Upgrade light switches with these clever mechanical add-ons

The father and son team of Lance and L. J. Nybye have come up with a wonderful line of mechanical add-ons for common light-switch covers. The mechanisms are typically cut with a laser from high-quality plywood and finished off with brass hardware. Additional decorations are engraved/burned into the parts with the laser.

From the online shop:

These mechanical light switches transform an ordinary appliance into the perfect flourish for your secret library, steampunk chalet—or wherever your imagination lives!

The mechanical switch covers install easily over a standard switch plate using the existing screws. In addition to the excellent lever-based switch shown in the video, they have a couple of other lovely designs.

Here is their one based on planetary gears...

And another design based on the rack and pinion mechanism...

Here is where you can get these mechanical switch-plate covers.

[ Thanks Jan and Julia! ]

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Useless Box kit with all the parts -- just build and solder

Did you see the fantastic Instructable on how to build The Most Useless Machine back in 2010? It was a brilliant project that led to a lot of neat spin-offs. Here's the version I built featuring a tiny carved arm coming out of a miniature trunk.

At long last, there is a kit available so you don't have to find all the little parts, which can be kind of a pain. If you aren't a woodworker you also don't have to worry about how to build the box itself. (The acrylic box pieces in the picture below are still covered in protective paper.)

From the kit description:

The Useless Box Kit arrives as most kits do: a pile of parts. With easy to follow instructions, you'll be assembling your Useless Box Kit very quickly. Whip out your soldering iron, do a little bit of work, and then screw the thing together. When you're done, you'll have your own gleaming acrylic box. Set it on your desk and wait for curiosity to cause victim after victim to turn it on - each to be met with the little finger turning the box back off.

Here's where you can order the Useless Box Kit

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Thinking Machine by Martin Riches & Masahiro Miwa

The Thinking Machine by Martin Riches and Masahiro Miwa uses rolling balls and mechanical track switchers to play a programmed sequence of notes on pipes. It has to be one of the most beautifully haunting computers I've ever heard.

From the video description:

The "Thinking Machine" is a ternary computer that outputs melodies formed by three sounds as resulting from the calculations. Whether binary or ternary, it is a computer in the terms of a Turing machine. In Thinking Machine the algorithm is fixed as a mechanical mechanism so it is not a versatile Turing machine or von Neumann type computer. However, like all computers Thinking Machine is a logical machine that can process code, and is an actual object that expresses discrete time within real time.

You can learn more about this and other machines at http://martinriches.de.

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