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.
Vancouver-based makers eatART have been working away at their most recent creation, Titanoboa, a 50 ft mechanical snake. They displayed the work-in-progress at this year’s Vancouver Mini Maker Faire, and it’s come a long way.
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.
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.
Metro Diverse Services is a 3-person team specializing in unique fabrication projects for monumental art and architectural and landscape decoration. They were one of two mechanical spiders featured at this year’s Vancouver Mini Maker Faire in June, the other being the Mondo Spider, built by eatART Foundation.
If you’re of ‘the Goonies generation’ like myself, then hunting for buried treasure is definitely a past-time of yours. And when hunting for precious metals or even a few dropped coins, you need the assistance of science! The Treasure Finder, our latest installment at Weekend Projects, is a multi-day endeavor with potentially lucrative rewards.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could make a machine that would make 3D models of phenomena otherwise invisible to you? It’s fun to do, and it’s is an amazing creative process to create a machine that produces something that you can hold in your hand from the invisible – and it’s surprisingly easy.
