Science writer Angela Saini confesses that as a late adopter of new technology, she struggles to reconcile a deep human desire to make, mend and recycle with the throwaway culture on which the development of new computers, gadgets and phones seems to depend. Much of this is inherited from the thrifty traditions of her parents.
Four Thought is a series of talks which combine thought provoking ideas and engaging storytelling. Recorded live in front of an audience at the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London, speakers air their latest thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect our culture and society.
Our elves Make: Labs Interns have been working on a little something extra for the holiday season. Every order the Maker Shed fulfills comes with bonus holiday cheer in the form of a wooden laser-cut Makey Robot. It’s our only Christmas wish that, when you open your package from the Maker Shed, you immediately hack Makey and send us the pictures. Cover Makey with a mosaic of PCB, glue him to your Festivus Pole, put him on your Christmas tree right next to your Flying Spaghetti Monster ornament, or make a wreath with old wire and cords and add Makey instead of a bow.
Tweet photos with the hashtag #MakeHolidays or #MakeyRobot, or post them to our Facebook wall. We will be on the look out for hacked ornaments, and rewarding the best shots with prizes from the Maker Shed.
Friend of MAKE, Kent K. Barnes, aka kentkb, used his Survival Pack and added blinking LED eyes. He posted shots in his I Made This! Flickr set, and included them in the MAKE Flickr pool. And just like that the holiday season got a little brighter. And a little blinky-er.
We’re giving away amazing kits from our new Make: Ultimate Kit Guide EVERY DAY — thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, including MakerBots!
To celebrate the release of our latest publication, the Make: Ultimate Kit Guide 2012 (and its companion website), we’re giving away at least one of the cool kits reviewed in the issue each day during the holiday season.
Today’s giveaway is a Thingamagoop 2 analog noise machine (value at $110). Here’s the first part of John Baichtal’s review of the Thingamagoop 2 from the Guide:
Analog voltage-controlled oscillators (AVOs) make a variety of intriguing hums, beeps, buzzes, and loops, controlled by buttons, knobs, and sensors. These are fantastic group projects because once the soldering irons are all put down, you get an excellent payoff: you can have an impromptu concert. Bleep Labs, run by Austin, Texas, circuit bender and kit maker John-Michael Reed, produces a few AVO kits that I’ve built and had fun with.
The Thingamagoop 2 features a square wave amplitude modulator and triangle wave pulse width modulator, packed into a lovely silkscreened metal enclosure. The Thingamagoop’s signature component is an LED on a bendable wire antenna called the LEDacle, which looks cool and, more importantly, interfaces with the light sensor hidden in the eye, making for a huge range of possible sounds.
To be eligible for today’s giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment below in this post. The entry period for today’s prize will be until 11:59pm PST tonight. We’ll choose one person at random, you’ll be notified by email, and you’ll have 48 hours to respond. The Winners List is kept on the Giveaway landing page. That’s it! No purchase necessary or anything else to do. Please leave only one comment per post. You can enter as many giveaways as you like until you win. This giveaway is for US residents only. You also must be 18 years old to enter (Kids: Ask your parents to enter). See the Kit-A-Day Giveaway landing page for full sweepstakes details and Official Rules.
Important Note: If you enter this drawing, when it’s over, please check the place where you registered to comment (eg. Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter). Some people are winning these kits and then not responding when we send them a message using the available means of contacting them. We want to make sure you get your giveaway!
This is the fifth installment of my series on building the MakerGear Mosaic 3D printer. This part covers installation of the “business end” of the machine, i.e. the extruder assembly, which consists of the preassembled motor and filament drive / hot-end groups, and the cooling fan. The fan and heater power leads, and the temperature sensor lead, are also connected at this stage.
Weekend Projects reader R. Lee writes in with his perfboard version of the Luna Mod Looper, one of many mods now out there in the wild. Not that I don’t appreciate the carpentry in Brian McNamara’s original project, but personally, this “all-guts-exposed” approach is my favorite style of making. I really like to see how something has been hacked. The full spectrum of colored wires helps me follow along with R. Lee’s connections and modifications, such as that “makeshift write button” connected via the green & yellow wires on the left side of the board – nice!
And because R. Lee went with perfboard instead of stripboard, his project mod is a winner for our latest Weekend Projects Challenge – all you have to do is build one of our project’s circuits on a boardtype different than the original project. We only have a few prizes remaining, so get making!
Sign up below for the Weekend Projects Newsletter to access the projects before anybody else does, get tips, see other makers’ builds, and more.
I wrote just last week about British electronics hobbyist Rupert Hirst’s method and homemade tools for bending his own aluminum project enclosures. This artfully-soldered PCB-free headphone jack amplifier is his latest project, and it only serves to reaffirm my impression of Rupert as a man with a refined sense of the aesthetics of DIY electronics. To top it off, he knows how to take a photo, too. The solid copper wire was harvested from cable intended for home wiring. Looks like Rupert intends to cast the whole thing in clear resin as a finishing touch.
If you read MAKE or visit Makezine regularly, you likely know William Gurstelle. He is our resident trebuchet enthusiast and the author of several high-octane how-to books, including Backyard Ballistics, Whoosh Boom Splat, The Art of the Catapult, Absinthe and Flamethrowers, and The Practical Pyromaniac. In MAKE Volume 28, Bill wrote an article on making a Gravity Catapult (shown in photo below). Here’s a brief interview with one of my favorite broad-spectrum makers.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I live in the beautiful city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It gets cold here in winter, so I have plenty of inclination to work on projects indoors where it’s warm. Although I do other things like give talks, mainly, I write for a living; writing books is the biggest part of what I do. I write a whole lot for MAKE and Popular Mechanics.
I am interested in making things, but more than that, I like to show other people how to make things.
Our own Michael Colombo created an instrument called the Magnetotron as a project for his New Interfaces for Musical Expression class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Inspired by the glass armonica and the Mellotron, this instrument is made out of a large spinning cylinder with audio cassette tape glued to it. Recorded on each strip of audio tape is a different note, which can be played by placing paddles on them. Colombo says that while some people think it sounds like a “banshee or a weasel,” he has a lot of fans that like it and appreciate how he is repurposing old analog technology.
The intriguing thing about author-illustrator Keri Smith‘s books is that they’re activity books for adults. In “Wreck This Journal“, Ms. Smith invites readers to smush leaves on the pages, fold and launder them, and otherwise do things we’re told not to do to books — plus use it as a journal. You don’t just read one of her books, you complete it.
When I pulled Laura Cochrane’s name out of the hat (and she I!) I sort of drew a blank because we don’t really know each other. Gar told me she likes papercrafts and rubber stamping, and my mind went immediately to Keri Smith’s work. Her latest book, Finish This Book, intrigues me, and this is what I’m giving to Laura.
The author, who is currently enjoying her maternity leave, very courteously emailed me a description:
It is part mystery, part journal, part activity book. It begins like this, while walking home from the library one rainy night, I found some scattered pages in a park. I attempted to put the pages in order and decipher the text which was badly blurred from having gotten wet. The resulting book appeared to have been some kind of manual for a secret order and gave some instructions on how to create your own secret order. While I did my best to research and transcribe the book I found, I am now putting it out there for others to decipher and complete. By working with this mysterious book, the reader in turn becomes the creator. I also offer some “secret intelligence training” to help the reader develop some important detective skills before they tackle the mystery.
“Finish This Book” invites the user into a secret world of their own making. The only question is “What will that world look like when you are done?” You have to complete it to find out. The book does not exist without you.
Maker Faire veteran Paul Nosa is up to some tour planning for 2012. He’d like to travel around the nation to public art walks, embroidering the imaginations of passers by with his solar and bike powered sewing machine built onto an aluminum rover that also displays his creations. Paul’s seeking funding on Kickstarter to bring solar sewing to a town near you. In the video above, watch him sew the entire tour route!
We’re giving away amazing kits from our new Make: Ultimate Kit Guide EVERY DAY — thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, including MakerBots!
To celebrate the release of our latest publication, the Make: Ultimate Kit Guide 2012 (and its companion website), we’re giving away at least one of the cool kits reviewed in the issue each day during the holiday season.
Today’s giveaway is a blinky kit trifecta containing the TV-B-Gone Kit, Red Blinky POV, and a MintyTime Clock (a combined $61 value.) It’s a fun grouping that will keep you busy during the holiday break. You can use the TV-B-Gone to turn off your neighbor’s new LCD TV, the Red Blinky POV to spread holiday cheer, and the Minty Time Clock kit to make a binary time Christmas tree! Have better ideas? Leave them in the comments!
Like all our giveaways, these kits are reviewed in our Make: Ultimate Kit Guide 2012 and reviewed on the companion website:
To be eligible for today’s giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment below in this post. The entry period for today’s prize will be until 11:59pm PST tonight. We’ll choose one person at random, you’ll be notified by email, and you’ll have 48 hours to respond. The Winners List is kept on the Giveaway landing page. That’s it! No purchase necessary or anything else to do. Please leave only one comment per post. You can enter as many giveaways as you like until you win. This giveaway is for US residents only. You also must be 18 years old to enter (Kids: Ask your parents to enter). See the Kit-A-Day Giveaway landing page for full sweepstakes details and Official Rules.
Important Note: If you enter this drawing, when it’s over, please check the place where you registered to comment (eg. Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter). Some people are winning these kits and then not responding when we send them a message using the available means of contacting them. We want to make sure you get your giveaway!
Add a layer of physical security to your USB drive data with this beautifully designed and machined thumb drive inside a cryptex-style combination lock cylinder, from Russian Steampunk enthusiast Tarator (machine translation).
Practically speaking, of course, anyone who managed to steal the drive could probably defeat the lock without too much effort, and its striking beauty might actually create more of an incentive to steal it than would otherwise exist. As I recall, Dan Brown’s original cryptex (Wikipedia) included a self-destruct mechanism for the (paper) data in the from of a vial of acid that broke if the lock was opened incorrectly. Maybe that’s the n + 1 iteration of this idea?
