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!
Lisa Pongrace’s cupcake cars are powered by electric motors, and evolved from a costume idea for Burning Man. After building the first prototype, her friends wanted their own mobile muffins and helped create a fleet of confectionery art cars, now known as Acme Muffineering.
The Uira Engine is a part of the guts from the Raygun Gothic Rocket Ship, which now resides in San Francisco’s Embarcadero. For Maker Faire Bay Area 2011, the engine was displayed by its designer, Alan Rorie. The engine consists of a series of cylinders that slowly rotate while emitting capacitive discharge that’s pleasing to the eye. Parts of this were handmade as well as produced from a CNC, and provided an important visual component to the rocket ship.
Every reported fact about this model is more amazing than the last: It was begun in 1986, when much information about the Hind was still protected by the Soviet Union as military secrets. It is constructed mostly from corrosion-resistant metals: aluminum, titanium, brass, stainless steel. The pedals in the cockpit work. The tires actually have air in them. The shocks actually compress. Many of the parts were fabricated under a microscope. The list goes on and on.
A few weeks have passed since the Atlanta Mini Maker Faire 2011 and I’ve been enjoying some follow-up visits with some of the many makers I met at the event. Time was short during the one-day fair, so I didn’t get to visit much with Alliene Bouchard, an Atlanta-based maker. Alliene (pronounced Ollie-yen) impressed me […]
Rich was curious about printing with polycarbonate (PC), but couldn’t find any definitive answers to his questions online. So he bought a roll of 1.6mm PC filament and started experimenting, and his reports are fairly glowing. PC melts hotter than ABS or PLA, is more rigid, and comes out of the printer cloudy, which some have suggested may be due to atmospheric moisture.
There are many ways to calculate an approximation to pi, but rarely is math as delicious as in this idea from Davidson College professor Tim Chartier. Make a quarter circle in a square of graph paper and place chocolate chips on the squares that lie inside the circle. If you now count the chips and compute four times the number of chocolate chips divided by the total number of squares, that will be approximately pi.
Though described as an “electronic instrument” and an “orchestra…composed of levitating balls whose physical height determines their volume,” London design group Poietic Studio’s “Floating Orchestra,” cool as it is, cannot possibly be producing the big, bold, brassy sounds of The Benny Goodman Orchestra that accompany their embedded video, above. Which naturally leads me to wonder what it really sounds like.
