Bryan Cockfield

The first known use of humans using wind to perform mechanical work with machines dates back to ninth-century Persian windmills. But if we count sailing vessels among those machines, the history goes back to sometime just before the invention of written language. Since then, humans have been sailing everything from the tiniest of Sunfish to the largest of shipping vessels, and even sailing boats like canoes that aren’t typically designed for efficient sailing.

One of the simplest robots to make is a bristlebot — a motor with an offset weight is attached to the head of a toothbrush, and the resulting vibrations will move the contraption across a flat surface. [Very Lazy Pixels] recently took this idea a bit further by turning the Steam Controller into a steerable, bristlebot-like robot. To drive one’s Steam Controller across a desk, all that is needed is for a computer with a paired controller and a Chromium-based browser.

For as popular as the piano is in music studios, homes, and schools, it almost defies logic. Compared to a guitar, harmonica, or drum set, pianos are incredibly complex machines that can have somewhere on the order of 8,000 moving parts in a case that can easily weigh hundreds of pounds and which often responds quite poorly to seasonal changes in temperature and humidity.