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!
I wish all projects on the web had as many pictures as this one. This how-to, by Brian Trump, covers installation of a car alarm with remote start and a few other features. The only problem is, I can’t remember the last time I heard an alarm go off and people actually bothered to look. […]
The folks @ MIT are warming up to the idea of parabolic solar collectors, recently demonstrating this 12-foot dish of massive heating power – — the completed mirror focuses enough solar energy at its focal point to melt solid steel. The energy of typical sunlight is concentrated by a factor of 1,000. This was showcased […]
Here’s another beautiful photo essay by Marc Steinmetz – plastination by Gunther von Hagen. It’s fascinating and somewhat disturbing – don’t click through if you’re squeamish. Here’s a short explanation of the process.
This video shows a Wii Fit Balance Board controlling a “SkyBot” toy robot to move around a platform. Check out the link below to the downloadable Python source code for this hack and lots of good details on how it was built. Wii Board
This is a nice article on how to identify and extract rotary encoders. It then explores how to decode your rotary encoder and has a little lesson on Quadrature Encoding. It does not go into extreme detail, but there is a lot of useful information. Some recent stereos do, especially ugly boom boxes and (non-ugly) […]
Ben writes- It’s amazing how a simple idea can take on a life of its own once you start. Have a desire to build a boat for fishing at your local lakes and a bunch of American Ingenuity? Build a boat out of things American, Duct Tape, PVC pipe, and plastic. I wanted a boat […]
Huh, so here’s a good use for entangled photons.. ghost-imaging via Wired. Investigators funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research are conducting research under the name of “ghost-imaging,” where a visual image of an object is created by means of light that has never interacted with the object. The new technology may result […]
