This minimal wooden stubby chair brings the original park bench home!

Do you remember when park benches were actually just stubs of chopped trees or creatively placed wooden logs? I remember my mom could tell I had been to the park because my clothes smelled like wood and grass, and that is exactly what this beautiful stubby chair reminds me of! This chair is an amazing display of nostalgia and minimalism through furniture design.

The designer wanted to incorporate our inherent ways of interacting with nature into a chair. Stubby chair was inspired by these environmental settings that combined the love for interiors with an element from the exterior world. Nature is the best designer (for the most part!) so observing nature gives the designer a lot of clues and points of directions where they should pay attention so it fits seamlessly into our lives. “Over time, you settle down with some household items, borrowed from nature. At the same time, you understand that the world is changing and you are changing with it,” she says describing the simplistic design which can age with time.

It is about looking at a familiar object through a different lens. Stubby chair brings back that attention to the details and functions of a sturdy chair. What would be a wooden chair would now be considered outdated so the incorporation of the metal pipes shows the same wooden chair in a modern light. “Do not be attached to the place and time. Do not endow the item with any particular style because of its deposit and burden it with the historical era in which the item was created,” says the designer on the product’s evergreen design along with the philosophy behind it.

Designer: Nissa Kinzhalina

Stubby Is a Stargate SG-1-Inspired Hexabot You Can Build at Home

Stubby DIY Hexavot

The Stargate SG-1 replicators inspired Wyatt Olson to create a hexapod robot for a competition hosted by Hackaday back in April. Stubby, as this hexapod is called, is a fine example of what kind of complex robots people can build at home.

Ever since Olson submitted Stubby for that competition, he and his fellow (enthusiast) roboticists have been trying to improve the hexapod. I admire people who ever strive for progress and for doing things better, even though perfectionists have a few faults of their own.

In the following video, which was uploaded by Olson last week, you get to see the third version of Stubby. It’s easy to assume that the developer of the Stargate SG-1 inspired hexapod robot enjoys documenting his progress so that his fans are aware with the changes made from one version to another.

Stubby is omnidirectional, as exemplified in the video. Olson showed how easy it is for the robot to walk, turn and rotate its body along the three axes. Best of all, the hexapod robot can be controlled with a modified PlayStation 2 controller.

For a first-timer, Olson did quite well: “This project is my first experience with walking robots. The concept is loosely based off of the SG-1 universe’s replicators, although there are definitely differences. Stubby version 3 has six legs with three DOF per leg, whereas the replicators have four legs with four DOF per leg. Then there is the whole thing of Stubby not being able to consume raw resources to construct copies of itself… I figure I will add that feature in the next version.”

As you might have noticed, he’s determined not to stop here, so there will definitely be more versions in the future. Should the changes be dramatical, I will provide a follow-up to this story, just to see how a hexabot can be improved.

Lazy geeks might want to buy Stubby, but they should know that it is not commercially available. The others will be happy to know that all the tools and the components needed for building this robot from scratch are available on Stubby’s project page. Everything needed for making a hexabot such as this one shouldn’t cost more than $150, provided that you already have the necessary tools.

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