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!
A liquid lens is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The really cool thing about them is that, though they have no moving parts (unless you count the liquid itself), they can achieve a pretty wide range of dynamically-variable focal lengths over a relatively short optical path. When I first read about them, the killer app was supposedly going to be phone cameras.
David Dorhout of Ames, IA, is trying to develop a system where a bunch of robots perform all the farming tasks in a field. This is a short video that lays out the new concept of swarm farming and demonstrates the first phase with Prospero, the robot farmer.
Just one of twenty stunning scale models–most of them 1/6 motorcycles–from Spanish crasftman Pere Tarragรณ of Motoscala Tarragรณ. Sr. Tarragรณ takes great work-in-progress shots for his models, and this one is no exception.
This microscope is a project by Sacha De’Angeli of ChemHacker. STM system is a non-optical, high-resolution, microscopy technique that is often used to obtain images of a conductive surface at the atomic scale. A sharp metal tip is placed only a few nano-meters from surface, a current is applied between the two (Tunneling Current). The […]
Imagine waking up and seeing your design for a circuit being used in a product by someone who never contacted you to ask if it was okay. You will not get any payment for their usage of your design, they’ve raised over $31,000 dollars, and they’re selling something you worked really hard on. You have no control over what someone does with something you made. Is this a nightmare? Perhaps for some, but this is actually a dream come true for others. And it’s what this week’s Soapbox is about: Open-source hardware kick-starting Kickstarters!
Inspired by his friend’s couch on wheels, William Keller built this motorized La-Z-Boy to get around the Playa at Burning Man.
This past Sunday, the New York Times had a piece by Bradley Berman about owners of the Nissan Leaf and how, as with the Prius, there is a growing community of Leaf hackers who are making improvements to their cars and some who are developing products around some of these hacks.
