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!
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 […]
In today’s project on diyphysics.com, David Prutchi shows how to build a Cockcroft–Walton multiplier using a “ladder” of capacitors and diodes on perfboard, submerged in mineral oil, inside a sealed plastic container. The multiplier takes high voltage AC, e.g. from a TV flyback transformer, and both rectifies it to DC and steps it up considerably. […]
If you can endure the relentless puns, the tag aggregator page for MakerBot’s Project Shellter is a fun read. There are cool pics of the denizens of MakerBot’s official “crabitat” sporting their fused-filament homes (such as “Paris Shelton,” above, in a lovely little daffodil yellow number) as well as oddly touching night-time videos of each […]
HaD writer Caleb Kraft of Springfield, MO, sexed up his VW bus with a lovely (and Cthulhu-esque!) elephant mural as well as stained glass sun visors that complement the painting. Caleb says he “never really painted before” — ORLY!? Looks pretty amazing to me.
Editor’s Note: When we were putting together our Make: Ultimate Kit Guide, we wanted to highlight the makers of the awesome kits we reviewed as much as possible. Our 96 pages quickly became chocked full of valuable info, and some of the longer profiles had to be cut down for print. Here is the full […]
Today is the 189th anniversary of the birthday of Jules Verne, the French author of many science fiction classics such as 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. You can find a brief tribute to Jules Verne at the Smithsonian Libraries, with the photo below that shows some of the […]
