Pneumatic

Hide your pets - this robotic mousetrap was designed to detect and exterminate everything in sight

ENLARGE

This shoebox-sized powerhouse would make Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor proud. Like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, the robotic "Better Mousetrap" goes to the extreme to detect and destroy its target.

ENLARGE

"Many people have been trying to develop a 'better mousetrap' for years, so we decided to build one in the literal sense," says its developer Jake Easton.Read More

Robot-controlled levitation sytem uses air to mysteriously move objects laterally

Aaron Becker and Robert Sandheinrich, with help from professor Timothy Bretl, built a computer-controlled air jet system that can make spherical objects like ping-pong balls not only float in place but also move along complex trajectories - even performing some acrobatic maneuvers like passing through wire loops.Read More

We Have A Winner!

It's A Mousetrap!

ENLARGE

The Winner of the Technology Grab Bag is:

Sidney San Martin!

Sidney is a technology consultant from New York, NY (Sidnicious.com). We are gathering some more information from him and will add it as soon as we receive it.

(Left-Right) Warren, Craig, and Sidney San Martin

Sidney not only correctly named the device, he did so in great (and accurate) detail! From his email:
Subject: It's a Mousetrap!
Body: A better mousetrap! The best mousetrap! An electronic, ultrasonic, pneumatic mousetrap.

After announcing he had won, we received an email from Sidney saying:

I had the picture up for a couple of weeks, trying to figure out just what that combination of parts could possibly do and grabbing other people in the office to talk about it. We made a last push and decided that it had to be a mousetrap."

Congratulations Sidney!Read More

New can crusher uses compressed air to quickly and conveniently smash beverage cans.

In an effort to make aluminum can recycling easier and more fun, EZ LIfe LLC has created the EZ Power Crusher. The can crusher uses 60 PSI of compressed air to quickly flatten a standard beverage can in less than one second.Read More

John Gill and Gary Arold from Hurley, NY built a compressed air cannon that fires a pumpkin at 600mph for up to a mile.

This is a real big-boy toy: a pumpkin cannon with a 97-foot-long barrel that shoots gourds roughly 4,000 feet, at a speed of 600 miles per hour. Tilted at a 45-degree angle, the cannon shoots about 3,500 feet high. Gill, a corn and vegetable farmer, and his construction buddy Gary Arold, built the pumpkin cannon in 2006 after they saw a friend's smaller model.Read More

Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation.Read More

FLARE is a pneumatic building facade system developed in Denmark. The FLARE system consists of a number of tiltable metal flake bodies. An infinite array of flakes can be mounted on any building or wall surface. Each metal flake reflects the light. When the flake is tilted downwards by a computer controlled pneumatic piston, its face is shaded from the light and appears as a dark pixel.