Postby EricTheFred » Thu Feb 11, 2010 6:47 am
The only one of these I've seen around the office (I work in an R&D department for Texas Instruments, so I'm surrounded by geeks with advanced degrees) is the PC fan. That one is a natural, and very easy to do. The popular thing here is to use one of the USB ports on your workstation for the power supply.
The hard drive clock face that Feng-Li mentions was all over the place here a few years back but I haven't seen one in a while. One guy was doing clock faces out of silicon wafers (we end up with a lot of useless silicon when the first pass of a new product fails misearably. I have a collection on my cubical wall, from 3" diameter to 12" diameter.) No one can figure out how he managed to drill the hole in the center for the hands, because typically if you put pressure there, a wafer shatters or splits into quarters (silicon has a crystalline structure that promotes orthogonal fracturing). My favorite guess is that he rigged up a laser to burn the hole.
My favorite, however, was one a couple friends of mine and I concocted as a use for all the AOL cds they used to send in the mail. We were going to collect them and make a parabolic solar collecter (and maybe a stirling electrical generator from that). Sadly, we came up with this plan right about the time AOL stopped mailing the things (this would be around the big tech collapse in 2000) so we never had enough. CD-Rs are so cheap now, though, that I might revive the idea.
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