Furniture & Lighting

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for making furniture and home decor for every room in the house, including the garage.

Twitter-enabled LED matrix end table

Twitter-enabled LED matrix end table

Jason Moungey of macetech dropped me an e-mail yesterday to let me know that the 9×9 RGB LED matrix table they were showing off at Maker Faire Bay Area 2009 (as shown above) has been upgraded with a Bluetooth shield that lets it receive tweets that control the display. Construction and programming details are available here, and there’s a live feed of the table here.

What Was I Thinking? Part 4: Hamsterlamp

What Was I Thinking? Part 4: Hamsterlamp

As an organic chemist, my thoughts went immediately to the idea of somehow sticking them together to make giant molecular models. It occurred to me that if you removed the access cover from one sphere you could fit the resulting opening over the surface of another sphere, glue them together, and have something that looked a lot like a space-filling model of, say, methane. So I bought five of the things–four small “hydrogens” and one large “carbon”–and got in the car to go home.