Zen gardening is well known to be the single most dangerous kind of rock-and-sand gardening. I can’t even imagine how many minor blisters all that slow, peaceful sand raking has caused through the thousand of years.

No longer, says the Harford Hackerspace in Baltimore. Their submission to the Red Bull Creation contest puts the design part of the process into a Flash and leaves the “gardening” to a CNC drawing machine. Watch it in action, and then watch the second video to see how it erases the previous sand design.

You can see there are several MakerBotted brackets and connectors in the machine. Awesome! We want to see that sucker draw our “M” logo! Check out more detail on their page for how they worked the Bullduino into their design, which is required in the contest.

 

Here’s Hack a Day’s love letter to all the night-owl hackers out there, with the help of The Replicator.

Background: Red Bull has become the patron saint of hackers and makers, so it makes total sense that they host the 72-hour Red Bull Creation contest. Selected teams submit functioning entries which have to make use of the Bullduino.

The Hack a Day team’s entry is an ingenious Red Bull delivery system, for those weary troops in the field. No, literally. It’s a cannon that shoots Red Bull cans, which gently parachute down to the ground. How do you get a skinny Red Bull can to fit into a 3-inch diameter cannon?

You MakerBot a custom sabot for it. (Duh.)

MakerBot’s Tony (IWorkInPixels on Thingiverse) joined up with the Hack a Day team recently to help the creation, and designed this piece, including the Hack a Day logo on each bottom piece. He’s shared the design with some detailed instructions on attaching the parachute and an LED for nighttime location.

This is insanely cool. Watch the video above to see the whole system in action and hear an explanation of the contest entry.

 

Hey good people of MakerBotDom!  This weekend, come on down to the Red Bull Creation challenge at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, where we’ll be running a demo table while the participants try to build a totally fossil fuel-free people mover.  We’re also going to be providing a printed trophy to the winner as well as scanning and printing the MC, Greg Barris.

We were there yesterday and took a few snapshots to give you a little taste of the event, but if that’s not enough, you should head on up to the Bedford L or Nassau G (as if you didn’t know, you fixie-riding professed hipster-haters) 3-7pm on Sunday to see the event and check out our table.  It should be a wildly caffeinated dose of awesome.