Stuff Made Here

The secret to the perfect mini-golf shot isn't a steady hand—it's a physics engine running thousands of simulations in the seconds before you swing. By integrating the MuJoCo physics engine with a custom robotic club, this build masters bank shots and wavy greens that are functionally impossible for humans. But when the simulation starts to maliciously comply with the math, a simple hardware project turns into a month-long battle against thermal expansion and stochastic solvers.

Shane Wighton has engineered a robotic mini golf club that uses high-speed infrared tracking to adjust its aim mid-swing, ensuring the ball hits the hole every time. This project tackles the extreme mechanical challenge of canceling out motor torque and the software nightmare of synchronizing sensors with physical actuators in under 200 milliseconds. While the hardware can hit moving targets and perform blindfolded shots, the battle against software latency and complex physics simulations suggests that the perfect game is still a work in progress.

Most people just tap an egg on the side of a bowl, but for a seasoned hardware expert, that's a messy failure of design. What started as a simple kitchen tool quickly spiraled into a complex mechanical computer involving five-axis machining, silicone over-molding, and pneumatic ejection systems. Can a purely analog machine handle the chaotic variability of a biological shell, or is this a case where the cure is more exhausting than the disease?

The traditional brownie pan is a thermal disaster that leaves edges burnt and centers gooey. After three design iterations and 272 retractable aluminum spikes, a custom-engineered solution finally delivers a perfectly uniform bake. By injecting heat directly into the batter's core and quantifying the results with a load-cell-equipped mechanical mouth, the 'edge' has officially been engineered out of existence.

What happens when you apply Formula 1 engineering to a $2 children's helicopter toy? You get a 2.7-pound metal beast with flywheels spinning at 24,000 RPM and enough torque to tear itself apart. This project explores the high-stakes world of kinetic energy storage and the brutal physics of gyroscopic precession that turned a dream of high altitude into a chaotic ground-loop.