Category: Machines EN

This time machine takes you back 4 billion years, when the first life emerged on earth. In the turbulent primordial soup of water, oxygen and organic compounds – such as simple proteins and sugars – the first single-celled organisms emerged, which developed into increasingly complex life forms over millions of years.

In the large sphere you can see the primordial soup swirling, with the first simple life forms here and there. The microscope lets you see the process up close, while you can experiment with the temperature, the amount of sunlight, oxygen and the pressure needed to bring the molecules together. But you will soon notice that life is capricious, that it is difficult to control the circumstances. Will you succeed in creating the optimal conditions for life on earth? Or will nature not be tamed?

Where are your emotions located? Where reside your fears? Where are you in love? Advances in medical technology have radically changed our perception of the brain. Have you ever had a CT scan? Or an MRI?

The Tehuti Brain Scanner shows in spectacular fashion how these new techniques map your brain layer by layer, searching for the precise locations of your emotions, decisions and control of your muscles.

In the “Full brain scan” mode, the laser starts at the bottom, at the brain stem. While the laser lights up a slice of the rotating brain, you see on the screen how the scan builds up. Once the picture is complete the scanner moves to the next layer. The menu dial offers 8 other modes that each simulate various types of scientific brain research, like “Emotion mapping”, “Brand recognition” and the “Trail-making test”.

When the Tehuti is not busy doing advanced brain science you can enjoy the intricate light patterns projected onto the ceiling.

For more information on the Tehuti Brain Scanner, visit the details page.

If you would like to see the Tehuti in action or have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Long before we all had access to the internet, there was a small group of people worldwide who were able to make worldwide contacts and communicate. Unfortunately, there was no one in my area who was interested in this, but the idea always fascinated me immensely. The threshold for learning Morse code is unfortunately high and broadcasting on short and medium wave radio frequencies requires permits and exams. Too much effort in a time when we can make free and easy video calls to the entire world.

But my interest in classic Morse keys, the button with which you generate the short and long signals, has always remained. What I find beautiful is the precise adjustment options with which everyone can adjust such a simple push button completely to their own wishes: more or less counter-pressure and a longer or shorter path to the switching point. My self-designed Morse key has these adjustment options and uses magnets to provide the counter-pressure.

In order to make this classic Morse key usable for a large audience, I decided to combine it with the simple one-button game ‘Flappy Bird’. This game was a huge hit on mobile phones in 2013 and was created by Vietnamese programmer Nguyễn Hà Đông. However, this developer was so shocked by the overwhelming attention and the addictive nature of the game that he decided to remove the app from the Apple App Store and Google Play in February 2014.

My version of the game is graphically much simpler because it works on a monochrome display and is controlled by a microcontroller, which has much less processing power than a mobile phone. But I still managed to make it work smoothly. And the best part: when you play the game, to untrained ears it seems as if you are typing Morse code with the greatest of ease!

The name “Marconi” is a reference to the Italian Guglielmo Marconi, who is considered in the Western world to be the inventor of radio.

The Nautilus started with an online article by a German photographer on how he had wired a GoPro action cam with a big button and four lamps and put it in a plastic box to create a photo booth for a wedding. Shortly after I read this story, my sister announced that she was going to marry. Obviously I would shoot the wedding photographs – I was a photographer at the time – but such a photo booth seemed very appealing too, for guests to take their own pictures.

I didn’t have a GoPro lying around, but I had something better: an older Canon D40 DSLR camera, and a wide-angle lens. Wiring this was a bit more complicated though, especially when I thought it necessary to add a progress indicator, a tinkle bell and a smoke machine. I had heard about Arduino microcontrollers, but didn’t have any experience with them yet. Fortunately, it turned out to be quite easy to work with these. Adding some basic electronics wasn’t too hard either.

For some reason in my mind this machine needed to look like it was created by Jules Verne. So I created the body out of dark, curved wood panels with a supporting frame of copper tubes and brass couplings. The name is a direct reference to Jules Verne’s 1870 novel “20.000 Leagues Under the Sea”.

One of my favorite features of the Nautilus is the countdown block, formed by two numeric “nixie tubes,” old gas discharge tubes that contained the numbers 0 through 9. These number displays were used in NASA control centers, old nuclear power plants, and on the Wall Street stock exchange to display stock prices from the 1950s to the 1970s. They are difficult to combine with modern electronics because they operate on 180 volts DC, many times more than the usual 5 or 3.3 volts of modern microcontrollers. Also, nixies have not been manufactured for a long time. I bought mine in Ukraine, an old batch that had surfaced somewhere. I bought the 180 volt power supply in Switzerland and the special microchips to switch the high voltage of the letters on and off came from eBay. A nice story is that a young Czech started a small factory in 2017 to produce new nixies. He seems to be doing well.