DIY science is the perfect way to use your creative skills and learn something new. With the right supplies, some determination, and a curious mind, you can create amazing experiments that open up a whole world of possibilities. At home-made laboratories or tech workshops, makers from all backgrounds can explore new ideas by finding ways to study their environment in novel ways – allowing them to make breathtaking discoveries!
Last March, roboticist Eric Brown and co-workers at the University of Chicago made headlines with their new, unconventional robot gripper design: a balloon filled with coffee grounds or other grainy material and fitted with a vacuum line. At atmospheric pressure, the balloon is squishy and can be “mushed” around an object—even traditionally hard-to-grip stuff like […]
While New York City is known more for its “Silicon Alley” start-ups, showrooms for just about every major technology company, and of course the boogie-woogie lights of Broadway and Times Square, there’s another – older and often unseen – side to the city of five boroughs.
Our maker this week is Carol Reiley a surgical roboticist at Intuitive Surgical and the founder of Tinker Belle Labs. Carol’s on the cover of the current issue of MAKE, Volume 29, and is the co-author of two how-to projects in this issue.
Neat idea from NY architect John Locke, who designed this slot-together plywood shelf unit to hang over the standard public telephone kiosk without fasteners or other alterations to the existing public property. The phone, if present, can still be used normally. So far, John has tested two prototypes, and in both cases passers-by were confused […]
What happens to all those mobile device accessories once the device they accessorized have become landfill? That’s what the folks at Berlin’s weltunit were thinking when they made these laser-cut cardboard device stands. They’re available for both iPad and iPhone form factors and made using recycled cardboard and carbon neutral energy.
Austrian Claudio Zachl Werbegrafik has a blog called The Amateur Engineer, and a YouTube channel with a regular show he’s been running every two weeks for a little over a year, now. In this episode, he shows off his drool-inducing Ultimate Breadboard prototyping station, mothered by necessity in a complex ongoing project to build his […]
Kiwi programmer and farmer John Hart of Lifeboat Farm has been experimenting with using his RepRap to produce mechanical pest control devices so he can leave off the chemical pesticides. Shown above, fused-filament butterfly decoys, spotted with a marker and mounted on stalks of plastic filament in the garden: The stalks are quite flexible so […]
