If you have someone special who you want to make a nice electronic project for have a look at this LED Heart Project over at PyroElecto. Chris made it for his Grandmothers 91st birthday! Just think of the technology that his Grandmother has seen in her time, I am sure she will get [...]
It was great to see Audrey Armstrong, age 9, successfully complete her first solderless breadboard project at our breadboarding workshop. She built a 555 timer-controlled blinking LED circuit with a photo resistor to control the rate of the blinking. I was impressed. Great job, Audrey! Filed under: Maker FaireThe classic game of thumb war meets rock-em-sock-em-robots—if the robots in question are 30 feet tall and have hands the size of engine blocks. Thumby Wars, as it’s known, was the “Team’s Choice Selection” winner in this year’s Red Bull Creation contest, and saw its first public appearance today at [...]I ran into David Lang, co-founder of the OpenROV Project and MAKE contributor, at the OpenROV booth at Maker Faire. He and his cohorts build open source submersibles and they have a couple of the robots on hand to show off. They’re at Robot Row in Area C. Filed under: [...]Everybody likes Ikea for its cheap and relatively cool-looking furniture. The only problem is a trip to Ikea is a half-day commitment what with all the time spent parking and waiting in line. Diatom Studio’s SketchChair hopes to solve that problem. The start-up company was one of the exhibitors at [...]MAKE contributing editor Matt Richardson awards the 2012 Makey Award for Most Hackable Gadget to Raspberry Pi. Accepting was Ebon Upton, creator of the Pi, the wildly popular new Linux-based computer system on a chip. We have Raspberry Pi boards and starter kits in the Maker Shed here at the Faire, [...]Come see the Lumiphonic Creature Choir at World Maker Faire inside the Great Hall. The Choir will be performing at these times and this project is not to be missed. Part music performance, part projection, the faces that appear on the end of tentacles talk & sing and complete the [...]One of my favorite projects of the Faire — and there are tons of insane ones! — is Miguel Valenzuela’s Lego pancake CNC that can output pancake batter in any shape you’d like, including the shape of water molecules as well as the obligatory (if you have kids) Mickey Mouse [...]Jason Kridner from BeagleBoard.org and Texas Instruments is currently wandering around World Maker Faire New York with a BeagleBone-based mustache machine.Here’s 15-year-old Chip Mahoney with his nifty pinhole Polaroid camera. It takes about 20 seconds to make an exposure. He showed me a photo he took earlier in the day and the people are wispy ghost trails. Very beautiful. Filed under: Maker FaireI ran into Phil Torrone and Ladyada here at Maker Faire New York and they gave me an advance copy of their coloring book, E is for Electronics, an A-to-Z intro to electronics, from Andre-Marie Ampere to Clarence Zener (namesake of the Zener diode). The delightful illustrations are by Robert [...]
[Piet] wrote in to tell us about his hack that allows for his front gate to be opened without a key. Unlike this hack that we featured in August, you don’t need a subway pass, just a good memory. As explained in his article (and the video after the break) if the proper sequence of [...]
When you have a quick look at the mouse above you might not see anything special but with a closer look you will notice that the scroll wheel is not stock. Rhett sent in some pictures of his Logitech Scroll Wheel that he Upgrade to Titanium, he made the upgrade after the original wheel [...]
Next time you are out of flux you can make your own if you have a pine tree in your back yard. All you need is some of the tree resin and some IPA. Check out the full process on how to Make your own Solder Flux from Tree Resin over at the Magic [...]
Siete tutti invitati domani sera (28 Settembre 2012) alle ore 18:00 a Roma presso il Nuovo Cinema Palazzo per un incontro / presentazione sulle tematiche dell’autoproduzione, digital fabrication e Arduino. A seguire, durante l’aperitivo, riprenderà vita l’installazione San Lorenzo Virtual Bike, un’installazione interattiva che permette pedalando di immergersi virtualmente fra le strade del quartiere, e proietteremo [...]
Even if you live in a dump this quick build will make your doorbell sound high-class. The new rig uses a crystal goblet to alert you of guests at the door. We suppose the room-silencing sound of flatware on a wine glass does make a great attention getter. For [Tobias] the hardest part of the [...]
Last July 23-27 2012, the workshop on “Physical and Wearable Computing”, organized by SUPSI within the summer school in “Digital Fabrication and Interaction Design”, has took place involving about 20 participants. This workshop has proved to be a very good approach to introduce future makers to the concepts of digital fabrication, prototyping and design of interactive objects. On the workshop’s homepage, [...]
We have seen some pulse jet builds before but this Pulse Jet Kettle has to be once of the funniest builds I have ever seen. You can see the kettle in operation at the 3:20 mark of the first video. It has an added bonus of waking up everyone in the house to get [...]
Check out this cool DIY Pandora Player called the PandoraBar that Jianyi Liu built. His inspiration was the Mighty Ohm radio that we saw back in 2009. The initial thought was to use a router as the main processor but in the end Jianyi used the Beagle Board since it had the processing power [...]
[Santiago] recently completed this project which he calls Tuitwall. It will display your Twitter feed on an LED matrix. The method he used to put it together will come in handy for any project where you need to scrape information from the Internet. The project does require a server in addition to the Arduino hardware [...]
If you enjoy biking this Open Source Smartbike project will be of interest to you. Luis Cruz who brought us Eyeboards last year is now enrolled in the University of New Orleans and has started this new project. Luis will make the code and schematics available in December so you could make your own. [...]
We have seen lots of these word clock builds. Our friend Muris has just completed his word clock build, he is using a ATmega328P microcontroller to command the 248 LED matrix to show the time and a little something special (watch the video at around the 32 second mark). Atmel AT42QT1011 touch sensors add [...]
[Chet] is showing off the Bluetooth controller upgrade for this RC car. The donor vehicle is a rather inexpensive Porche which he purchased to make sure he didn’t start hacking up his more expensive toys. He took a bit different route than the IOIO RC truck we saw earlier in the week, but the concept [...]
Reborn is an australian digital creative agency whose mission is to design smart and innovative ideas. Among their works, a very nice one regards a hack consisting in the re-engineering of a sofisticated espresso machine, to show its peculiar features in the process of coffee making. By means of an Arduino board, the team can collect real-time information such [...]
Chris H built and sent me a revised board for LeafCAN. The V2 board puts all of the components on the back of the board, instead of facing the LCD. By also eliminating all of the header pins (except for the ones used to connect the LCD), the assembly becomes considerably thinner than V1: Below [...]
My house has a crazy amount of sprinklers. In the front yard alone, there are 14 channels, which have been controlled by two very old Irri-Trol DewBee 7-channel units. I’m sure that they were fancy high-end stuff when they were purchased, but they look like they’re over 20 years old. Not only were they a [...]
[V0R73X], who is 17 has been working on a project, to build A robotic arm. This project started out as a challenge put forward from one of his school teachers to build a robotic arm for $200. [VoR73X] accepted, and the challenge began. He came up with a robotic arm that can be controlled from his mobile phone and [...]
Chris, from PyroElectro.com, proposes a comprehensive tutorial on how to make a simple, yet effective, Arduino-based tachometer. The circuit is very simple: an IR led is coupled with an IR phototransistor to detect possible interruptions of the light beam, while the Arduino is responsible to calculate the time interval between two such events. Finally, a LCD is used [...]