Mujahid Abdulrahim at the University of Florida has an SAE white paper on the sports of drifting:

Same dude also has 1000fps footage from a Phantom High Speed camera of Mini-Z racers crashing on YouTube. What a cool guy.

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TechRestore has a cool series of stop-motion photography of various gadgets being unboxed, disassembled and reassembled. Here’s one of the iPhone 3GS going under the knife. They have a behind the scenes look at how these are done here.

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Tormach CNC has a really innovative tool in beta – combining a USB microscope with a CNC mill. It’s part vision based CMM, part machine setup tool. The last part is key – you can reverse engineer a part, and machine a new part using the same tool to setup / reference features already on an existing part.

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Food:

Garett Kern, of Garett’s Table, has a totally out of this world take on the classic Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.

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Food Pairing is an awesome website for exploring different food pairing options.

They belong to a class of flying machines called quadcopters – made only possible with recent advances in MEMS electronics (specifically, accelerometers, electronic gyros, and microprocessors). These are classic examples of fly-by-wire machines where a computer evaluates the flying conditions thousands of times per second and provides mid-course corrections, while a human pilot tells the computer where he or she wants to go.

http://aeroquad.info/bin/view
- an Arduino-based quad-copter, built from Align 600-series helicopter tail booms, brushless motors and propellers. An Align T-Rex600’s landing skid provides lander support.

http://quaduino.org/
- Another Arduino quad copter. Looks like a custom airframe.

Tried to use a toner-transfer method to do a photo-resist mask tonight, to chem-etch a brass face plate for a couple of pieces of photography that I’m framing up for presentation / sales. I’ve done this before in college doing DIY PCBs and earlier on in high school for model airplanes.

The process involves mirror-inverting a photo negative of the mask pattern and then printing it out on a photocopier. Because toner is a thermoplastic, a regular clothes iron can be used to remelt the toner and transfer it to another medium – balsa wood for cutting (this is before laser cutters) or, in my case, a sheet of brass plate from K&S Engineering in Chicago for a name plate.

Turns out I forgot that you need special paper. Toner sticks really well to regular paper (no surprise):

Oh, and it helps to turn the steam off on the clothes iron.

I think this is the stuff that I used in college. I’m placing an order tomorrow for a small sample, shipped pony express (ground) from Florida. So, check back in a week to see how it went.