Awesome Hacks

Russian car modding channel Garage 54 has done some pretty wacky things over the years. This time, they took an old beater and covered the entire car with 300 high-output LED headlight bulbs. There’s no missing this thing on a dark road, though it might blind its operator and every other driver on the road.

X-Creation likes to put speakers into a kinds of unlikely places. After building a wheelbarrow boombox, he created a stereo sound system by making cutouts in a pair of gas cylinder bottles, and installing speakers, crossovers, wiring, and sound-reactive lighting inside.

“My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain IBM.” Styx’s 1983 track Mr. Roboto represented the pinnacle of overwrought concept rock. Yet there has yet to be a more appropriate song played by Paweł Zadrożniak’s electromechanical orchestra, the Floppotron and its servo-powered instrumentation.

Photography expert Mathieu Stern loves to work with unusual camera lenses. After being stuck at home sickened by COVID-19, he decided to build a lens using stuff he had lying around the house. He enlisted the help of his wife to design this LEGO camera lens, while he focused on the optics. We love the brick-shaped bokeh.

In the interest of keeping his distance from others, builder Colin Furze decided that he was still too close to other people while riding his bicycle, so he built a stainless steel two-wheeler dubbed the “Highcycle” that rides more than six feet off of the ground. We’re impressed he was able to get onto this thing.

Celebrity food expert and kitchen scientist Alton Brown shows us something fun we can do to make a tasty snack from stuff you probably already have in your pantry. Using a combination of dry mustard, hot sauce, and melted butter, you can give your ordinary saltines a kick in the pants and spice them up.

Thanks to hoarding and panic buying, it’s become much harder than normal to find toilet paper these days. Household Hacker thinks the solution is to split your 2-ply rolls down the middle, giving you two single-ply rolls instead. We’re not sure you’ll actually use less, but it might be a short-term solution if you’re desperate.

William Osman had a bunch of robot vacuum cleaners left over from a previous project, so he asked his viewers what to do with them. After trying a bunch of bad ideas, he decided to go his own way and build a bike with Roombas for wheels. It doesn’t go well.

Usually, you want the deck of a skateboard to be made from wood, fiberglass, or maybe a durable composite. But maker James Bruton wanted to see if he could build one using cardboard. His design takes advantage of the structural rigidity of poster tubes, stacked and glued together to help distribute weight.

While crowdsourcing traffic data generally has improved the quality of navigation services, it’s also possible that the data could be manipulated. Berlin artist Simon Weckert shows how he was able to create non-existent traffic jams on Google Maps by walking through empty streets while pulling a wagon full of 99 cell phones.

James Bruton is always making cool and amazing things. His latest build is a version of Tickle-Me Elmo that can actually move and walk around thanks to an array of nine servo motors and a wheeled robot that pushes it along. The design was inspired by that creepy teddy bear in the Spielberg movie A.I. Part one here.

Look Mum No Computer loves to build music making equipment from retro technology. Here he shows off an awesome build – a synthesizer that uses the sound chips inside an old SEGA Genesis (aka Mega Drive) game console to crank out some wild electronic noise.

The guys are Russian auto-hacking channel Garage 54 have made some pretty insane stuff. After putting together their own version of the Tesla Cybertruck, they managed to convert a janky old Fiat Uno 70-S into a crazy mutant with six wheels spinning in back. Ironically, it’s still just front-wheel drive.

Why wait until 2021 for Tesla to start shipping Cybertrucks, when you can just build your own? That’s what the guys from Russian car-hacking channel Garage 54 did. While their version of the primitive looking truck looks the part, we’re certain the formerly concrete-armored UAZ truck it’s built on isn’t very energy efficient.

With builds like this and this, maker Giaco Whatever isn’t exactly known for his subtlety. So when he wanted to shoot a promo video for an upcoming Kickstarter campaign, he not only busted out one of those crazy Laowa probe lenses, but he fabricated a camera mount for an industrial robot to give it motion control.

Taking obvious inspiration from artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests and CARV’s earlier efforts, maker The Q fabricated himself a crazy bicycle which has no rear wheel, and instead can walk across the ground. This design appears much smoother than the one we previously saw, but by no means the fastest way to ride a bicycle.

There are lots of NERF blasters out there that can fire in rapid succession, but the majority can still only fire one dart at a time. James Bruton shows off an enormous custom NERF weapon he built that can fire 10 foam projectiles simultaneously. Each bank of darts is loaded into a magazine that rotates into place to be fired by rollers.

When it comes to guitars, the strings are one of the most critical elements. But James Bruton built this electronic guitar that’s played not by plucking strings, but by scanning barcodes. It has four necks and uses an Arduino MEGA board to map the scanned data into USB and MIDI signals to control a synthesizer.

Mad inventor Colin Furze was asked by game maker Blizzard to replicate the Rip-Tire, a spinning weapon featured in Overwatch. His first version was entertaining, but not nearly as deadly as the one in the game. So with the help of a 600cc motorcycle engine, he built another version that is far more dangerous.

Smart guys Mark Rober and James Bruton show us how to game the system with engineering know-how. They recently collaborated on a special bowling ball that can consistently bowl strikes by simply leaning in the direction you want it to go after you release it down the alley.

After a viewer provided a really bad idea of how to create a flaming version of Pokémon’s fiery little Charmander, maker Allen Pan of Sufficiently Advanced decided to hack together his own fire-breathing orange dragon from a talking plush, an air freshener machine, and birthday candle pilot light. He’s also got a taser Pikachu.

Turns off you don’t need to be the US Navy to build a railgun. YouTuber Ziggy Zee shows off his backyard railgun, which he mounted to an old RoboteX remote-controlled platform. This killer beast fires up to 35,000 joules of electricity, laying to waste anything in its path.

Do you have an old flat-screen TV or monitor with a broken LCD panel? DIY Perks shows us how you could use it to fake daylight in any room. By upcycling its fresnel light diffuser, and swapping out the LEDs, you can create a smooth and bright light source that can convincingly simulate a window or skylight.