HOW TO – Make homemade Playdough
Canida show you how to make your own non-toxic toy with custom colors and fragrances. – Link. Related: HOW TO – Make Play Dough – Link.
Fun & Games
The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
HOW TO – Make a nice wooden sword
BobbyMike writes – “Why buy your kids a cheap, soon to break toy when you can make them a great hardwood sword that will be durable, fun to play with, and even look good? This should not be considered the only way to make a nice wooden sword, but it definitely makes a nicer one […]
LEGO Mindstorms NXT and open source (updated)
DGary – points to the updated LEGO NXT developer page – Software Developer Kit (SDK) Includes the NXT driver interface specification and necessary tools for creating third-party programming environments: Driver SDK Includes documentation for interfacing with the MINDSTORMS NXT driver on the PC or Mac. Executable File and Bytecode Reference Includes documentation for the executable […]
Nintendo Wiimote Acceleration Sensor Reading
There’s been a lot of progress made with dissecting the operation of the Wiimote. This video was recently posted on youtube, showing a PC MATLAB graph of the Wii’s acceleration sensor data. Since this data is now technically available on the PC via bluetooth, it shouldn’t be too long before someone puts together a Wiimote […]
PS3 Grill
“When the final case design of the Playstation 3 was released, it was widely critsised as looking exactly like a George Foreman Grill … we decided this would be a great project and challenge to actually build the Real PS3 Grill.” I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in knowing that somehow, somewhere, […]
LEGO Mindstorms NXT and open source
In the MAKE open source gift guide we included the LEGO NXT, one of our readers (dwahler) was concerned that LEGO wasn’t actually releasing the firmware as open source as promised, so – I found out the scoop straight from the source (no pun intended). Soren Lund, head of NXT at LEGO Denmark sent me […]
The making of a LEGO brick
BusinessWeek has a great slideshow and article on how LEGOs are made – “Compared to the high-tech toys of today, LEGO bricks look exceedingly simple. But their precise production process is nothing to scoff at. Each LEGO brick must have that perfect grasp — strong enough to hold onto another brick but easy enough for […]