Your Comments

And we’re back with our twenty-second installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Make: Online, our Facebook page, and Twitter.

In response to the Laser-cut marquetry skateboard, TimLillis shared their awesome build:

Good for Griptape too!

Rad, definitely too nice to ride! I’ve used lasercutting for griptape for a ‘nuts and bolts’ themed skate deck in the past (photo)

Br.Squid is cooking up a project similar to the Laser projection microscope:

Hey! This sounds very similar to something I was trying just last week. I made a Van Leeuwenhoek style microscope when I was in grade school from a couple sheets of soda can tin, some laboratory glass rod, and an alcohol burner. (See http://www.mindspring.com/~alshinn/Leeuwenhoekplans.html for the method). I remember reading about it in a science based periodical, but haven’t been able to find the article (probably mid 70’s – I think I made mine in 1979). Lately, I’ve been trying to make an actual replica, from brass. I’m at the stage now where I want to make a lens, and have been testing various lenses to see which are better than others. I glued a lens onto a spare sheet of brass with a hole drilled through it, and experimented viewing the cells in a leaf. You have to hold the lens right up to your eye to see it, so I found that an easier way to use it was by projecting the image on a wall with a powerful flashlight. It’s essentially the same method as shown in the article above, but I used a flashlight through a hole, instead of a laser pointer, and glass instead of water. The resulting image was very faint, but visible. Unfortunately, it was too faint to record with any camera I had on hand. I’ll have to retry it with a laser pointer and see if I can get pictures.

matt.gromm.es shared a creative use for weathering paper for prop documents:

This reminds me of a project I had in elementary school. We had a project to write a diary for someone crossing the country in the pioneer days. I had of course waited until the last minute so I wrote half the diary in one night, then on the last page wrote about how Indians had been attacking our camp. Then I tore off the last half of the diary and burned up the edges using a technique my dad had shown me with his blowtorch to make it look like it survived the attack. After I was done I realized I had used pencil instead of the required pen so I also went back to the first page and put in a bit about how I was using a new-fangled pencil for my diary. Laziness makes for creativity. :)

gwagner had a great suggestion for the “Hello, world” blinky light project:

I think it would be a good idea to include a current limiting resistor in series with the LED. Something on the order of: (3.3V – 1.2V)/10 mA = 210 ohm 220 ohm is a standard value 3.3V is Vcc 1.2V is typical red LED forward voltage 10 mA is typical LED current

pmjett is inspired to monitor the bees:

Pretty elegant solution, and neatly executed. It never occurred to me to weigh a beehive, but thinking about it now, you could go nuts with this. Inexpensive load cells from eBay ($10-25) coupled with some flavor of open-source datalogging could yield a much finer time resolution (and probably a couple of gram weight resolution). Then you could monitor bee traffic per unit time and all the other neat parameters mentioned in the posting. Still not as cheap as the posted solution, but could yield some additional data.

And over on twitter, Brian Lalor spotted a MAKE magazine in a backpack advertisement:

Ha! Nice little product placement for @make in @timbuk2’s H.A.L. backpack: http://bit.ly/9LBm1X

Like these comments? Be sure to sound off in the comments! You could be in next week’s column.

Above photo by Flickr user funadium.