Awesome Stuff Made Here

Shane from Stuff Made Here already invented an unmissable basketball hoop. But what do you do if the basketball hoop is 16 feet off the ground? To give himself a fighting chance at making extra-tall dunks, he built a pair of telescoping boots that lift him to the net like Inspector Gadget’s leg springs. They work but look dangerous as hell.

Engineers have come up with all kinds of pencil sharpeners. Shane from Stuff Made Here used his engineering expertise to see if he could come up with some new ways to achieve the sharpest point for his pencils. His six ridiculous pencil sharpeners include a 5-axis waterjet, a robot with a spinning X-acto blade, and a tiny chainsaw.

Shane at Stuff Made Here wanted to see if he could program a robot with such accurate penmanship that it could fool a handwriting expert. He used an off-the-shelf X/Y plotter, then wrote software to convert typed words into pen strokes that mimic human writing. He also programmed a robot arm to place and stack multiple postcards.

After creating a robot that gives haircuts to humans, Shane from Stuff Made Here has bestowed one of his robots with a far more dangerous tool than a set of clippers. While his chainsaw-wielding robot arm is designed for carving shapes from foam blocks, we could see it taking off an arm if there’s any bug in his programming.

A while back, Stuff Made Here showed off an early version of his robot that could solve simple jigsaw puzzles. After refining the robot’s hardware and rewriting its puzzle-solving algorithm, he turned it loose on a 4000-piece puzzle with only white pieces. Oh, and he had to move his entire shop in the middle of the project.

Shane from Stuff Made Here has made machines that reduce the difficulty of basketball, pool, and golf. Now he’s built a robot which can look at jigsaw puzzle pieces, pick them up, spin them, and place them in the right location. It was a complex engineering challenge to make it solve even the simplest of puzzles.

A couple of years back, Stuff Made Here created a basketball hoop that was always in the right place to catch the ball. Now he’s back with an upgraded, cable-driven robot with six degrees of freedom so it can catch balls thrown long or short or off-axis. Like all good engineering projects, it required lots of failures along the way.

Shane from Stuff Made Here had a big wall in his workshop that he needed to paint. But rather than get out the rollers himself, he spent more than a month engineering and fabricating a robot to do the work for him. But this thing doesn’t just paint a flat color; it outputs multi-color images like a giant inkjet printer.

Shane from Stuff Made Here has built himself machines to help cheat at baseball, basketball, golf, and pool. His latest engineering feat? A wearable archery-bot which automatically aims and shoots at targets. It even can hit a moving target by predicting where it will be by the time the arrow gets to it.

Shane at Stuff Made Here is the engineer behind creations like the haircutting robot and the unmissable basketball hoop. In his past videos, you may have noticed that he has quite the assortment of tools in his shop. To show off his collection, he used each of his machines to make a different kind of ball bearing catapult.

“I don’t have skill, but I do have technology!” Shane of Stuff Made Here adds to his collection of robotic sporting goods by engineering a pool cue that automatically lines up the best shot. We love how Shane shares his failures and troubleshooting process along the way. Also, we learned a cool new word: fiducial.

“It’s going to take a bit of work for you to truly understand the depths of the stupidity…” Shane from Stuff Made Here decided his first attempt at a robot that gave haircuts wasn’t good enough, so he went back to the drawing board. The new version is a bit more versatile, accurate, and can carve patterns, sorta.

Until LockPickingLawyer gets his hands on this lock, we’re not going to call it infallible, but Shane from Stuff Made Here put an impressive amount engineering effort into this deadbolt that managed to stump a professional locksmith. Along the way, he offers a great explanation of how lock pins and cylinders work.