The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
Greg writes “Here is a line following robot that will follow a line, and at the end will stop for three seconds. After pausing for three seconds it will retrace its steps and drive in reverse. It is made with a sensing circuit, and H-bridge motorcontroller, and a microcontroller.” Link.
Make contributer Cy on creative uses for all that holiday trash – “Christmas, it’s inevitable, things will get discarded, broken, or ignored,” says Cy Tymony, a Torrance resident and author of Sneakier Uses for Everyday Things (the sequel to his Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things). “But why should things just go into a landfill?” In Tymony’s world, if you’ve got boxes, make boomerangs. Got milk? Make plastic.” Link.
Make your own LEGO blocks “…not everybody has access to their own CNC machine, but for those who do, here is a lesson in building up custom lego parts. This is not necessarily a design just for those of us lucky enough to own a CNC machine. A manual milling machine, or even hand tools and a great deal of patience will do the job. This post IS however directed at somebody who owns some sort of CNC milling machine, has access to some plastics and the tools appropriate to cut them, and somebody who is not a rank beginner at building lego robots.” [via] Link.
On New Years MAKE kicked it the virtual world. Here’s what I was wearing in the real life (more about this soon). Here are a couple photos sent from the all night dance-a-thon. Lastly, a quick video of some pixels getting funky! Special thanks to Eric for putting on this spin-dig.
Dave writes “Steve runs a kayak-building company but his spare-time project is designing a velomobile, that is, a human-powered, closed vehicle; technically a recumbent trike with a full body. There are a few commercial velomobile products in Europe, see links at the top of Steve’s page. His current design is just gorgeous (be sure to look at all the pictures) and makes clever, sophisticated use of hi-tech materials, and is very close to commercially practical.” Link.
Pat writes “Since all will be watching their clocks tonight, (except in Australia where the Blogger’s Apprentice has already rung in the New Year), here’s a fitting video, we thought, of how clocks are made.” Link. Stay tuned for some info about a MAKE meet up online for New Years!
NCT writes “Here’s some great opensource DIY Home automation software, written in Perl with a Web interface. For windows or Linux/unix. It also works with the One Wire Weather station posted a few days ago.” MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It’s fun, it’s free, and it’s entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. Link.
