chlamydia genome: MacGyver Challenge Winner: Up Your Game With Sugru [Macgyver Challenge]

MacGyver Challenge Winner: Up Your Game With Sugru In this week's MacGyver Challenge, we asked you to hack something cool with Sugru. We received some great entries, but the winning hack belongs to Aaron Schmersal, who blew us away with his crazy-awesome game pad cover for his phone's physical keyboard.

Check out the description of Aaron's winning entry below and read about some of our other favorite entries.

Winner: Up Your Game With Sugru

Aaron's write-up for his hack was so good, we're just going to let him tell the story:

So this was the problem originally. The touch screen controls were over the screen, and my thumbs covered half the screen I was supposed to be watching! As you can imagine, it made it very difficult to slay my foes!

But all was not lost. For I had a physical keyboard attached to my phone! The emulator allowed me to program the buttons that would normally be used for typing and change them into buttons used to control link!

But alas, my thumbs were still too fat! In the heat of battle, my fat thumbs would find the wrong buttons, causing me to run away instead of charge my enemy! As you can imagine, this caused problems.

A wild Sugru appears!

What's this!? Can Sugru help me stop being a coward in battle? Can Sugru help me slay my foes?! Can I too become a "Sugru Guru"? Why, I think I can!! I covered my phone in plastic wrap and went to work!

I opened up 4 small packs of Sugru and wrapped this fancy substance around the keyboard of my phone, taking great care to get an imprint of each button. After it cured, I removed the plastic wrap and now solid Sugru, peeled the two apart and began placing my thumbs where I thought the buttons should go. But what to use as the buttons!? More Sugru? Might be too squishy. Beads? Sure, why not? But my D-pad needed to be special...Iconic... so I salvaged the D-pad from an old broken controller.

I cut small circular holes in the Sugru where I wanted the buttons to sit, cut out a + where the d-pad would sit and placed them all together! I took great care in making sure each bead would land correctly on the phone's keyboard. I sealed them in place with one last pack of Sugru and waited once more for it to cure.

At last! Completion! Now I can fight my enemies with ease!

Honorable Mentions

We got a lot of great entries and we'd be remiss if we didn't share some of our favorites. Here are some of the entries that really impressed us.

Find Your Flashlight in The Dark

MacGyver Challenge Winner: Up Your Game With Sugru When it's dark and you need a flashlight, how do you find it? Kyle Lawson has the answer and he shared it with us in this hack of simple genius. First, he mixed some glow-in-the-dark powder with white Sugru (which is genius enough right there) and then added it to the back end of his flashlight. Really, there's no end to what you could do with glow-in-the-dark Sugru, not the least of which is sticking it on emergency devices or other things you might want to find in the dark.

Repurpose Old iPhone Docks for the iPhone 5

MacGyver Challenge Winner: Up Your Game With Sugru Joey Principato was not happy that Apple isn't making a dock for the iPhone 5. So, what's a Lifehacker to do? You don't want to lay your phone just right there on the desk, do you? Joey solved his problem by using two old iPhone docks and a bag of Sugru he'd been looking for an excuse to play with. He dismantled the two docks and removed the components, leaving the metal weights in place. He then fed the new Lightning cable through both docks and plugged his phone in so that he knew the plug was in the right place. He used a bit of Sugru to secure the cable in place inside the docks and then a bit more to permanently stick the two docks together. After letting it dry for a day, he filled in the rest of the dock with Sugru.

Fix Up Your Boat

MacGyver Challenge Winner: Up Your Game With Sugru Eric Taylor loves his sailboat. Eric Taylor also loves Sugru. He sent us a bunch of fixes and improvements he's made around his boat and we wanted to share them all with you. Check out the gallery below to see what Eric has done. Happy boating, Eric!