Building My Own Useless Machine

It's been way too long since my last blog post. But it's also been a while since I did anything that was worth writing about. Well, that changed on Friday when I decided to build the world's most pointless machine. I originally read about this thing in a book. It seems that a science fiction author had one in his home. Its a box with a switch on the top. If you flip the switch, an arm extends out of the box and pushes the switch back into it's original position. That's it. It is a machine that turns itself off.

Pretty cool, huh? I thought so. I watched some videos and really wanted one, but I didn't figure that I would ever find one. Nor did I think that I could make it myself.

I ended up finding some DIY instructions for the box on this great site called Instructables. I used this site to find instructions for building the rain barrels that now grace the outside of my house. The instructions are good and they typically come with very helpful pictures.

Here is the link to the instructions for the box.

For the project, I needed the following items:

Wooden Box
Servo (I found some extra servos with my old RC car stuff)
2 Switches
Wire
4x AA Battery Holder
a wooden letter Y
some screws

I also grabbed a saw, my soldering iron, some screwdrivers, and a wire stripper.

The first step in the process was to take apart my servo and alter the innards so that it would change from a standard servo to a continuous rotation servo. The basic idea is that the batter leads are connected directly to the motor instead of to a circuit board and the servo arm is given a full 360 degrees of rotation. This step was pretty easy and only involved some minor cutting, soldering, and chiseling.

In the next step, I soldered the batter holder to the servo and the two switches. Here is a picture of the end result.

The hardest part was mounting all of this stuff into the box. I had to alter the top of the box by cutting the lid in two. All of the gunk then had to be mounted onto one of those halves. I also had to be careful and align the switch with the wooden arm (half of the letter y) that was mounted to the servo. This step involved a lot of glue, some double sided tape, and plenty of patience.

But it was worth it! Here is a picture of my machines at rest. You can see that I had a few failed attempts at figuring out where to place the switch. You can also see that I didn't do a perfect job cutting the box lid in two. It's hard doing wood working projects without proper equipment.


Check out this video of my own DIY useless machine.

On another note, the job hunt is going. I'm not sure how it is going though. I had two successful interviews last week, but my definition of successful (at this point) falls short of actually getting the job. I thought that they went well, and I got a really good vibe from the interviewers, but as you probably guesses, I didn't get the job......yet. I am still holding out hope.

I am very interested in a job opportunity in Columbus, OH, but I am not sure if anything will come of it.

Right now, I am passing my time censusing (can you believe that is a word). It's an interesting job, and a job that I am not 100% sure how much I can talk about in the public sphere. Needless to say, it has it's moments.

I have recently come upon some deals on 18XX games and I look forward to getting them at Origins (THANKS PAUL!!!!). I also have some new Winsome games to try out.