Revisited: Cord Curling – Part 2, Reversing the Coil
Inspired by “How It’s Made,” here’s a second step in my old DIY cord-curling process that makes the coil even tighter and is, just as importantly, a heckuva lot of fun to do.
Technology
Second Generation IOIO on the Way
Fans of Ytai Ben-Tsvi’s IOIO board will be happy to know that there’s an update coming. Ytai recently announced that there’s an second generation IOIO in the works. The new version will feature the ability to connect to a PC over USB (OTG) or Bluetooth using the same high-level API and cost slightly less than the original.
Engineer Guy vs. The Smartphone Accelerometer
Here, with great fanfare, is the second installment of Engineer Guy Series #4: theMEMSaccelerometer. With typical flair, Bill and his production team take us from the basic concept of an accelerometer (using the familiar ball-on-a-spring model), through the analogous silicon device that lets your smartphone tell up from down, all the way to the anisotropic etching techniques used to It’s wonders all the way down, with Bill, as usual.
Airsoft Gun Turned Into a Soldering Iron
Instructables member mikeasaurus wrote in with his Airsoft Soldering Gun project, which adds the guts of a cordless soldering iron to an airsoft pistol, with the battery held in the clip! A soldering gun is a pistol-shaped soldering tool, named for their rough appearance to a firearm. Why settle for an approximation when you can […]
Texting Trapper Saved by a Faraday Cage
This is one of my favorite stories of an eleventh-hour save of a Maker Faire project. Makers Sophi Kravitz and Ollie Tanner built an 8′ bar graph that indicates the signal strength of nearby cell phones. It worked great at home, but not so much at the San Mateo Fairground: Since the idea of the […]
Lego Cuusoo Ladyada’s Workshop Set
Now you can help turn legendary hardware hacker Ladyada’s workshop into an official Lego product! Ladyada’s Workshop is a project on Lego Cuusoo, a new platform by Lego that lets amateur models get produced as actual Lego products if they get 10,000 votes. Welcome LEGO fans! We looked around and couldn’t find a LEGO set […]
Manga Helps You Learn Surface-Mount Soldering
As electronic components get smaller, look to see more and more hobbyist kits utilizing surface mount technology (SMT) components, which attach to the surface of the PCB rather than having their leads running through holes on the board. The tininess of the components and the perceived difficulty in placing them accurately turn off many people. […]