Mechanical Movements and Ingenious Mechanisms

Spontaneous Projects is a chronicle of all of my projects, a reference for me, and a way to prevent others from making the same mistakes. 
This is a listing of a few pages that I wandered across and felt would be useful for future spontaneous projects.

I was wandering around the internet the other day, looking at crazy gears and the like... something I want to play with a bit more once I get my scroll saw back, but these were linked in the page.

These books are really interesting, out of copyright and should be useful for mechanical art pieces and the like

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown, published 1868

Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors Vol 1 by Franklin D. Jones, Copyright 1930
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 4 



The same site that hosts the Ingenious Mechanisms volumes also has a huge variety of docs, including instructions for making band saws, lathes and the like.
It's well worth a look

Things I'm looking to do

There are a few things on this list at the moment, as I haven't had the time, or money for the last few months.

I want to have a play with both the Raspberry Pi and Arduino systems... haven't really got a plan for the Arduino though, but there are a few options for the Pi:

- A car media manager, combining a few gig of music, and a bluetooth dongle, The Pi can supposedly create it's own hotspot and act as an apple airport system. This will allow my, or other people to stream music to it, which it can play through the stereo. If I don't want to use the phone to stream podcasts, I can use the inbuilt music to play.

- A similar idea, but over wifi, and able to be streamed to by a pc as well... I haven't seen any writeups of this, but it seems like it should be doable. This will allow me to use the tablet to watch hockey, while using the better speakers - and move more than a meter away while I do so. Ideally this would become 2 or more speakers, in different rooms, with a way to switch between all/ some/ one of them.


I also have plans to build a tricopter that is stable, for the purposes of cave exploration - a long term goal would be to use it to generate a 3d map of the cave system using computer vision, or other technology. But even with a manual control system it will be a fun way to get wetline/highline footage, and some cool climbing shots.

And I have the PCB for a Nixie clock that I got from kickstarter:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/8807675/nixie-tube-clock-project, so it seems like a bit of soldering is in my future once I obtain the $100 or so worth of components, fortunately the board is already programmed, so it's a simple matter of building the board and adding power, and making a cool case to make a nice steampunk clock.