Year: 2012

A little taste of what’s going on at the third Maker Faire Detroit this morning.

A set of student capstone projects demonstrating assistive technology from the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Detroit Mercy were on display inside the museum. Dr. Darrell Kleinke said that the projects came from students working with disabled clients and developing custom solutions for them. One wheelchair modification was designed for a man who […]

Tom Malinowski filled a big blue bin with some of the obscure analog instruments in his basement and brought them out to Maker Faire. I particularly liked the Atari Punk Console in the antique radio and the Modutronic Messmaker synth.

Seita Koike from Tokyo City University describes Mugbot as a primitive reference design for a social robot, but there’s something very charming about this robot platform made from dollar store items and open source electronics. Mugbot is controlled by cell phone through a web socket server and is driven by an off-the-shelf combination of Arduino/XBee/Motor […]

Never let it be said DEFCON attendees don’t know how to dress up. After one session today, I spotted attendee Paul sporting a snazzy electric blue bow tie. Although he claimed he didn’t actually make anything—he used an off the shelf LED matrix module—he did need to whip out a soldering iron to repair the […]

One of the drawbacks to the Raspberry Pi is that there’s no built-in analog-to-digital converter, meaning that it can’t read analog sensors “out of the box.” Luckily, our friends at Adafruit recently posted a tutorial on how to hook up an external ADC chip (the MCP3008 to be precise) to the $35 embedded Linux platform.