Nick Poole, a technologist for SparkFun Electronics, built this beautiful Arduino-powered rainbow box: Recently, I had the opportunity to see Phil Lapsley talk about his book “Exploding the Phone,” a history of phone phreaking. When I found out that he was coming to give the talk, I was reminded of a project that I had […]
If fire wasn’t the first thing invented, it was probably the second. The human race has had a long relationship with fire, and now you can use it to charge your smartphone, GPS, or anything else that you can connect to this thermoelectric generator using a USB cable.
Ian Danforth has created a robot he hopes change how people, mainly children, think about and interact with robots. It’s called the Fenn. Ian, founder of Embodied AI, has written a children’s story about our contact with an alien planet and the creatures who live there. The Fenn is the robotic embodiment of one of those creatures. Ian and the Fenn will be at Maker Faire Bay Area this month.
From the creative mind of Steve Belfer, who composed music for the animated TV show “Spongebob Squarepants,” comes this awesome homemade bubble machine. The video that shows it in action is, of course, accompanied by Belfer’s fun and quirky tunes.
Last month, Super Awesome Sylvia, one of our favorite young makers, was selected to show off her WaterColorBot at the White House and meet President Obama. Yesterday, Joey Hudy, another young maker and MAKE regular, was named by Business Insider as one of 10 smartest kids in the world. Wow.
Each month this year, we’re exploring a different electronic component, delving into what it is, how it works, and how you use it in projects. Last month we covered resistors, and before that we looked at batteries. This month we examine operational amplifiers, often called op amps. An op amp is an electronic component used […]
Next in our run-up coverage for the MAKE 2013 Hardware Innovation Workshop is Craig Bonsignore’s Open Clock Project. Bonsignore is a biomedical engineer with more than fifteen years of experience designing, developing, and analyzing cardiovascular implants. And he’s fed up with badly designed alarm clocks.
