May 16th, 2013

Here’s A Weekend Project For First-Time Tinkerers: Turn Your Converse Into A DIY Light Show

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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

April 30th, 2013

DIY HAL Replica Wants You To Close The Pod Bay Doors, Dave

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Everyone’s favorite electronics hobby shop, Adafruit has posted instructions for building your own HAL 9000 replica out of a big red button, an Arduino board, and some cleverly cut plastic. Best of all? With the press of a button you can make HAL tell you what to do – until you kill it. → Read More

April 26th, 2013

Designer Builds 3D-Printed Headphones That Use No Manufactured Parts

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If the whole of human knowledge were to be wiped out tomorrow, how would you recreate the consumer electronics industry so you can jam out to some rockin’ tunes? Why you’d build these unique 3D-printed headphones. Except for some twists of wire, these cans consist of thin pieces of printed plastic and the speakers are actually plastic with a coil of copper wire embedded, by hand, into a set of… → Read More

April 24th, 2013

Kids DIY Game Creation App TinyTap Heads To iPhone, Launches Its Own App Store

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TinyTap, a Tel Aviv-based platform that allows children to create their own mobile games and “playable” books, is now expanding from the iPad to the iPhone, as it also launches its own social marketplace for apps. Here, users can sell their TinyTap creations to others, or just share them for free. The move comes roughly six months after the company announced its half a million dollar seed round→ Read More

April 23rd, 2013

The BeagleBone Black Is A New Single-Board Computer That Can Brew Beer

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While the Raspberry Pi is great for educating kids about computing, can it brew a mean beer? The BeagleBone Black can. Trevor Hubbard, an engineer at Texas Instruments, uses the new, next-gen board to control heat exchangers and monitors to handle beer temperature remotely. → Read More

April 18th, 2013

These 3D-Printable Lithopanes Are Today’s DIY Coolness

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Lithopanes are objects created to let light through to different degrees, allowing you to create a sort of greyscale image that is visible when the plate is placed against a light source. Created by the folks at Makerbot, the lithopanes are completely customizable and you can upload your own images that will then print in about an hour on a standard printer. → Read More

April 2nd, 2013

Circuit Playground Is Adafruit’s Educational Series For Helping Kids Learn About Electronics

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

March 20th, 2013

The Raspberry Pi Dynamic Headlight Can Tell You How Fast You’re Cycling

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

February 27th, 2013

Be The Life Of The Cubicle Farm With A DIY Sound-Sensing Tie

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

February 26th, 2013

How A Teacher Turned To Technology To Solve A Thorny Problem And Raised $100K

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

February 25th, 2013

MakeXYZ Helps You Find An Idle 3D Printer Near You

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Idle 3D printers are the bane of the creative class. That’s why MakeXYZ.com is so important. It is a service that helps you find 3D printers near you and request print jobs. Like the remote batch jobs of yore, you can simply contact a MakeXYZ maker and they’ll print off your item. → Read More

February 11th, 2013

This Open-Source, Robotic Tentacle Will Haunt Your Dreams

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

January 31st, 2013

DIY R2-D2 Heels Are Perfect For Your Next Black Tie-Fighter Event

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Fans of Star Wars can take their love of droids and kitten heels to the streets with this DIY Instructables project. Created by Mike Warren, an editor at the site, these are the droid shoes you’re looking for. → Read More

January 25th, 2013

Just In Time For The Weekend, We Present The DIY LEGO Pancake Bot

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

January 22nd, 2013

A French Artist Is Posting DIY Robot Parts So We Can Print Our Own Androids

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Gael Langevin wants to give you a robot. The French artist is posting 3D printer files for a humanoid robot he’s building as he completes the various parts, allowing us all to create our very own plastic helper/lover with some ABS plastic, a few Arduino boards, and some motors. → Read More

December 23rd, 2012

This DIY Mini-Tardis Is Bigger On The Inside

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

December 20th, 2012

DIY Mobile Website Creator bMobilized Adds Another $2.5 Million In Series A Funding

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bMobilized, a New York-based mobile web startup offering small businesses a way to convert their existing websites into HTML5, mobile-optimized sites, has raised an additional $2.5 million in Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The new funding comes from previous investors Norway’s Alliance Venture and Investinor, as well Alden AS. The funding also comes on top of the $1.5→ Read More

December 19th, 2012

Hey! Your Hexapod Is In My Hexcopter!

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

December 11th, 2012

DIY: Make Your Own Solar-Powered Raspberry Pi FTP Server

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In the pantheon of geek projects there are few things as potent as the creation of an FTP server. Rather than doing cool stuff like serving up web pages or handling phone calls, an FTP server just sits there serving up files like a Michelin-starred chef slinging hash at a diner. But what if you made it solar-powered? What then? → Read More

December 10th, 2012

New Arduino Esplora Provides A Ready-For-Gaming, Customizable, Open Source Video Game Controller

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Arduino unveiled a new preassembled board today, one that includes a variety of sensors and controls already assembled, allowing aspiring game programmers to quickly and easily get up and running with functional hardware out of the box, without having to break out the soldering iron. It includes light and temperature sensors, an accelerometer, four push buttons, a joystick and a slider, as well as… → Read More

December 6th, 2012

I’m Not Afraid Of 3D-Printed Guns

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As someone who has been following the 3D printing revolution very closely, I’m convinced it will bring about a new industrial revolution. What that means – and where it will put us at the end of the day – is a question that I feel I can’t answer yet. But we can, with some clarity, see what is going on with projects like Wiki Weapons. → Read More

November 25th, 2012

Body Hacks: Building An Open-Source, Theremin-Like Vibrator

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

November 19th, 2012

Gift Guide: DIY Marble Machine Kit

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

November 15th, 2012

Gift Guide: Solder: Time LED Watch Kit

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Geek parents will get a huge kick out of the Solder:Time watch kit from Spikenzie Labs. It’s a cute kit that contains all the parts you need to make a large, readable LED watch. Just grab a soldering iron on Christmas Day and get cracking. → Read More

September 8th, 2012

Hacker Uses A Kinect To Help His Mom Email After A Stroke

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

September 5th, 2012

DIY Sugru Fixbot Robotic Arm

Robotic arms haven’t been the same since Tomy stopped making the Armatron but that doesn’t mean you have to live your life without a robotic helpmate. The Fixbot Robotic hand is a DIY project that requires a bunch of time, servos, and 3D printed parts, but it’s easy to make if you have a little time. It’s part of a marketing campaign by Sugru, a self-setting moldable rubber for repairing… → Read More

August 20th, 2012

LittleBits Is A Nearly Perfect Electronics Discovery Kit

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I’ve been hearing about LittleBits, an electronics kit for hobbyists and kids, for quite a while but I never got a chance to play with them until recently. The company recently announced a funding round with hardware manufacturer PCH and they launched their Extended Kit, a new box of bits.

The kit allows you to build simple circuits using a power source, a connector, and an output. For example… → Read More

August 17th, 2012

Webs.com Adds A Facebook Cover Image Designer To Its DIY Page Creation Tool, Pagemodo

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Webs.com, a DIY website creation service that helps non-technical, non-designers build good-looking websites on the fly, is introducing a new product today to complement its other offerings: a tool for creating professional Facebook Cover photos. Given that Webs.com’s target audience consists of those building business websites and Facebook pages, the new addition makes sense, especially now that… → Read More

July 31st, 2012

This DIY Lego Wheelchair Can Carry (Small) Passengers

Burf aka Simon Burfield is an iOS programmer and Lego experimenter who tries to take building blocks to the next level. Interestingly, if this wild rideable Lego wheelchair is any indication, he’s left the next level and is now firmly in the distant future.

Made with 12 Lego NXT motors and 12 multi-directional wheels, this carefully designed prototype can carry around a 198 pound person and is… → Read More

July 19th, 2012

When The Boss Is Gone, Rock Out With This Automatic Party Desk

Some folks we met in Charlotte had a mission: they wanted to win a contest (sponsored by Red Bull) for the coolest Arduino project in the land. I think they may have nailed it. The project, built by engineers and designers for Edison Nation, turns an ordinary desk into a booze-infused party zone when the clock hits five (or when you slap the Swingline stapler.) → Read More