But as team member Jon Masse says on the Pheromone blog, “I mean, who really wants to sit and manually take 10,000 photos?”—so he and his colleagues built . Basically, they made a robot finger. .

I’ve always thought that being the guy who builds stress-testing machines has got to be fun. One of the things that makes IKEA worth it (guess who just furnished a new apartment) is the series of little glassed-in museum exhibits showing off how they prove that their otherworldly flat-pack furniture will actually stand up to human use.

The machines often look like they have no relation whatsoever to the hands that will actually apply real-life stresses, and the idea of building some crazy setup that unexpectedly, exactly simulates a human motion is pretty fascinating. Pheromone’s post on the automatic button-pusher proves that I was right about it being fun: Masse gets positively gleeful as he describes the design process and the end results.

Cobbled together using a Lego Mindstorm kit and a couple of borrowed styluses, the grey-yellow-and-purple Lego structure sits on Masse’s desk, repeatedly propelling the styluses toward a stationary iPad. Of course, its merits as a timesaver may be undermined by how fun it is to watch a little plastic doohickey push buttons…

[ via ]