For the upcoming Vancouver Mini Maker Faire fundraiser party tonight, Vincent van Haaff made a fun confetti party with openFrameworks.
Posted by Emily Smith | Thursday March 15th, 2012 3:31 PM
Categories: Craft, Fun & Games, General, Open Source Hardware, Science | 1 Comment
DIY physics guru David Prutchi coveted one of the expensive professional-grade gyroscopic camera stabilizers made by Kenyon Laboratories. "These devices," he observes, "don’t seem to have changed much since Kenyon’s...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Monday March 12th, 2012 6:00 AM
Categories: Photography & Video, Science | 23 Comments
I wanted an unusual shot to show off the results from my recent soda can label embossing project, and had some success using this unusual method. There is a classic...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Monday February 27th, 2012 1:00 PM
Categories: Photography & Video, Science | 11 Comments
Refurbishing old scientific and industrial equipment from eBay is something I love to do. If you understand what you’re looking for and are a savvy eBay user, you can score...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Tuesday February 21st, 2012 6:00 AM
Categories: Electronics, Science | 4 Comments
Last March, roboticist Eric Brown and co-workers at the University of Chicago made headlines with their new, unconventional robot gripper design: a balloon filled with coffee grounds or other grainy...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Friday February 17th, 2012 6:00 AM
Categories: Robotics, Science, Workshop | 2 Comments
In today’s project on diyphysics.com, David Prutchi shows how to build a Cockcroft–Walton multiplier using a “ladder” of capacitors and diodes on perfboard, submerged in mineral oil, inside a sealed...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Thursday February 9th, 2012 1:00 PM
Categories: Electronics, Science | 2 Comments
David Prutchi, whose surplus plutonium probe shenanigans we covered last week, received Micro-Mark’s branded version of the popular Sieg X2 mini mill for a recent birthday, then retrofitted it with...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Tuesday February 7th, 2012 6:00 AM
Categories: 3D Printing, Science, Tools, Workshop | 3 Comments
The late unpleasantness in Japan has recently focused our attention on homemade radiation detectors. These are often lumped together under the term “Geiger counter,” but in fact there is more...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Thursday February 2nd, 2012 1:42 PM
Categories: Electronics, Science | 5 Comments
DIY methods for electroactive polymer actuators are hard to come by, and none of them are kitchen-counter simple. But compared to the wet chemical methods circulating in the academic research...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Thursday January 26th, 2012 1:02 PM
Categories: Electronics, Science | No Comments
On Friday, the Discovery Channel announced that Mythbusters stars Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage are creating a new reality show where contestants duke it out by creating Rube Goldberg machines....
Posted by John Baichtal | Monday January 23rd, 2012 5:30 PM
Categories: Science | 4 Comments
Very cool widget from British firm RTL Materials, who’ve figured out a trick for making composite tubes that are pre-stressed, like a tape measure, such that they want to roll...
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Monday January 23rd, 2012 6:00 AM
Categories: Science, Workshop | 13 Comments
Shape-memory metals get a fair amount of attention, but shape memory polymers exist, too. In fact, heat-shrink tubing is a familiar example of a simple shape-memory effect in a polymer....
Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Friday January 20th, 2012 1:00 PM
Categories: Science | 2 Comments
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