Greg writes “Here is a line following robot that will follow a line, and at the end will stop for three seconds. After pausing for three seconds it will retrace its steps and drive in reverse. It is made with a sensing circuit, and H-bridge motorcontroller, and a microcontroller.” Link.
“This procedure will help you construct a simple vacuforming device. With it, you’ll be able to fabricate plastic parts or make copies of of objects in plastic. Vacuum forming is a popular industrial process for manufacturing hollow, thin walled, plastic parts. In industrial units, a sheet of plastic is heated, usually by infrared lamps. This homemade vacuformer is made by using a piece of perforated circuit board as the platform, and a project box as the vacuum chamber. A heat gun is enough to melt most thing plastics, and a shop vac provides plenty of ‘suck’.” Thanks Jason! Link.
Here’s a great tutorial from Ashley Martineau on how to reuse the yarn from old sweaters you don’t want anymore. The tutorial is complete with photos and lots of tips on how you can reuse the yarn, like doubling up the fibers for stronger support. Link.
“The basic idea for the single use digital camera is to take your “27 pictures” or so, send the camera in and they send you a CD with your photo’s. Kind of lame, but unique. However, you bought the camera – keep it! There are three different methods to making this camera “last forever”. You do not need to do all three of them, choose the method that will be cheapest/best. You may have a few of the items at your disposal already, so take a look at the required parts for each section, then choose which rout to take.” Thanks Star! Link.
Interesting way to provide localized power sources – “The Toyota Prius – Gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles can serve as a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for your house. The Prius, unlike the generator, also has a battery that provides instant, UPS-like power, to your house. Careful research has shown that most people would prefer not to go outside to manually pull a cord in the case of a power failure.” Tons of information, photos and how-to info… Thanks RobK123! Link.
Dave is hacking up the new Furby “Yesterday I went and bought the New Furby which just came out in October this year. The new Furby is a pretty darn advanced toy for only $30, if you haven’t seen one before they are basically armless Mogwais with beaks. New Furbys are powered by the Sensory Inc’s RSC-4128 which is a multi-purpose microprocessor that does everything from voice recognition to text-to-speach to IO to DTMF output. After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I was pretty sure that the Furby would be quite the hackable robot, so I decided to take a look inside and see what hacking would entail.” [via] Link.
Mikey, one of my favorite Makers (and appearing in our book Makers) writes in with a great POV project – “A entirely open source persistence of vision project using surface mount parts. The web page includes a helpful three minute video of soldering surface mount parts for this project. This is the first POV project I have seen that has a optional Bluetooth connector for updating content.” Link.
