Month: May 2013

How do bits and bytes feel on your fingertips? Like your controller’s gravelly rumble when a video game football player gets tackled? Like bubbles of turbulence on an airline simulator control wheel? Like the rubbery resilience of 3D digital clay? Like the hairline cracks on a fragile archaeological find? Yes. Could they feel like varying and unique human tissues as a surgeon in London performs surgery on a patient in Johannesburg? You bet. What we’re talking about here is called “haptics,” a class of technology that most of us have experienced most commonly in the form of a vibrating cell phone. But increasingly, it’s coming to the medical world.

Hardware is hard as the quip goes, but there’s never been a better time to be prototyping and launching hardware projects than right now. That seemed to be the consensus today as the second and final day of MAKE Hardware’s Innovation Workshop wrapped up. The all-day schedule of speakers represented a deep pool of talent, creativity, and passion for the business of making.

The Viper was one of the most popular projects at Maker Faire Bay Area last year, blowing minds, creating smiles, and eliciting screams of excitement. The Viper is a full-motion Battlestar Galactica-themed flight simulator built into the fuselage of a Piper PA-28 plane, complete with 360-degree rotation on both the pitch and roll axes, as well as a fully immersive flying environment inside. The most amazing part is that The Viper was made by a team of five high school students, guided by their mentors, as part of the Young Makers program. The Viper is coming back to Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, and it promises to be even more impressive.

Today’s great line-up of speakers at the second and final day of the Hardware Innovation Workshop let fly a flurry of great tweets. Here is but a sampling of the buzz.

Makers have mixed opinions on venture capitalists (VCs) fueled by stories of entrepreneurs who lost control of the companies they built when they traded autonomy for capital. While projects are getting off the ground with crowd sourcing from Kickstarter and Indiegogo, many start ups still turn to VCs to get the funds they need to get off the ground. MAKE invited some of them to participate at the Hardware Innovation Workshop this week, so innovative makers could get the straight dope.

This giant popsicle pinata tutorial from Oh Happy Day seems like a fun and relatively easy way to enjoy a nice day.

In each bi-monthly episode of DiResta (every other Wednesday at 2pm PT), artist and master builder Jimmy DiResta (Dirty Money, Hammered, Against the Grain, Trash for Cash) lets us into his workshop, to look over his shoulder while he builds whatever strikes his fancy. On this episode of DiResta, Jimmy shows us more of his band saw skills as he whips up a set of interlocking stacking stools designed to fit in small spaces.