The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
Stretta managed to build a fully functional (and apparently quite fun) foosball table from LEGO parts – My son is really attracted to foosball tables, and, if I’m honest, I’d have to say I am too. I considered the idea of buying a small, tabletop unit, but I was unsure how much use it’d see. […]
The boys from MaceTech cooked up an impressive yard display with eight RGB LED modules in eight different pumpkins around the yard. Garrett explains:
We made a control board for eight pumpkins, using eight ShiftBars, 50mm cables, a Seeeduino, a ShiftBrite Shield, and a 12V power supply. The ShiftBar potentiometers were adjusted to deliver about 100mA to each of the 24 LED channels. We wired the LED array boards to the control board using cheap 4-wire telephone station cable from Home Depot.
Read more about it here.
We never do the same thing twice, and the projects can be pretty stressful as we’re always taking a risk and sticking our necks out, often doing things that have never been done before. We also work with relatively small budgets. Luckily it’s almost always worth the hard work though.
The Maker scene and the general explosion in low cost high technology have been a huge inspiration to us. Many of the things we do would have been pretty much inconceivable ten years ago. It’s also important that we try to work with technologies that the world and his dog aren’t all trying to innovate with. So for example we’ve stayed away from augmented reality as pretty much everyone is trying to create something with those tools.
For years I didn’t consider myself very creative. Sure, I always decorated the house for holidays, did crafty projects with my kids, refinished furniture, loved to try new recipes, and shunned store-bought costumes for what I think are way better homemade creations, but a crafter? Not really. These days I’m trying to convince myself that […]
Since Disney bought Marvel comics, there have been a number of artists offering up creative image mashups. Perhaps my favorite is character designer/story artist Jeffrey Thomas’ Dark Princesses series. Thomas reinterprets iconic Disney female characters with a seriously dark twist. Looking at these is providing me great inspiration for twisted Halloween costumes.
Coilhouse recently ran a roundup of ruff collars full of enough inspiration to get you moving to the ribbon isle at the craft store, plus a collection of awesome how-tos for making your own ruffs. Warning: there’s one NSFW fashion image, all the way at the bottom of the page. [Thanks, Gareth!]
Tomorrow, Friday the 23rd, at noon Pacific time, we will be giving away another prize bundle consisting of one Microchip Technology PIC10F Cap Touch Demo Board and one MCP1650 Multiple White LED Demo Board.
This time, the winner will be selected from among our Twitter followers. Send us an @reply containing the phrase “Microchip Technology giveaway theta” and your name will be in the hat, too.
The winner will be announced Friday afternoon through our Twitter feed. If you enter, please be sure to check your Twitter account promptly after the contest is over; DMs are the only way we have to contact you if you win!
