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Aug 12, 2012 4:00 PM   There's really no reason slingshots should be limited to firing rocks and balls, or even just things that are small. That's why Joerg Sprave, slingshot extraordinaire, built the Blunderbuss Cannon. It's perfect for firing glass bottles, full of nonhazardous liquids, of course. Because of its slingshot-crossbow-bazooka-like design, the Blunderbuss has all kinds of ammunition options, and of course, Sprave isn't shy about showing a bunch of them off. All the best —and most dangerous—ones, he's content to just mention and warn against. But you can imagine how awesome they'd be. Not that you would ever use them, if you had the chance. Of course you wouldn't. [YouTube] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Aug 9, 2012 10:30 PM   Hideaki Matsui and Andrew Spitz, students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, built the Super Angry Birds desktop slingshot controller as project for their Haptic (tactile feedback) technology class. With a hacked motorized fader (the kind found in audio mixing consoles) to create forced feedback, an Arduino-based microcontroller called Music & Motors developed at the CIID, and a programming in Max/MSP and Arduino, the real-life bird-slinger mimics exactly the tension and toss of the wildly popular Rovio game. They even built a custom TNT box for the birds whose abilities are amplified in the game when triggered by such a device. About their force-feedback USB controlled, the pair writes: Basically, the way we achieved this is by drawing a force curve and storing the values in a table, then we send the current position of the slider through the table and extract the value to send to the motor that applies an opposing force. The final product ...