The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
For folks that don’t have the time to read the morning toast, a team from MIT Media Lab led by David Carr have fashioned an ambient feedback toothpaste dispenser, called Tastes Like Rain, that will check the forecast and dispense an appropriate amount and flavor of toothpaste suited to the day’s weather conditions.
Akiba of Freak Labs wrote in to share how he used one of his open hardware Freakduino boards to create a realtime wireless protocol analyzer for the 802.15.4 standard.
We covered the work of Eric Strebel in the lead-up to Maker Faire Detroit. He contributed to our “Making Detroit” series. Now he and partner Jim Nogarian have brought their design for the Solar Vox personal USB solar charger to Kickstarter. They’re looking for $35,000 in funding to bring their product to market. Solar Vox […]
And we’re back with our twenty-sixth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Make: Online, our Facebook page, and Twitter. Pete Prodoehl wrote in to share his version of the DIY iPad Stylus: Great video… I made my own, with just a few modifications… build info is here Desiring […]
If you’re one of the lucky folks to have received a Google Cr-48 notebook computer running Chrome OS, you might find it interesting that the same hardware can also run Mac OS X. Though it doesn’t have hardware accelerated graphics and the track pad is a little glitchy, it does seen like it could be a fun rainy day project.
My new Kinect is a very cool toy, but it was not lost on me, as I was plugging it in, that I’d given the Microsoft hive-mind a pretty sophisticated set of eyes and ears onto my living room. Sure, I suppose I could only plug it in when I’m using it, but I’m kind of a neat freak about my entertainment center wiring and I don’t want to be digging the Xbox out every time I decide I want certain privacy. Some kind of lens-cap arrangement seemed the easiest solution, and making it out of the foam that the Kinect came packed in avoids the danger of picking some material that might scratch the device or otherwise be incompatible with it over the long term.
Getting iPhone push notifications from objects in your physical world is possible using an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield, a PHP-enabled web server and an iPhone app called Prowl. In this video, I show how to set up a mailbox so that it pings your phone when snail mail is delivered, but it’s very easy […]
