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Archives: December 2005

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December 31, 2005

New Year's Eve - Virtually!

If you're staying in tonight come join MAKE and Eric Rice in the virtual world, Second Life. The party will be at Spin Martin's place (Eric Rice) - at the Spin Martin Estate in Palulop (117/231). Eric has set up numbers to call 1-818-237-5533 or toll free 1-800-978-KSSX and will be streaming music in world (or here and here). If you're wondering what to wear to something like this, here's what I'm wearing... Link.

How Clocks are Made

Pat writes "Since all will be watching their clocks tonight, (except in Australia where the Blogger's Apprentice has already rung in the New Year), here's a fitting video, we thought, of how clocks are made." Link. Stay tuned for some info about a MAKE meet up online for New Years!

NPR : Inside the World of 'Do-It-Yourself'

Here's MAKE on Talk of the Nation, December 28, 2005 "Looking for new furniture, clothes or a remodeled house? Maybe it's time to "Do It Yourself." A peak at the curious and creative world of DIY. Guests: Shoshana Berger, editor in chief of ReadyMade magazine. Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of Make magazine. Tom Silva, general contractor on PBS' home improvement show, "This Old House"." Link.

Picture tour of the Edison-Ford Winter Estates...

Here's MAKE contributor Joe Grand (Grand Idea Studio, Inc.) and the Edison-Ford Winter Estates, 2350 McGregor Blvd., Ft. Myers, Florida. Tons of great photos. The estate is a very cool place with some amazing early prototypes of Edison's work (one of the original hardware hackers). Certainly worth a visit if you're ever in the area. Link. Hey Joe, nice shirt!

HOW TO - Circuit Hijacking

Leadingzero writes - "Several projects on this site involve the modding of consumer electronics for new and inventive purposes. The NES tv remote for example used an old remote control as the base of the whole project. However, the circuitry inside was diverted to the controls of an old NES controller. This process of redirecting the internal circuitry of a component is what I call "circuit hijacking" because essentially, the circuitry is "hijacked" to a new location and purpose. This method is by no means new, nor is it even difficult but in this article I will attempt to described the best ways that circuit hijacking is accomplished so you can begin hijacking your own circuits." Link.

Robot fish!

Robogumby writes - "Here's a wondeful page with all sorts of different robot fish including student projects from a Tokyo university. Most seem quite simple in principle using just one or two RC servo motors. This looks like it could be lots of fun." Link.

December 30, 2005

Makers: Reviewed on Slashdot

James Alguire has a review of our new book Makers on Slashdot - "Makers: All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things In Garages, Basements, and Backyards by Bob Parks, and published by O'Reilly, celebrates the basic human desire to create, to nail together two things that have never been nailed together before and see what it does. While I have worked in construction, built computers from scratch and done my share of soldering, I still felt a sense of wonder after reading about the 76 projects outlined in this book." Read the rest of James's review..." Link.

Make a Musical Ode to the Leap Second

Peter writes "Since atomic clocks worldwide will add a leap second New Year's Eve 2006, we decided we wanted to immortalize the moment in sound. Create a one-second piece of music and email it to us, and we'll have the results by New Year's. It's the ultimate in economical music -- meaning uncompressed audio (AIFF/WAV) is perfectly kosher!" Link.

Open source web based home automation

NCT writes "Here's some great opensource DIY Home automation software, written in Perl with a Web interface. For windows or Linux/unix. It also works with the One Wire Weather station posted a few days ago." MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It's fun, it's free, and it's entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. Link.

Simon Says Christmas Wreath...

Good one for next year! Ryan writes "Most of us remember the popular memory game Simon from the late 70's. In this hack, I converted simon to play on a christmas wreath. Bust this out next year along with some egg nog and impress your friends with a non-traditional wreath decoration." Link.

HOW TO - Build the ULTIMATE Garage Door Monitor

Dan writes "Build the ultimate garage door monitor, if you like home automation, you will definitely like this. This How-To shows how to monitor the exact position of the garage door, and display its status in your touchscreen interface (in this case, Main Lobby). A lot of details, but easy to understand."Link.

DIY Metal Chess Figures

Claude writes "My newyear present for all makers: Industrial Design DIY chess pieces out of nuts and bolts, brass and steel. I had seen a picture of similar chess figures in a book about chess, so i decided to build my own using commonly found 8mm nuts, bolt and other metallic pieces, some glue (to fix parts to base, which is a 14mm nut)". Link.

DIY RCA Theremin Replica

"Mark McKeown loved the classic RCA Theremin so much that he built one to spec from scratch, down to the vintage power supply, coils, and cabinet. With authentic tubes and other details, this near-perfect replica can reproduce the instrument's sound far better than a cheap kit. Mark includes links to resources for specs and supplies if you want to try it yourself." [via] Link.

December 29, 2005

Search all of MAKE with Instant Message, with the MAKEbot

Reminder, the MAKEbot delivers the best of MAKEZine.com, Flickr, Instructables and del.icio.us all via your buddy list on AIM. And now you can search ALL of MAKE, the blog and the magazine, all with instant message! After you add the MAKEbot, just type search, then what you're looking for or just type what you want with a ? at the end, like this - MAKEbot search for iPod! Click here to add the MAKEbot to your buddy list, then type help for a list of commands or just click here to subscribe. Over the last week hundreds of people have messaged the MAKEbot and we've given away hundreds of free copies of MAKE to many lucky people too! Want a free digital edition? Just add the bot, type comment and your email address!

HOW TO - Build an iPod Shuffle FM transmitter

MAKE photo pool member Shufflehacks writes "I built my own radio-transmitter for my Shuffle, I nicknamed it "iMouse". It works quite easy, there is a power switch on the bottom to turn it on. Just press play on the Shuffle and tune your radio to the right frequency. The range is about 100 to 150 meters.(500 feet) Now I can enjoy my Shuffle on my car stereo." Link. It's made out of an old mouse, excellent.

Make your own internet connected weather station

"Oww is a software project, to communicate with the Dallas 1-wire weather station and other 1-wire sensors, presenting live weather readings, logging data to file, uploading data to weather Web sites, and sending data to other programs through a command line interface." Thanks Jason! Link.

HOW TO - Use a scanner lamp inside your computer...

Pastelero has a great use for an old scanner lamp, use it inside a PC! "I had a broken scanner around here, so I decided to do something with it. I decided to install the lamp inside my computer. And it worked!!! So I'll try to explain what I did to make it work. I believe it's different for different scanners, but you can try to figure out for yours!" Thanks Star! Link.

HOW TO - Ground Effects Lights For Your Bike!

Nice Instructable from Maxwell - "An easy DIY project to add ground effects lights to your bicycle or other means of conveyance, utilizing inexpesive and commonly available cold-cathode lights. They look cool, and really do increase your visibility at night. Since putting them on my tallbike everone is asking to take my picture." Link.

DIY RFID Implant

Electric clothing writes "At the next Dorkbot meeting in NYC (Wednesday, January 4th @ 7pm) Mikey Sklar will be explaining the process he used to install a $2 RFID tag in his left hand. His talk will cover why he choose to do this, the necessary materials, different tag options, and what he and other people have been doing with these tags." Link. See our interview with a RFID implanter as well.

Speed controller circuit for radio controlled boats...

"This application note describes a circuit designed to control the speed of a dc motor used in radio-controlled boats. The electronic speed controller (ESC) is a "no-brake, forward-only" controller. I wanted to keep the part count low and the circuit simple so a couple features were sacrificed. The circuit does not have: over-current protection, over-temp protection, polarity protection, or over/under voltage protection. All the parts can be obtained from digikey distributors. The circuit was designed with a popular 12-cell model boat motor in mind (graupner speed 700). This project was my first attempt at using Bascom-avr and Atmel microcontrollers. " Thanks JasonR! Link.

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