Andrew Rossignol wanted to make a desk ornament, and inspired by Charles Lohr video on making a glass PCBs, he decided to do just that. But not having access to the tools he needed to etch his own PCBs at home, he took a different approach, one that would let him use parts he found at a local craft store.
There is a large field of mustard a couple miles from MAKE headquarters, and for a few weeks in spring, all the mustard blooms, and the field turns brilliant yellow. On the way home from work about a month ago, I stopped at the field, with a plan to to take some photos. As I got closer to the ideal photo spot, I came across a gentleman, documentary filmmaker Michael Heumann, flying a quadcopter. We got to chatting, and I ended up snapping some photos. Michael has a DJI Phantom Aerial UAV Drone Quadcopter with a GoPro camera mounted to it, and he showed me how he had installed some Moongel pads on the top and bottom of the camera, to absorb shock to reduce video shakiness.
Kansas City programmer Michael Overstreet wanted his own high-performance humanoid robot to experiment with, but was deterred by the $12,000 pricetag of an off-the-shelf DARwin-OP. Though a significant fraction of the cost is tied up in the top-of-the-line servo actuators the design requires to perform at spec, Michael believed he could build his own “clone” of the fully open-source design, at substantial savings, by 3D printing as many pieces as he could in fused filament, on home equipment.
At Minne-Faire this year, I ran into Jerry Bjelojac who has created the Choosatron, an Arduino-powered, coin-operated choose-your-own adventure machine that prints your quest out on a thermal printer. As technology has advanced, so has the way we tell stories. The interactive fiction genre evolved so quickly from text adventures to modern gaming that creatively […]
AA battery + coil of wire + neodymium magnets = DC Motor!
Congratulations to Intonarumori, the Lobbyist Meter, the Raspberry Pi-based State Poster, Walnut Raspberry Pi Enclosure, and the Raspberry Pi Powered Cat Feeder, who are all winners in the first ever Raspberry Pi Design Contest!
Marco Robustini wanted to test the accuracy of the ArduCopter code and show the accuracy of the IMU, so he decided to suspend bottles from his multi-copter to find out how it would cope with huge variations in weight and trim
