Alt.CES: MAKE’s Take, 2012
We haven’t even had a moment to work off the extra holiday weight yet and it’s already that time again: the Consumer Electronics Show! Here at MAKE, each year, we program a little thing we call alt.CES.
We haven’t even had a moment to work off the extra holiday weight yet and it’s already that time again: the Consumer Electronics Show! Here at MAKE, each year, we program a little thing we call alt.CES.
Master modder Ben Heck is at it again. This time around he’s created a hand-held game controller for the iPhone using the guts from an Ion iCade iPad game controller and some laser-cut parts. As ever, Ben pulls off a slick portable mod suitable for the store shelves.
If you’re building a standalone project with an embedded PC (say, a CNC rig or a MAME cabinet) one of the easiest ways to get instructions to the software is using the PC’s baked-in keyboard interface. But if you don’t want to actually use a keyboard to control the thing, you need some way to convert button presses and/or joystick movements from your custom control panel into signals that look like keyboard input.
Mike Estee has been laser-cutting hexapod limbs from cardboard and is making great progress on his hexapod project. As he explains:
As I’ve written about in the past, cost can be measured in many ways. For this exercise I’m primarily interested in cost of materials, cost of manufacturing, and assembly time. Design time isn’t particularly optimized here, but as we build on previous iterations, hopefully we can stay ahead of complexity. On the cold hard cash front, I think I’m doing pretty well. This little fellow consists of: $1.00 in cardboard, $54.60 in servos, and $29.95 in servo controllers.
True to Matt Richardson’s post, we now have HELLO! My Name is LED Nametag Kits available in the Maker Shed! This kit is perfect for your next hackerspace meeting, convention, or anywhere you want your nametag to proclaim that YOU ARE A MAKER!
In a pinch, you can clip the earbuds off an iPhone headset to get a quick and dirty lav mic. Add a safety pin with a little hot glue and camouflage it with a smattering of sharpie and you’re good to go. If you’re curious about the quality of the audio produced with such a setup, check out the above video from maker Levi Allen, where he runs through a build while capturing the audio with his iPhone. It won’t win any awards, however it’ll get the job done.
Our featured image from the MAKE Flickr pool this week is by regular contributor Peter Barvoets, aka lookseeseen. Its subject is a glowing Geissler tube (Wikipedia), an early type of low-pressure gas discharge tube invented in Germany in 1857. Peter has another great shot of the same tube here.