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!
Stephen Richardson of Tangent Audio built the AZIZ light ring for his Bausch & Lomb stereo microscope. AZIZ is an LED microscope illuminator that I designed and built from scratch. It is designed around a Texas Instruments TLC59116 constant-current PWM LED driver chip, and an Atmel ATTiny1634 AZIZ has 64 LEDs, half super-bright and half […]
Cristos Vasilas added a Raspberry Pi with camera board to his telescope, and took great video! My rPi camera board arrived from Element14 this week. I was anxious to get it connected to my rover, but once I saw the quality of the image it produced, I decided to use it as a wireless image/video […]
The Dream Rocket Project project brings the “A” to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) and celebrates the Saturn V — a crowning achievement of human ingenuity — by wrapping it in a massive crowdsourced quilt made by people from around the world. The project needs funding to help cover design and engineering costs, and you can help by contributing to their Kickstarter campaign.
Join me in my continuing journey to make a solid building material from plastic bags. My latest experiment has potential. How can you add to it?
Anna Kaziunas France, of Global Fab Academy, prints out a 3D model of the iconic Joy Division album cover art for Unknown Pleasures. Did you know it’s a radio waveform from the first pulsar ever discovered? And that it was lifted directly from an astronomy encyclopedia?
Our friends at WGBH’s Design Squad have come up with a great line up of activities for kids interested in NASA and the final frontier—space. The materials are designed for the classroom and after school programs, but with summer vacation a few weeks away, it would be easy to plug these resources into summer activities for adults looking to give kids something to do over the lazy days of summer. It’s basically a plug-and-play curriculum.
Combine an ECG headset with an Arduino to control paramecia! Paramecia display a behaviour known as galvanotaxis: movement in response to an electrical field. If an electrical field is generated across the water they are swimming in, they will turn to orient themselves to the field and will swim towards the cathode (negative terminal). The […]
