MAKE » Category: Electronics

Controlling LEDs with Charlieplexing

Stett Holbrook — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:51:03 +0000

MAKE contributor Andy has created a great tutorial to introduce you to the utility of "Charlieplexing," a method for controlling multiple LEDs without the use of multiple microcontroller pins. With charlieplexing you can turn on or off one LED at a time. To light more than one LED at a time, you can scan the LEDs by turning a sequence of them on and off really fast.

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New Project: DIY 3D Laser Scanner Using Arduino

Ken Denmead — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:05:11 +0000

The principle behind this scanner is the typical of a line scanner. A laser beam intercepts the object to be measured and a camera, positioned at a known angle and distance shoots a series of images. With some trigonometry considerations and optic laws it is relatively easy to reconstruct the Zeta dimension, the measurement of the distance between the object and the camera.

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Milwaukee Makerspace’s Hacked Water Cooler

John Baichtal — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:58:08 +0000

Ron Bean has a fascinating post on Milwaukee Makerspace’s wiki about his project to plumb in the hackerspace’s water cooler. In addition to the obligatory refrigerator full of soda (or sometimes empty of soda, depending on whether anyone’s filled it recently), we also have a water cooler that takes the […]

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5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Things About Joe Grand

Goli Mohammadi — Thu, 23 May 2013 23:42:23 +0000

San Francisco-based electrical engineer Joe Grand has spent the last two decades finding security flaws in hardware devices and educating engineers on how to increase the security of their designs. He specializes in inventing, designing, and licensing products and modules for electronics hobbyists. Joe has been on the MAKE technical advisory board since the first issue, and is the author of the longest project (35 pages) to ever run on the pages of MAKE.

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The Toa Mata Drumbots Return

Nick Normal — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:55:56 +0000

Italian maker and sound producer Giuseppe Acito returns with his robot percussion band by combining LEGO Bionicle bots, Arduino Uno, and an iPad MIDI sequencer app.

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Use an Op Amp to Make a Self-Dimming Night Light

John Baichtal — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:02:39 +0000

On Make: Projects, Jason Poel Smith uses a pair of LM741 op amps to build an self-dimming night light that turns itself off after a period of time so you don’t waste electricity. The timer is made from a 741 op amp (operational amplifier) wired as a comparator. It compares […]

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Brendan Dawes: Sharing Your Work

Andrew Sleigh — Wed, 22 May 2013 22:00:08 +0000

This week, I interviewed the designer and maker Brendan Dawes for my podcast, Looking Sideways. Brendan's known for early interactive web projects like Psycho Studio, that allows users to remix Hitchcock's famous shower scene themselves. He's also known for his physical projects, such as the Moviepeg and Popa iPhone accessories, and devices that cross the digital/physical divide, such as the Happiness Machine, an internet-connected printer that prints random happy thoughts from people across the web. We talked about designing physical objects that embody hidden digital information.

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Maker Pro: How Much Should I Charge?

Stephen Murphey — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:07:58 +0000

Figuring out how much to charge for your product is the second most common question entrepreneurs ask themselves. The first is of course..."what should I build in the first place.” Assuming you’ve made it past the first question and there is a market for your product, you have to figure out how to price your product. I reached out to several entrepreneurs for real world examples you can use for your hardware startup.

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Playing A Human Theremin

Andrew Salomone — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:37:20 +0000

Graphic designer Lucy Sansom turned her sister into a human theremin and then made this video demonstrating how she is played!

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Diyode Codeshield Gets a Lesson Plan

John Baichtal — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:18:35 +0000

The Diyode Codeshield is a fascinating project out of the Diyode hackerspace in Guelph, ON. It’s an Arduino shield loaded with sensors, a buzzer, a motor, LEDs, a rotary encoder, and so on, with the idea that it would help people learn Arduino programming without having to learn about electronics […]

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