Awesome Mark Rober

We can always count on Mark Rober to teach us cool things. For this experiment, he wanted to know if the camera-based emergency braking system on his Tesla was as effective as a Luminar LiDAR-based system. The ultimate test was to see if the cars would stop before driving into a Wile E. Coyote-style fake road. He also used LiDAR to map Space Mountain.

Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs engineered a unique mini crossbow that shoots NERF darts. To prove the scalability of its design, they created a super-sized version that fires massive mega-NERF projectiles using bungee cords. Mark tested its destructive capabilities with the help of guest host Jesser. The mini version is available through CrunchLabs’ Build Box subscription.

When Mark Rober isn’t taking down thieves and melting stuff with lava, he likes to play around in his CrunchLabs space. To kick off his 2024 Camp CrunchLabs series, he taught kids about friction and the slippery properties of spheres. After an intro about his STEM toy system, he poured 3.5 million Airsoft BBs onto his warehouse floor and went for a ride.

Drones can be used to capture aerial images or deliver packages, but they can also be weaponized. Mark Rober explores some of the technology being developed to take down dangerous drones. Then, he teamed up with fellow makers to build backyard drone defense tech, including a mega-turret, an electrified stream of liquid, and a powerful vortex cannon.

If you put a powerful fan on a boat and blew it at its sail, would the boat move? Engineer Mark Rober channels Mr. Wizard with a series of experiments and easy-to-understand explanations of this and six other perplexing physics questions. He also debunks a viral video along the way.

Mark Rober has been frustrating porch pirates and other thieves with his trick glitter bombs for a while now. To wrap up the series, he teamed up with a local news outlet in San Francisco to set up a bait car and backpack, covering thieves with glitter and fart spray and tracking the stolen goods to help identify the criminals behind the break-ins.

A little while back, Mark Rober engineered a tiny NERF gun using a compliant mechanism. The design has spawned numerous other builds, including this neat-looking blaster Matt Esltea made from wood. It’s not made from a single part like Rober’s NERF weapon, but it’s built with a similarly springy launching mechanism. It’s a beautiful build, but will it work?

It’s common knowledge that octopi are intelligent creatures. After he purchased an octopus from a pet store, engineer Mark Rober wanted to release the animal back into the ocean. Before he could do that, he built a challenging maze to confirm that Sashimi would be able to hunt for food after being hand-fed for most of her life.

We would say, “Don’t try this at home,” but most of us don’t have a cauldron of molten lava or a vat of acid lying around. Mark Rober’s video includes a series of experiments in which he and his pals tested the destructive abilities of lava, acid, and some wildcards. The video culminates in a challenge to see which could kill a car engine quicker.

Mark Rober and his pals made one of the largest NERF guns ever. This time, he went in the opposite direction, putting the popular toy through the shrink ray so many times it’s only visible with an atomic force microscope. After using a compliant mechanism to engineer a simplified version that can fire a dart, he worked with scientists to make NERF guns from DNA.

Hitting a flying baseball or wiffle ball takes practice, but you can do it with time. With a game against a team of professional wiffle ball players on the line, Mark Rober engineered a cheat to give him a chance. He started by studying the physics that enable curveballs and created mechanical balls that change trajectory as they approach the batter.

It’s easy to float a ping pong ball above a diagonal stream of air thanks to the Coandă effect. Mark Rober of Crunchlabs wanted to see what could be lifted with a stronger wind source than a blow dryer, so he subjected various household items to a high-pressure jet of compressed air.

Most DoorDash and GrubHub deliveries are made using gas-guzzling cars sitting in traffic. Zipline hopes to change that with drones that hover 400 feet up, then lower a small delivery unit to quietly and safely drop off small packages. Mark Rober explains the tech and how Zipline has been saving lives with their existing drones.

After embarrassing numerous porch pirates, engineer Mark Rober is back with the final and most ambitious iteration of his electromechanical glitter bomb. Version 5.0 is packed with autonomous glitter drones and even more fart spray to ruin any criminal’s day. He also built a stripped-down version for car break-ins.

To celebrate the launch of CrunchLabs, engineer Mark Rober endeavored to set up the world’s longest Hot Wheels track. At over a half-mile long, the track takes advantage of the warehouse space and has stacked switchbacks with Hot Wheels Boosters to keep the cars moving. We’d love to see the FPV footage of the full ride.

For his latest experiment, rocket scientist and entertainer Mark Rober teamed up with Joe Barnard of BPS Space to launch an egg into space to see if they could catch it safely a mattress when it dropped back to earth. But the project proved far more challenging than they thought and required huge amounts of trial and error.