Maker Education is such a valuable role. These stories will bring you the latest information and tales of maker educators who area spreading the maker mindset. Help others learn how to make things or how to think like a maker at makerspaces, schools, universities, and local communities. The importance of maker education can not be understated. We appreciate our educators.
Mitch Alman, Jeff “Mightyohm” Keyzer, and Andie Nordgren, just released their “Soldering is Easy” comic book. It’s part of a book they are working on that will be published later this year. You can download the comic in PDF format from the Mighty Ohm website. The comic (and lots more cool stuff!) will be included […]
The Gakken EX System was a series of educational electronics kits that were produced in the late 1970s. The kits uses “denshi blocks” (also known as electronic blocks) to allow electronics experiments to be performed easily and safely. More than 25 years after its original release, one of the main kits from the series was […]
Recently, we’ve been messing about with motors and gears at Pemtech. Students in one of my classes are building an underwater ROV, and we don’t have any decent propellers. Rather than shop for them, we’re fabbing our own with the laser cutter and Makerbot. Earlier this week, Jett worked out the proper dimensions to fit a plate to a motor shaft. He did this by measuring out a range of holes and then cutting them in quarter inch acrlyic. Once they came out of the laser, he tried pushing the motor into each of the holes until he found the ‘goldilocks fit.’ Once we had a plate, he used the same process to cut a series of holes in the plate that could be threaded with M3 screws. This setup allows us to attach anything to a motor.
Jon Chandler has written a fantastic getting-started article on selecting an AC-to-DC power supply for your home electronics project over at Digital DIY. It covers the very basic details of voltage and current selection, and goes on to clearly and succinctly explain what “linear,” “regulated,” and “switching” power supplies are, and, most importantly IMHO, gives a bunch of practical tips on how to identify the various species of wall warts, in the wild, and determine if they are suitable for your own application. [via Hack a Day]
The aim was to use a hubless wheel to create a compact bicycle, with the benefits of a large wheel and belt drive.Hubless wheels have appeared in bicycle concepts already, and were first invented by Sbarro. However, few concepts have made it to prototype and when only used for aesthetic purposes, the disadvantage of extra cost out weights the visual gain. Lunartic uses the hubless for a reason; to house the working parts, reducing the wheel base but not sacrificing conventional riding geometry. Lunartic is supposed to be as compact as possible without folding or being awkward to ride, however there is the potential for the front wheel to fold up into the rear or for that space to be used for a laptop back, motor or dynamo.
NASA’s Amazing Space project has a monthly Tactile Astronomy feature that provides public-domain files for printing “feelable” versions of Hubble’s deep space photographs on special printers:
The Make: Electronics Components Pack 1 includes all the parts you need to perform experiments 1-11 from our incredibly popular Make: Electronics book by Charles Platt.
