Jack Conte, musician and founder of Patreon, has been on a tear lately with a set of unique music remixes performed by him and a group of pneumatic robots that fire off audio sequences to create some amazing music. → Read More
There are few things as satisfying – and dangerous – as burning through stuff with a laser. Drake Anthony AKA Sytropyro is a young man who enjoys making DIY lasers out of things and he recently completed a 3000mW laser made from the diode of an old DLP projector that can blow out a beam so hot that it burns paper, plastic, and electric tape in seconds. → Read More
The weekend isn’t upon us just yet, but here’s a little project to tuck away for when the Sunday doldrums set in — the New York-based tinkerers/part suppliers at Adafruit Industries have worked up a way to give your old pair of Chuck Taylors a bit of luminescent DIY flair. → Read More
Adafruit, the DIY electronics website and marketplace, is espousing the popular strategy of “get em’ young” with a new live action short video series broadcast on YouTube. The series, called Circuit Playground, takes an alphabetical approach to teaching kids about the basics of circuits, components and concepts that will come in handy if the tots watching have aspirations of becoming electrical… → Read More
A Brooklynite named Matt Richardson has built a working prototype of a bicycle headlight that uses a Raspberry Pi to project his current traveling speed as he rides around the city. Richardson calls it the Raspberry Pi Dynamic Headlight, and it’s one of those jaw-dropping DIY projects that makes you wonder why this isn’t something you can buy in a store yet. → Read More
When I used to work in Fairfax, Virginia as a computer consultant during the dot-com boom (actually I was a documentation specialist) we’d all go down to Pizza Hut for their lunch buffet. They had pizzas all laid out – three or four flavors, plus dessert pizza. A salad bar. I’d go with a bunch of people whose names I forget now (I didn’t make a lot of friends when I worked in Fairfax. I’d go for… → Read More
The clincher, the thing that made Quick Key go viral, was a poorly-lit video of an excitable guy holding his iPhone up to a Scantron page, one of those test pages you used to fill out in school. He thumbs through page after page, making comments on students’ performance as the app scans the page and instantly reports a grade. The video was amazingly compelling. The creator, Walter O. Duncan IV… → Read More
In the underground world of robotic tentacle makers, there are two rules: 1) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making and 2) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making. Both of those rules have been shattered by Matthew Borgatti, a robotics designer who has created a life-like, 3D-printed tentacle that flails around quite disturbingly using Arduino boards and a set of mini air compressors. → Read More
If you only watch one video today, it should be this one. You will discover that it is footage of a DIY LEGO pancake maker which is, in my expert opinion, the best thing to come out of Norway since the fjords. Created by Miguel Valenzuela, an American maker abroad, the project has been around for a few years but this video shows us how the project works in detail, further proving that the nascent… → Read More
If you’ve watched and enjoyed the program known as “The Good Doctor Who” in which an alien of some sort who flies around with his little, knobby robotic buddy (I’m not entirely clear on the details), you’ll be pleased to note that one fan, our own former employee Greg Kumparak, has built a real Tardis police box which, using some digital trickery, is really bigger on the inside. → Read More
When we look back on the events that led up to the rise of our Robotic Overlords, I think this will be a day that will live in infamy. Some foolish mortals at Mad Lab Industries have, for their own twisted reasons, connected a Phantom AX Hexapod robot to a six-rotor helicopter kit, thereby creating a flying/crawling insect hybrid that can walk through tight spaces and then take off. → Read More
For your postprandial pleasure I present the an open-source vibrator that you (or your partner) can play like a theremin. The story of how it came to be is pretty amazing and involves FCC chip lookups, bit-tracing, and lots of assembly code. In short, it’s an amazing effort in DIY hardware hacking that serves the dual purpose of education and giving pleasure. → Read More
Keeping with my theme of DIY projects as gifts, I present to you this little treat, a laser-cut marble machine that comes to us via merry old England. While the mechanism is cool – you turn a little crank and send the balls climbing up a hill and then down a little ramp – the real fun comes in assembling the jolly little machine. → Read More
Here’s a heartwarming story for a Hackathon Saturday: Chad Ruble’s mother suffers from aphasia due to a stroke. She hasn’t been able to use a keyboard for years because she is simply unable to recognize text. In order to help her, he built a Kinect-enabled interface that lets her move her hand around a series of simple icons – happy, sad, upset, etc. – and other icons that signify degree.
After… → Read More
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