Technology

Super Sewable Circuitry – Sylvia’s Mini Maker Show

Super Sewable Circuitry – Sylvia’s Mini Maker Show

I bet you didn’t know that there’s a soft side to the hard edged fiberglass boarded electronics you know and love, and it’s called soft circuitry! The copper clad board in through-the-hole electronics can actually be replaced by cloth, and the traces replaced with conductive thread, allowing your projects to light up, and still be huggable and wear friendly. Today we’ll show you how to make your very own glowey-eyed cuddle monster you can sew together with the threadbare essentials. Lets go!

New in the Maker Shed: TFT Touch Shield

New in the Maker Shed: TFT Touch Shield

This big, gorgeous 2.8″ TFT touchscreen display from the Maker Shed is sure to add some flare to your next Arduino project. It’s capable of displaying 262,000 different colors with 240 x 320 pixels so pictures will be nice and sharp. The built in resistive touchscreen is capable of tracking your finger anywhere on the screen so you can use the display as an input device. An on-board microSD slot lets you load pictures and graphics with ease.

Scratching Analog Audio With a PC Fan

Adrià Navarro created this excellent DIY DJ turntable from a junk pile walkman and PC fan. When you rotate the fan with your fingers, the voltage is read by an Arduino, which smooths and remaps the levels and then uses PWM to control the audio casette player’s motor. For good measure, Adrià added an array of LEDs to show the speed of playback. Inspired by her, I’ll be fishing through my junk pile to see if I can give new life to any dusty old parts.

MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup

MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup

I had a sense, as early as Tuesday, that it was going to be a yellow kind of week, and sure enough, the MAKE Flickr pool has proved it out. And though yellow has lots of negative connotations, it happens to be my favorite color, probably because it reminds of me construction equipment and power tools. Oh, and flowers. I have credible reports from people who have actually seen nature that flowers are sometimes yellow, too.

YouTube + Microwave = μWave

A group of students competing in PennApps Data Hackathon created a microwave which plays a popular YouTube video that is the length of the time you’ve entered for your food to heat up. They call it the μWave and their hack won them first prize in the competition. Not only does the microwave entertain you while your left over chicken fried rice is reheating, but it also texts you when your food is done and tweets about when you use it. They used an Arduino to read the amount of time on the microwave’s 7-segment display and to communicate that information to a web server with Ruby on Rails.