, So while picking them up (the resistors) and soaring them out I was thinking, how cool would it be to have a big resistor that you can actually manually rotate the bands and get the resistor value right away. If you are into electronics and you are really passionate about it like me, you're always looking for projects and challenges to take on all the time. So, with that idea and a vision in mind I started working on my new project, of course with the help of Arduino UNO microcontroller.
SP = www.sparkfun.com , YD = www.yourduno.com , J = www.jameco.com , HP = Home Depot
Have an extra LCD monitor laying around? I think most of us have upgraded their screen or TV at some point to a larger one and have their old one collecting dust. If you have the space, why not put it to good use and create a coffee table with a built in LCD screen? 
Careful when taking apart any TV or LCD panel!! I cannot stress this enough! Disassemble the plastic housing around the TV or LCD panel. Don't worry if you need to chip the plastic or break some buttons, just make sure that you don't have to fiddle with a remote or pressing of any buttons to get the TV or LCD to recognize your input device. Min was a TV, so I tested hooking up a PC, a Mac, and an Apple TV to test the three ports (HDMI, VGA, and DVI) to make sure I didn't have to fiddle with any buttons for the TV to turn on and recognize my source.