To download Maker Faire 2008 Vehicles MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the Build and Ornithopter article MAKE 08 "Build and Ornithopter" & You can see that in our digital edition.

Here are 8 ways to recycle the common 2 liter plastic soda bottle. Did you know...Americans throw away 2 million plastic bottles an hour. We throw away about 868 million pounds of it annually (about 75% of what's produced). That's an estimated $130,000,000 worth of plastic!
To download Water Bottle Recycled MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the Kitchen Floor Vacuum Former MAKE 11 "Kitchen Floor Vacuum Former" & You can see that in our digital edition.

PDF

Check out the Transitorize Your iPod MAKE 13 "Transisorize Your iPod" & you can see that in our digital edition.

Check out the MAKE 13 "Telekinetic Pen" & You can see that in our digital edition.

Check out the Explosion EngineMAKE 13 "Explosion Engine" & You can see that in our digital edition.

PDF

To download the fire shooter MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

A modified version of Diminutive Balls of FireMAKE 13 "Balls of Fire" & You can see that in our digital edition.

MP4 Video | QT Video | Subscribe in iTunes.

From the pages of MAKE - Project: Gun-Operated Alarm Clock - Hack a retro gaming light gun with tilt switches to control a vintage digital clock radio. When the alarm wakes you up, grab the gun and kill it off! Read it in the MAKE digital edition.

Clock radios are everyday hated devices that designers seem to ignore, judging by how little their features and user interfaces have changed. This project adds a new capability, letting would-be sleepyheads enjoy a human-machine interaction of a different sort. Don't worry, we're not going to connect your clock to an MP3 player and play mellow New Age sounds. We're going to shoot the alarm off. With a gun. Wake-up time is now payback time.

We'll base the project around a digital clock radio and a light gun for gaming; huge selections of both of these are available inexpensively second-hand, with many beautiful and well-designed examples. To enable our FPSI (First Person Shooter Interface), we'll outfit the gun with five tilt sensors, arranged at different angles on a small circuit board. A cable tethers the gun to the clock and carries your tilt and trigger signals to the clock's time and alarm control button contacts. - PDF & Instructable.

This week's CRAFT Video Podcast is the second in a two part series on how to make intarsia/stranded knitting pattern from an image in Photoshop. We'll go from the gridded pattern we made last week to a knitted back panel for the sweater using a mixture of intarsia and stranded multicolor knitting.

Related:

• Skeleton Cardigan Part 1 - CRAFT Video Podcast- Link.
• Skeleton Cardigan - CRAFT Pattern Podcast - Link.
  

This week's CRAFT Video Podcast is the first in a two part series on how to make intarsia/stranded knitting pattern from an image in Photoshop. We'll go from an old skeleton illustration to a gridded knitting pattern for personalizing your own Skeleton Cardigan.

Next Friday in Part 2, I'll show you how to work from the pattern to make the back panel of the Skeleton Cardigan!

You can also download the Skeleton Cardigan PDF pattern - Link.

This weekend on Best of Weekend Projects with Bre Pettis, learn how to hack your brain by making Mitch Altman's Brain Machine! It flashes LEDs into your eyes and beeps sounds into your ears to make your brain waves sync up into beta, alpha, theta, and delta brainwaves!

Mitch invents cool things that make the world a better place. He's well known for the TV-B-GONE and this brain machine is his latest project. One of the cool things about this project, is that it builds on an open source project. Mitch used Lady Ada's open source MiniPOV and switched out LEDs and added new capacitors and resistors and then rewrote the firmware to make it into the brain machine. It's super cool when people make hardware open source so that others can work with it!

Make sure to take pictures of your build and of you in your brain machine and upload them to the Make: flickr pool.

Get the podcast and pdf downloaded automatically in itunes. - Link

This week on Best of Weekend Projects, we look back at part two of the AHAB (High Altitude Balloon Adventure). In this epic Bre & Co. travel to Eastern Washington to launch a GPS and camera enabled balloon into NEAR SPACE!

mp4 | 3gp |3g2 | iTunes | blip.tv

This week on the best of Weekend Projects with Bre Pettis, we join him in arms and learn how to make a trebuchet. With a trebuchet, you can smash your enemy's castle or at least fling the heads of enemy spies into their courtyard. In the old days, the most important metric of a trebuchet is that it can fire farther than your enemy's archers can shoot their arrows!

In this podcast you'll see how to build a paperclip trebuchet and a medium sized trebuchet. The paperclip trebuchet can be made in under an hour and it teaches you a lot about how they work.

The medium sized trebuchet took a little longer to cut, drill, and screw together, but it's not hard.

Download the pdf for more instructions to make your own seige weapon!

MP4 Video | QT Video | HD | Subscribe in iTunes

I visited Bonnie Burton at Lucasfilm in San Francisco recently where she works her crafty magic creating projects on starwars.com for the kids section of the site. Take a look and enjoy some of the fun projects she makes. All I can say is how much I love the Yoda fountain!

Here's are the links to the project how-tos mentioned in the video:

• Yoda Doll - Link.
• Chewie Tissue Box Cozy - Link.
• R2D2 Pinhole Camera - Link.
• Mouse Droid Cat Toy - Link.
• Hammerhead Sock Doll - Link.
• Super Deformed Dolls - Link.

Check out also the archive to all the Star Wars crafts projects and more photos of the projects on Bonnie's Flickr.

Bonnie taught one of the most popular craft workshops at Maker Faire Bay Area last year -- How to make a Yoda doll. Here are some crafters showing off what they made! See more photos in Bonnie's Flickr set. - Link.

Also check out Bonnie's book, You Can Draw Star Wars that I reviewed last spring on the CRAFT blog. - Link.

This month we continue the best of "Weekend Projects" with Bre Pettis. This particular episode was made to celebrate the One-Year Anniversary of Weekend Projects and features the flames to prove it! If you haven't seen this podcast, its a doozy. Be sure not to burn your house down, and join Bre as he makes a JAM JAR JET!

This pulse jet works by igniting a flame, which pushes the gas out of the jar and then bit of a vacuum that it leaves sucks the air back in and the circle is repeated. Watch the video and download the pdf to learn how to make it!

mp4 | ipod | mov | hd-appletv | 3gp | 3g2 | pdf | itunes | youtube

Another bit of archived awesomeness from the Weekend Project vault!

Make your bike into a single speed hipster bike! This week Dave Neff joins me to take some old broken bikes and mash them up into a new radical ride. Everbody's experience will be different, but we rebuilt the bottom bracket, put new wheels on, chopped and flipped the handlebars, took off one of the front chain rings and put on a single speed bmx-style gear in the back. We did this because we made a bike out of parts found in the trash, but if you've got a working ten speed, you can just strip the derailleur, chop and flip the handlebars and switch out the back gears for a single speed freewheel gear.

Single speed bikes are great for folks who live in a moderately flat city. There are less parts to get stolen and less parts to break.

Don't miss a single video! You can get the Make: Video Podcast and PDFcast downloaded automatically by subscribing in itunes. - Link

The retro Weekend Project-o-thon continues!

Joe Grand and Bre Pettis join forces to become the Awesome Electronics Workshop and introduce you to the Arrr-duino! In this tutorial, you'll learn the basics of programming and setting up your arduino. Don't have one yet? You can get them in the Make: Store or build you're own! - Subscribe Link

Arduino in the Make: Store - Link

MP4 Video | QT Video | HD | Subscribe in iTunes

While at Maker Faire in Austin, I met Cristen Andrews of cristencrochet.blogspot.com who crocheted the most lovely backpacks, hats, cozies, bowls and more -- all from plastic bags. Here in this video she shows us some of the cool things she makes and how to get started crocheting with plastic bags.

For more detail, check out the step-by-step photos on her blog on how to prepare plastic bags for crocheting here. - Link.

Related:
CRAFT: Plastic Bag Crafts - Link.

mp4 | HD | Blip | Youtube | Subscribe

The Weekend Projects Podcast Reruns continue with the Rodent Powered Nightlight! This was a project inspired by the writing of William Gurstelle. I've done a lot of his projects and they're always awesome!

Make sure to check out the PDF for more detailed instructions!