Sometimes half the fun of a project is in its pointlessness. For very little expense, it is surprising just how many interesting projects you can construct from bits and pieces around the home. The article below describes four utterly useless projects to keep you occupied for a few hours on a rainy day.
Steampunk Violin Beetle
If you have a broken violin and some spare time you can make a very attractive moving insect model. Incorporating the open source Arduino or Raspberry Pi prototyping platforms will allow the bug to flap its wings, and do so from a distance with a remote control, or be used as a flapping backpack with the legs acting as anchors for the straps. Other than the potential applications for practical jokers, this project is pretty useless for anything other than wasting a little time and being a conversation starter at dinner parties. If you have an old violin you don’t want to let go to waste, though, building a bug could be the most pointless way to give it a new life.
Retaliation
If you are trying to keep track of a number of busy programmers churning out code, or just want an innovative solution to root out your own mistakes, Retaliation is the thing for you.
This clever script keeps watch in the background for slips of the keyboard. When a mistake is detected, the project uses the Arduino platform to locate the erroneous programmer, and fires a foam dart from a USB dart gun in the direction of their terminal. As well as being great way to eat up a lunch break, this fun programming exercise will have your developer friends entertained for hours, as well as helping to root out nasty habits in their programming skills.
Rube Goldberg Machine
Well known for their astonishing ability to over complicate even the simplest tasks, Rube Goldberg machines often require nothing short of pure genius to produce. These machines operate through making use of utterly wasteful and roundabout methods of performing a simple task, and many of the good ones are built from nothing more than imagination, spare time, and everyday hand tools you will have around the house. The Rube Goldberg machine chosen here is possibly the most interesting way of lighting a set of Hanukkah candles in existence, involving a set of helium balloons, a dollop of nitroglycerin, and a robotic arm just for good measure.
Why not try out your own Rube Goldberg machine to top it? If you want to overcomplicate a simple task to ridiculous proportions, then designing a Rube Goldberg machine is the best way to spend a day being utterly pointless.
The Useless Switch
This project is beautiful in its simplicity. You can easily build it yourself using some wood, some hand tools, some wire strippers and a soldering iron.
The simple design of this project, as well as its utter purposelessness, provide a great reason for any part time tinkerer to embark upon it. A single switch activates a motor, raises an arm, and turns the switch off again before returning to its resting position. The only purpose of this machine is to switch itself off again, making it the pinnacle of pointless devices. This machine has been dubbed the most useless machine ever created, and for very good reason.
With this guide you will have hopefully been inspired to design useless projects just for fun, and expand your knowledge of the Arduino and Raspberry Pi packages by designing projects to perform complex tasks, which really accomplish nothing. Building just for fun, and not having the pressure of a useful end product to think of, is the best way to improve your skills.
This is a guest post by Christopher Parkinson. Christopher’s interest in electronics stemmed from an early age, watching his father using a multimeter to assess why his Scaletrix which had stopped working. At that time this was the most fantastic thing he had ever seen (bear in mind he was 6 and hence very easily impressed). He went on to study microprocessor design theory before working for a company repairing mobile phones.
