Homespun Checkers Set
I am in love with this sweet and simple checkers set made by Blair of Wise Craft. She’s used scrap fabrics to create the game board, and beautifully colored felted rocks as game pieces. Fantastic!
Month: June 2009
How-To: Knap an arrowhead from a beer bottle
(Image courtesy of Kevin Dunn, whose book Caveman Chemistry, along with a bunch of other cool hands-on projects, contains a chapter on knapping in bottle glass. Thanks Kevin!) Anybody else read Snow Crash? Remember the big scary Aleut who likes to steal warheads from nuclear submarines using only his canoe and handmade glass knife? Remember […]
A sightseer’s guide to engineering
If you are looking for a way to smarten up your travels, you may want to look into the Sightseer’s Guide to Engineering provided by the National Society of Professional Engineers and National Engineers Week. From the entry on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge: To engineers, crossing the Tacoma Narrows presented more of an economic challenge. […]
Android/XP Frankenbook hybrid device
The Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan have cobbled together from existing parts a truly unique device. It’s part netbook, part tablet.
Linear stepper motor controller kit
Linistepper is a stepper motor controller/driver for small to medium sized 5-, 6-, or 8-wire unipolar (not 4-wire bi-polar) stepper motors, featuring “ultra smooth old school linear microstepping” combined with active current regulation from an on-board PIC microcontroller. The folks at PIClist are offering both PCBs and full kits for sale. Linistepper
Difference Engine maintenance manual
[Image: Creative Commons Attribution photo from Adactio’s Flickr stream] Do you have a Babbage Difference Engine in dire need of servicing? Fret no more! Reg Crick of the London Science Museum has put together this handy “INSTRUCTION MANUAL to Operate and Maintain Charles Babbage’s 2nd Difference Engine,” written in 1991 to help keep the Engine […]
Multi-flash camera makes automatic line drawings
Here’s an oldie-but-goodie from 2004: Kar-Han Tan, James Kobler, Rogerio S. Feris, Paul Dietz, and Ramesh Raskar, then of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL), produced a custom digital camera and software that derives line drawings of a scene, or an object, by analyzing the shadows in four otherwise-identical pictures that are illuminated from different […]
