The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
Pet owners who want to spend a day hiking, at the beach, shopping at the mall or even a weekend far from home can build an automatic pet feeder to dispense water and dry food at a preset time. Tom Thompson, Julie Redmond, Curtis Siebenaller and Nathan Woodworth at Colorado State University explain how to combine electronic and mechanical devices to do just that.
Speaking broadly, non-Newtonian fluids are of two types: Either they get thinner under shear, or they get thicker. Shear-thickening fluids, like the common corn flour-water mixture sometimes called “oobleck,” obviously, get thicker when a force is applied. This new and highly secretive non-Newtonian fluid formulation by British defense giant BAE is like oobleck to the power of ten, and can, reportedly, be very effectively combined with Kevlar to improve human body armor performance against bullets. [via Fast Company]
And we’re back with our sixth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Make: Online, our Facebook page, and Twitter. Nate imagines what it would be like if the Star Wars characters were making Death Star cookies: Hee hee…I’m having all of these wonderful images of Vader, Tarkin, and […]
Reportedly this cam-actuated, weight-activated grabbing hook from designer Stefan Bennedahl “makes it easy to hang things like towels that tend to fall off hooks,” which I’m willing to buy into if for no other reason than that it looks like a heckuva lot of fun to use. Design Within Reach actually lives up to its name with these, which are only $10 apiece.
Google’s App Inventor for Android (beta) is a tool that will help you visually design mobile apps and run them on an Android device. This should be exciting news for all the Open Blocks/Scratch fans out there as the project uses the Open Blocks Java library distributed by MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program.
This week in the MAKE Flickr pool we saw: Drilled hole photo by ogk2009, TinyG Bot Mini CNC Mill by rileyporter, Blood Sponge Bag by eqqman, and Donut Machine Demonstration (AKA Saskatoon) by Steven Laurie.
I am loving the DIY gadget aesthetics of these FernSprecher voice-memo machines made from old telephone handsets by Jörg Schatzmann of Berlin. FernSprecher, one of the German words for telephone, literally means “remote speaker.” One button records a message, the other plays it back. [Thanks, Jörg!]
