Following on from "what bike fettling you don't do", in a non work associated/professional scenario whats the most complicated/technical/hardest thing you've built or created?

Not actually that complicated, but hey…

How does this work exactly? My work is mech/elec engineering, as are most of my hobbies (I'm a rounded person, honest!).

BEing part of the Big Bike Bash was pretty complicated.

Rebuilt and restored classic & vintage cars. Restored a croft and barn convertion, currently building a stilted pool house.

Done 'popish' transcriptions of Velasquez paintings, that was technically challenging.

thread hijack – so coffeking, does that make you an expert in stepper motors? It's for an idea I'm working on and I can't find anyone with answers.

I once helped an amazing guy re-manufacture 80% of the internals from a 1948 Jaguar's gearbox
We did have an old stylee factory fitting shop to work in though & plenty of spare hours on night shift

Still a great achievement for him & hell of an education for me

convert – email in profile 🙂

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Ok so it probably doesn't count…

8 in 16 out fully matrix switched video setup for the relaunch of the Intercontinental Hotel Park Lane

doing it overnight doesn't help

or it might have been programming for a 'flying pixel' effect using a Pearl lighting desk and 80 odd badly installed LED lighting fixtures for the PC pro awards at the Brewery in London

the one and only time i've had to use a proper spreadsheet for my job

i used to hate video matrixing. it sucked.

tinker-belle – I've made 3 of those

I only mixed the ingrediants though – I didn't cook it

A flux capacitor. Cant wait for 2010 again, it's a great year for me.

A device for extracting sunlight from Cucumbers.
Can't really go into the details here, but take my word it's complicated.

a helicopter which goes underwater. I think it might be a deathtrap.

Sonar beamformer using 4 Texas DSPs to do an interleaved FFT with parallel instructions

not started yet, but this is going to be a pretty big challenge over the next year or so 🙂
Can't wait

Compared to how much of a clue I had when I started, I was pretty happy with the way this turned out:

[img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3655/3282286720_4ecb35fd96.jpg[/img]

edit: It lasted seven weeks before the roof melted through in the spring sunshine, apparently.

A house.

Visual control system for an industrial 6 DoF robot.

Visual control system for an industrial 6 DoF robot.

What, you did that for fun?

MTT where did the plan of your kingdom go? 🙂

What, you did that for fun?

Kinda. I did a phd with it, voluntarily when I could have been earning. But I am working on a visually controlled mobile robot for fun at home currently if the other didn't count. Software, spare linux machines hanging around and old radio controlled cars make for far too tempting a scrap pile I'm afraid!

Currently trying to design a purely pneumatic collision detection system for an auto door closing mechanism.

I like it elliptic 🙂 What were you using to drive it?

Probably my dissertation on calculating BPMs in music even though it er… well, didn't work entirely as intended!

Worked on prenatal diagnostics test kits a few yrs ago -creating protocols etc.

Made a shed once using drawing plans and wood etc.

Rebuilt an engine for a car after the owner was going to scrap it. Drove like new.

Cooking for the GF is the hardest thing I've done lol

coffeeking: it's a DSP with two synchronised on-board DACs for generating digital modulation in walkie-talkies. And some code hacked together one lunch hour…

chvck: strangely similiar… I designed a system to analyse engine noise and extract the rev count, used behind a fancy graphic on the TV coverage of a certain high profile motorsport… 🙂

Built a 5m canadian canoe out of ply and fibreglass, not quite a Ray Mears birch bark job though.

Built a TV from scratch back in the 1980's.

26 inch colour CRT with teletext.

It retired to the loft a while ago but it still works!

Built a fibreglass kayak with my stepdad once. It helped that he's a boatbuilder 🙂

Otherwise, audio multi-effects unit for a college project. Digital delay, tuned distortion, phaser and flanger, multiplexed. Was pretty noisy, but you could get some **** crazy shit from it. Gave it away to a mate 🙁

Tinker-belle…you beat me to it!

Still look at my two and can't believe I created them…well with just a tiny contribution from MrFC!! 8)

1968 Austin Healey Sprite
1973 Morris Minor
1976 Triumph Spitfire

Not technically created but certainly reconstructed…

Oh..and a petrol to Diesel conversion of a SWB Series III landy

Designed several computer software systems that were pretty complicated but not the most exciting.