This guy has built a pro-quality condenser mic from a beer can and some other bits and pieces. Omnidirectional small diaphragm capsule, ruler flat freq. response from 100 Hz to around 15kHz, attached to the power supply by approx. 7 ft. of cable, fits most mic clips, and runs on a 9v battery. He’s built them out of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz, selling them from $15 to $51 on ebay. Thanks Tom! Link.
Here’s a fascinating project and history of the Dirkon paper camera. The name Dirkon is a play on words based on the combination of the parts of two words: Dirk- is the beginning of the Czech word dirka – pinhole, and -kon is the end of the name of a well-known Japanese camera. The site has a gallery, instructions, tips and printable templates to make your own. Link.
The BENT 2005 Circuit Bending Festival is a four day exploration of the art of circuit bending. The festival is in NYC from April 27th to the 30th. What is Circuit Bending? The term circuit bending refers to the act of modifying the circuitry of battery-powered children’s toys to create strange, new, and unintended sounds for creative purposes. Link.
Awhile back I did some testing of using a USB based Geiger counter on a plane ride from Seattle to San Fran to detect cosmic rays- Dean used a Aware Electronics RM-70 to do the same on more on a Southwest Airlines flight to LAX. On the site you can see graphs from the flight as well as the decay of radioactive daughter products of radon-222 being captured on a coffee filter that filtered 15 minutes of air through a vacuum cleaner in someone’s basement in Ohio. Link.
We now have a mobile version of MAKE via Winksite. It took about 10 minutes to sign up, add our feed and publish the mobile version. Here’s a picture of it on a Sidekick. Here’s the direct link to the mobile version of the blog section of MAKE. We’ll have a link somewhere on the site soon so you can always find it. Link.
New DIY trend, alarm clock mods. Hacking an alarm clock so that it will enter snooze mode when it experiences a shock. In this project, we will bypass the mechanical snooze switch on top, and instead turn the alarm clock off in a much more fun way: punching it! Hopefully along the way I will be able to teach you some techniques that are useful in reverse engineering, so you can apply them to future projects. Link.
David Randolph from G4’s ATOS built a portable retro gaming system from two Eittek Power Player game sets, a Clarion VMA5894 car head rest video screen and a project box. Link. If this looks a little familiar, it is, the GameGrrl uses a low cost LCD and Nintendo controller instead. Between these two resources you’re likely to pull off this project and/or come up with new ideas.
