Awesome Engineering

Engineers from MIT have developed an incredibly thin and lightweight speaker that flexes like a sheet of paper. The piezoelectric speaker’s volume increases when it comes into contact with other surfaces, so theoretically, it could be used to turn entire walls into immersive, room-size loudspeakers.

Do you suck at first-person shooters? Kamal Carter might have the solution. He built a servo-controlled robotic rig that moves a mouse exactly where targets are by scanning the screen for specific colors. It cheats quite well in the FPS trainer AimLab, but it’ll need more work to be accurate in a real game.

Thanks to his Swiss heritage, Alexandre Chappel felt obligated to build a timepiece of some sort. So he set about making a unique tabletop clock that tells time on a series of nested circles. He used a CNC machine to cut all of the wooden gears. He should probably add a pointer, so you know where to look for the time.

This yucky blob looks like something your dog might leave on the grass, but it’s actually a liquid robot that can be controlled by a human. AsapSCIENCE speaks with Professor Li Zhang to learn about his team’s so-called slime robot, how it works, and its potentially life-saving applications.

Carbon fiber is an amazing material, combining strength and weight efficiency. When set into resin and woven properly, it can be used to build airplanes and cars. But this clip from JPRC shows the dramatic difference in strength that carbon fiber exhibits when its fibers are pulled in a straight line versus tied into a knot.

Ricoh’s unusual Penta-X robot set a new world record for the most robot jumps in one minute. This waddle of five of conjoined penguinbots jumped rope 170 times in a row, and charmed their way into our hearts at the same time. Of course they have a long way to go to beat this human.

We’ve always been fascinated by the properties of chainmail armor and how it can flex around a body while still offering protection. Now, researchers at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and Caltech have come up with a new kind of fabric that can be tuned from a flexible to a rigid form in an instant.

Priced at over $400,000, Bulgari’s Octo Finissimo claims the tile of the world’s thinnest mechanical watch. It measures just 1.8 mm thick, with its extremely flat mechanism set into a 40mm sandblasted titanium case. It features three subdials, a visible movement, and flat horizontal knobs for winding and setting the time.

Inspired by the LEGO car builds on the Brick Experiment Channel, the guys at Brick Technology wanted to see if they could create a motorized LEGO vehicle that could drive over a wall. It took quite a bit of trial-and-error to come up with a design that could scale even a fairly short wall, and the final vehicle is a bit of a cheat.

Engineer Mark Rober takes a look at a very special piano that can transform speech into music. Known as Chopstix, the Edelweiss player piano was modified so it can play all of its keys simultaneously. It feeds on a steady diet of MIDI files which it can play at incredibly fast speeds. It can even perform Rush E.

Smoothly dispensing toilet paper is definitely a first-world problem. In fact, we’re not even sure it’s a problem that needs to be solved at all. But that didn’t stop LEGO maker Technic Brick from engineering a solution using a variety of gears, connectors, a motor, an ultrasonic sensor, and an Arduino controller.

You might not know it, but depending on the location, trains might roll on different gauges of tracks. That normally means railroad engines and cars can only roll on compatible width tracks. But this ingenious rail car has an undercarriage that automatically adjusts its width to adapt between 1-meter-wide and 1.43-meter-wide tracks in Switzerland.

In this video from Sumitomo (SHI) Demag, they show how their El-Exis SP injection molding machine makes plastic bottle caps. Each time its molds fill with plastic, it stamps out 96 identical bottle caps, repeating the process every 1.9 seconds. We love that top-down view of all the caps falling to the production line below.

Getting around in a wheelchair poses its challenges, especially when it comes to putting your chair away after sitting in a car. The AbiLoader by AbiliQuip can lift up a wheelchair parked next to the driver’s door and stow or retrieve it from the trunk in just 25 seconds.

JBV Creative loves to engineer kinetic sculptures and machines using 3D-printed parts. For this interactive piece, he created a wall-mounted mechanism that represents the slow, repetitive churning of the corporate machine. It launches ping pong balls into the air and catches them in a funnel to repeat the process endlessly.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could walk on water? With a lot of trial and error, JLaservideo designed and fabricated a special pair of shoes that let him stroll above the surface. They use powerful electric motors and propellers to push the wearer up out of the water. Maintaining balance is clearly the trickiest part.

This Cummins Allison Jetsort coin sorter machine can count and separate 10,000 coins per minute, yet its sorting mechanism has just a single moving part. YouTuber Herb-O-Matic shows how its centrifugal action and precision-cut grooves ensure the right coins go into the right slots and bags. Full video here.

Inspired by the geometric star art of John and Jane Kostick, mathematical artist Henry Segerman shows off a neat bit of mechanical engineering which uses a set of five geared racks that can smoothly slide through each other. The model is available as a 3D print from Shapeways, but it’s not cheap.

Animator Jared Owen has dissected the inner workings of everything from the Space Shuttle to the Enigma Machine. This time, he delves into something less complicated – the Playskool Poppin’ Pals toy you might have played with when you were a tot. It might not be rocket science, but it’s still some neat engineering.

What’s better than a delicious cupcake? A machine that can crank out cupcakes for you on-demand, that’s what. Skeyntific shows off a robotic factory line he built that first pours dough for each cupcake, moves it into a modified microwave for cooking, then applies toppings using motorized caulking guns.

This unique system parks cars in an underground garage while taking up minimal space. TreviPark’s silo-shaped parking lot has spaces set up in a circular arrangement around a central elevator which can rotate to access a specific car, then lift it to the surface. Here’s an interior view from another car’s perspective.

The Enigma Machine was a cipher device used by Germany during WWII to encrypt and decrypt top-secret communications. Animator and educator Jared Owen provides a detailed look at its ingenious design and how it scrambled and unscrambled letters. Given its complexity, we’re amazed that it was cracked.

Engineer Mark Rober is back with the 4th-generation version of his karma-delivering glitter bomb package. For 2021, the package for porch pirates is filled with new surprises, including a self-launching box lid, a car horn, and 20% more fart spray.