January 20, 2001
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A serendipitous hypertext journey. On Friday, überlinkster Garret had a posted a link to The Ohio Art Company’s online Etch-a-Sketch and it triggered something that made me think of an article in an old issue of Byte magazine where some geek wired up an Etch-a-Sketch using serial controlled stepper motors. Since Byte’s sorry excuse for an online archive only goes back as far as 1994, and I knew for a fact that the article in question was from the mid-eighties, I had to try something else. Not wanting to dig through my boxes of back issues under the basement stairs, I plopped a query into good old Google but couldn’t find any reference to the original article. However, I did manage to find another geek with similar passions. Neil Fraser has apparently been building Meccano-based robots since he was a young pup, and has his own version of the Computerized Etch A Sketch. As cool as this was, I poked around his site until I came across his design for an Infrared Mouse Trap that apparently met it’s own untimely demise:
“It turns out that this mouse trap has an Achilles heel. Because it is made out of junk, it looks like junk. As a result it was inadvertently thrown out by a well-intentioned relative who took it upon herself to do some cleaning.”
I felt a brief pang of empathy for Neil, and I suddenly remembered the sound that small plastic and metal objects make as they’re sucked up a hose when your mother is vacuuming the shag carpeting in your bedroom. Not one to dwell on childhood trauma, I followed a link at the bottom of the page to Doc Fizzix, “…your complete source for mousetrap car know how.” What more could a person ask for? I’ll tell you. Did you realize that the distance record set by a mousetrap-powered vehicle is 111 metres? Beats the crap out of the Kub Kar racers I built as a kid. Even the tiny chrome hood scoops and exhaust pipes that I glued onto my wooden automobiles didn’t help. They ended up falling off once the glue dried anyway, and probably got tossed out by one of my well-intentioned relatives. Sigh.
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