Solve multiple global problems at once when you
make your own sandals from an old tire.
An accumulation of old tires is an increasing problem
in the United States. Tires can't be easily recycled,
and mosquitoes breed in the water that collects in
them. But you can solve multiple problems at once
when you make your own sandals from an old tire.
...
It's hard to be a maker if you don't have a good place to do your making. Yet two things often stand in the way of building out a basic home workbench: high cost and limited space.
Industrial-grade fixtures and spiffy garage storage systems cost a pretty penny. Likewise. domestic real estate is a scarce commodity - garages must still be used for parking cars, basements for storing stuff. and utility rooms must shelter washing machines and assorted whatnot.
I faced those constraints and a little more when I set out to build a simple
workbench in my narrow garage. To avoid getting in the way of my car, the
bench had to be shallow - no more than 2' deep. I needed lots of storage for tools, small parts. and bulky boxes of big stuff.
...
After transforming a record player and some plumbing
parts into a spinning speaker (seeMAKE, Volume
05, page 24), George "the Fat Man" Sanger is back
with a new way to enhance yourguitar sound.
His Goodwill Amp Enhancer is a DIY version of
the commercially available Enhancer. which beefs
up the tone of open-back amps by redirecting the
"lost" sound to the front.
The nicely finished commercial versions start at
$150 (soundenhancer.com), but the Fat Man built his
enhancer out of a $15 computer desk he scavenged
from a thrift shop. "It took just an hour or two," he
reports, "and adds wonderful tone to my amp."
I've spent much of my adult life dealing with either
computers or bicycles. Writing about computer
technology has put food on my family's table and a
roof over our heads, while riding helps me unwind,
clearing my head of the jargon that accumulates
throughout the workday.
During the summer. I'll disappear for hours on
long rides to nowhere and back. But I have to admit
on some rides I've gotten so lost I have trouble
finding my way home. Happily, I was able to build
a solar-powered GPS mapping machine, mostly
from old computer parts and software I had sitting
around my office. I've seen motorcycle-mounted
GPS navigation screens. but have never come
across one on a bicycle, even though it seems
like a natural mix of appropriate and functional
technology.
...
Google SketchUp is my favorite design tool, and if
all goes according to plan. it'll soon be yours, too.
Even though I use higher-end 3D software all day at
work, SketchUp still blows me away: it enables fast,
fun, and accurate 3D sketching unlike any other
program (it's free too!).
Makers will find SketchUp useful for all sorts of
things. from furniture design to workshop layout.
from project enclosures to robotic exoskeletons. It's
good for this kind of stuff becauseyou can rough out
your designs quickly. using real-world dimensions.
I decided to use SketchUp to design a much-
needed workbench. The first phase was to create
the conceptual model, which is a rough 3D sketch of
the form. The second phase was design engineer-
ing, where I figured out the real-world materials list
and construction plan for the project.
In May of 2006, Robot. makers of the Roomba
robotic vacuum, announced they had shipped
more than 2 million cleaning robots, making Roomba
one of the (if not the) most successful domestic
robots in history. With 2 million of anything that can
be taken apart, it was only a matter of time before
dozens of Roomba hacks hit the net.
Courting this audience, Robot opened up the
interface to all current Roomba models. and released
an educational version called the Create. With so
many ways to hack these suckers. makers responded
by building more projects and developing software.
Here's a roundup of some of the interesting projects.
My house is a robot. It thinks, reacts, predicts, and informs. Throughout the day it lets me know how its inhabitants are doing and takes care of all the little things I forget. If I'm worried that I left the front door open or that the heater is turned up too high, I can view my house's website or RSS feed through a browser or my mobile phone.
In addition to making my life easier, my house is concerned about saving the planet and my wallet. It can turn off unused appliances and lamps and
intelligently control my heating and air conditioning systern according to when someone is home and where it's coldest or hottest in the house.
...
I was browsing through a department store one day,
in search of a gift for my 8-year-old daughter, when
I came across Mattel's Hot Wheels Radar Gun
($30). The box said that this toy could clock the
speeds of not only miniature Hot Wheels cars. but
also full-sized vehicles.
I figured the toy must have severe limitations, but
decided to buy one for my daughter anyway. It turns
out that she (we) loved it, and we found that it could
accurately measure the speeds of toy cars. cars on
the road, even joggers. To my amazement. the detector
even measured the speeds of spinning objects
like bicycle wheels.
...
The head guy at Parallax, Chip Gracey, is truly self-taught, which means
that he has had to find his own way. Twenty years after teaching himself
to program the first generation of personal computers, the creator of the new
Propeller microcontroller still speaks with the enthusiasm and amazement of
a bright teenager: "The tools are out there. These days with the internet, it is
so easy; you can learn anything. What used to be obscure stuff that only a few
people were interested in - well, today those people put it on the net to share
among themselves, and the rest of us have access to it."
...
ABS* TO THE RESCUE
Last night I dreamed of a magical material
that would be bendable like metal, as easy to
shape as wood, and would never warp, split, or
splinter. It would be washable, would never need
painting, and would last almost forever.
...
*)Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene
For me, a good construction project should create an object that is fun,
functional, and pleasing to the eye - and if it teaches me something
interesting along the way, so much the better. I managed to satisfy all these
requirements when I designed and built a pair of electronic dice. Although
dice simulations have been around for many years, I was able to simplify the
project while at the same time making it more interesting.
...
Thanks to the rise of inexpensive digital cameras and photo sharing
sites like Flickr. photography is more popular than ever. I've come
across a number of useful and free web-based services that make
it easier to save. share. organize, and edit your digital photographs.
How can I download many Flickr photos at once?
You can batch-download multiple photos from a Flickr set with a
free utility. It's tedious work downloading a bunch of full-resolution
photos from a Flickr account to your computer, requiring a lot of
back-and-forth mouse clicking. Windows users have it much easier:
they can grab a copy of FlickrDown (greggman.com/pages/flickrdown.htm),
a nifty utility that makes it easy to download dozens or even hundreds of
photos from Flickr in one fell swoop.
After launching FlickrDown, enter the Flickr username you're interested in.
After the thumbnails load. you can check the ones you want. or select
"All photos" (if the user has lots of photos this could take a lot of time and
consume quite a bit of hard disk space, so be careful). Then select a
directory to store the files in, and click Download.
...
Back in 1970, when barely half a dozen corporate seedlings had taken root
in the fertile ground of Silicon Valley, a company named Signetics bought
an idea from an engineer named Hans Camenzind. It wasn't a breakthrough
concept, just 23 transistors and a bunch of resistors that would function as
a programmable timer. The timer would be versatile, stable, and simple, but
these virtues paled in comparison with its primary selling point. Using the
emerging technology of integrated circuits, Signetics could reproduce the
whole thing on a silicon chip.
This entailed some handiwork. Camenzind spent weeks using a drafting table
and a specially mounted X-Acto knife to scribe his circuit into a large plastic
sheet. Signetics then reduced this image photographically, etched it into tiny
wafers, and embedded each wafer in a half-inch rectangle of black plastic with
the product number printed on top. Thus, the 555 timer was born.
...
YOU'RE SITTING IN YOUR CAR, DRIVING to work. Al a stoplight,
the car across the way starts flashing its lights al you. Squinting,
you think: What's thisguy's problem? Lazily, you recall something
about bright lights ... and then you remember. Flashing lights mean
I'm dreaming? You take a moment to confirm it (yes, your glove
compartment is filled with goldfish, as expected). then step calmly out
of your car and decide to fly through the air.
This is the "lucid dreaming" state, which lets you interact consciously
with your dream worlds and break the rules of reality. Lucid dreaming
is fun, and enthusiasts have developed many ways of trying to induce
the phenomenon, from simply repeating statements of intent
("I will realize I am dreaming tonight") to using hypnosis and brain
wave analysis.
...
High-speed DVD burners are mass-market commodities now.
Most new computers sport DVD-RW drives, and discount shops
sometimes carry upgrade burners for less than $30. They're cheap,
but inside every one lies a hidden secret that many of us would
have killed for 20 years ago: a high-powered, solid-state, visible
red laser. This means that with a pretty small expenditure and
a little hacking, you can have a portable. handheld laser that's
powerful enough to ignite matches, burst balloons, and melt
plastic. Here's how to do it.
...
The MAKE Controller Kit is a powerful and easy-to-use hardware
platform that can interact with the physical world. It's based on
a microcontroller, which is essentially a computer-on-a-chip.
Unlike general-purpose microprocessors. here the memory and
device interfaces required to run a simple (or not-so-simple)
application are integrated onto a single board.
...
Tom Jennings | Make Vol. 10- 2007 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb
NO ONE TALKS OF FAILURE AS ANYTHING but shameful:
this is wrongheaded and foolish. Mistakes are synonymous with
learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end.
It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly
it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems
when they come up.
It all begins with a mental toolbox, filled with useful items you
can't buy. but can only obtain through the act of failing again and
again. Here are mine.
...
Take a look at a printed circuit board. You can see components such as resistors and capacitors, but where is the voltage? Where is the signal? How do you tell if the circuit is working correctly? What if you want to change it?
Electronic test equipment lets you probe and "see" the voltages and currents running through electronic circuits. This article covers four basic devices: oscilloscopes, power supplies, function generators, and multimeters. Learning to use these tools - especially the mighty oscilloscope - requires patience, but it's an absolute requirement for building, trouble-shooting, and hacking electronic gizmos.
...
SOME MODES OF TRANSPORTATION WERE destined for garage builders.Think of the thousands of wooden canoes, dune buggies, and steel-framed road bikes that hobbyists have created over the years. Modern, high-performance downhill skis, on the other hand. seem to be an entirely different beast. the kind ofstate-of-the-art product that only a big factory production process could churn out. Who else has the ability to fuse together all those exotic materials into a sturdy package that will safely get you down icy slopes, powder runs, and even the occasional cliff huck?
...
RIDE YOUR OWN BRAIN WAVES
You don't have to be a Buddhist monk to meditate, or a Sleeping Beauty to sleep well. Achieve these altered states of consciousness, and others, with this simple microcontroller device.
What would happen if you could play a recording of brain waves into someone's brain? That question popped into my mind one day while I was meditating, and it turns out that there are devices that can do this. Sound and Light Machines (SLMs) produce sound and light pulses at brain wave frequencies, which help people sleep, wake up, meditate, or experience whatever state of consciousness the machine is programmed for. The first
time tried one was a trip! Not only did I follow the sequence into a deep meditation and then out again (feeling wonderful!), but along the way I had beautiful, outrageous hallucinations.
...
Introduced in 1897, the cathode-ray tube brought us oscilloscopes, television. radar. computer terminals, the electron microscope. and, 110 years later, YouTube. But the hum of flyback transformers, by which so much code was written, is at an end. As the last generation of armblooded monitors vacates our desks, let us remember that the cathode-ray tube's contribution to digital computing began as internal memory, not external display.
Conventional CRTs display the state of a temporary memory buffer whose contents are produced by the central processing unit (CPU). Once upon a time, however, cathode-ray tubes were the core memory, and they stored the instructions that drove the operations of the CPU. This was one of those sudden adaptations of pre-existing features for unintended purposes by which evolution leaps ahead.
By 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of random-access memory in the entire world, with 5kB in the original IAS machine.
...
Andre LaMothe's creations have a neo-retro bent that's hard to resist. Combining the sensibilities of game systems from 20 years ago with the DIY appeal of a microcontroller board. LaMothe's XGameStation Micro - a compact video game hardware kit - gave hobbyists the opportunity to write games that are closer to the bare metal than most programmers have been in decades.
The XGameStation Pico Edition 2.0 (makezine.com/xgamestation) takes you even closer. Modern game programming environments use collections of code libraries and high-level design tools to hide the complexity of the hardware from programmers. The Pico lets you duplicate the experience of writing games for a retro system like the Atari 2600: hardware and software fuse into a single platform, and in pushing the limits of that platform, you challenge yourself to come up with creative hacks that you would never need on today's ultra-powerful systems. Want to draw something on the screen? You'll have to understand something about video signaling first.
...
TV-TO-SYNTH INTERFACE
Triggering sound from video images. By Tom Zimmerman
WORLD'S LOUDEST IPOD
iBump crossover lets you crank it up without distortion. By Tom Anderson and Wendell Anderson
PROJECT REDSHARK
Turn your Xbox into a mobile media monstrosity. By John Riney
HOW NOT TO MAKE A HOW-TO VIDEO
Ignore these handy rules and your instructional video will turn out great! By Travis J. l. Corcoran
VAN TV
Big sights and sounds hit the streets. By Ethan O'Toole
QUICK AND DIRTY LIGHT TABLE
A storage bin. a pane of glass. and fluorescent light saves hundreds of dollars. By Hiram Cook
ACTION MOVIE EFFECTS
Shoot a fight scene with a blood -spurting knife wound and a head smashing through a window. By Zack Stern
TILT-SHIFT PHOTOGRAPHY
Flexible lens makes scenes look miniature. By Dennison Bertram
ONLINE VIDEO PRODUCTION
Tips and techniques for daily content. By Andrew Michael Baron
OUTDOOR WEBCAM ENCLOSURE
Capture winter scenes from hanging sewer pipes. By Alek Komarnitsky
TIME-BASED DEVICES
Transplant a heartbeat from cheap alarm clocks. By Larry Cotton
METAL ETCHING
Chemically carve detailed text of line art onto brass or copper. By Tom Jennings
ELEGANT PLYWOOD COFFEE TABLE
Making furniture with no nails, screws, or glue. By Andy Lee
THE BYTELIGHT
Make a high-tech mood light from a fluorescent lamp and 54 obsolete SIMMS. By Ross Orr
It seems as though nearly everything high performance these days boasts some amount of carbon fiber in its construction. Originally used in aerospace, carbon fiber has moved into the mainstream and can be found in luxury automobiles, mountain bikes, and sports equipment.
Some laptops and cellphones even use printed decals to simulate this lightweight material's cutting-edge look. The good news is that you don't need a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to work with carbon fiber composites. In fact, you can do it at home.
This article discusses some of the basics of carbon fiber construction and explains how to create a carbon fiber iPod case. All you need are some basic woodworking tools and skills, and the right materials. And because the same process also applies to fiberglass and Kevlar composites, these skills give you multiple ways of boosting your future projects to a new, level!
When my pickup truck broke down, a friend lent me her Geo Metro convertible for 2 weeks. Well, I'm a good-sized guy, and at first I felt a bit silly driving this tiny car, but quickly tell in love with it. It's easy to park, great on gas, and o blast to drive. I decided to buy my own, and I though that if I'm willing to be seen driving this toy sized car, why not go all the way and put a big windup key on the back?
This project will show you how to build an amazingly inexpensive and rad-looking one-string electric guitar out of pine wood and PVC pipe. A single string purposely keeps the design simple. (For a 3-string cigar box model, see MAKE, Volume 04.)
PIN-O-RAMA
Lensless and low-tech, pinhole cameras have always been maker-friendly. But forget the Quaker Oats carton, and go wide with this roll-film, panorama design.
I bought a new scanner recently, and soon found myself spelunking through drawers of old photos from my many misspent years in photography. Some of the most interesting shots were the pinhole camera experiments I had done as a teenager. With ghostly outlines from multi-minute exposures, and shapes warped into boomerangs by curved film, these otherworldly images got me dreaming about pinhole cameras again.
BIG SOUNDS FROM A SMALL PACKAGE
In MAKE, Volume 04,1 presented my version of the venerable cigar box guitar. The instructions for the project included adding an electric pickup so you could play the guitar through an amplifier.
People from around the world emaiIed me to tell me they'd built cigar box guitars based on my instructions. I struck up a conversation with one gentleman from Europe who goes by the moniker Blind Lightnin' Pete. He made a couple of beautiful cigar box guitars, including one he calls the Vintage Blues Texas Rattlesnake Special model. He then went one step further, and built a cracker box guitar amplifier. This outstanding little amp cost all of $5 to build (depending on where you get the parts). Pete kindly allowed me to modify his design and present it as a project for you to build. (See page 111 for a word from Pete about the origins of the cracker box amp.)
My amp differs a little from Pete's because I wanted to make a workable little practice amp with parts and tools that could be purchased "one-stop shop" at RadioShack and built in an hour.
