I’m loving the work TX/RX Labs, Houston, TX’s hackerspace, is doing these days. Their Flux Clockpacitor is made with DR2000 Numitron nixies, 7-segment drivers, and an Arduino Uno. The intrepid adventurers of our Temporal Archaeology Team have returned from a parallel timeline in which they personally witnessed President Tesla’s WWI victory against Otto Mecha Bismarck […]
MAKE reader Ken Miller wrote in to tell us about the magical staff prop he built this Halloween to complement a very lucky lad’s wizard costume:”We built this Dragon Head Wizard Staff for my girlfriend’s 9 year old son, mostly out of parts we had lying around. It uses an accelerometer to ‘cast spells’ based on the direction you shake the staff…”
I love Udo Klein’s LED Camera experiment he performed on his Blinkenlight shield. Keep an eye on the screen in the background to see the individual LEDs’ readings.
At the Center for Biorobotics in Estonia, Eszter Ozsvald built a mechanical fish named A.riel that can model the movements of actual fish surprisingly well, and using only one servo inside a carefully made silicon-based mold. It took many iterations before the final product, but found that in the end she could develop the same vortex patterns as actual fish. Her site has extensive documentation on the build process and is definitely worth a look for the mold-making processes alone.
It’s been a while but the most popular version of the Ultimate Microcontroller Pack is back in stock in the Maker Shed! The Ultimate Microcontroller Pack with Arduino Uno includes everything you need to dive right into the world of microcontollers. The 100+ components include everything from servos to an LCD screen to allow you to complete nearly any online tutorial without having to source individual parts.
Enviably agile and purposeful, the mobile robot makes its way through grounds rendered off-limits to humans as the result of a chemical accident. Depressions, ruts and other obstacles are no match for this eight-legged high-tech journeyman. Its mission: with a camera and measurement equipment on board, it will provide emergency responders with an image of […]
John Graham-Cumming created this sleek 7×7 LED display by hacking up a string of addressable Christmas lights from GE. Starting from Robert Quattlebaum’s excellent tutorial, he mounted an Arduino Pro and GE Color Effects G-35 Christmas lights inside a frame and diffused the light with a cutting board. I especially like how he used servo arms to secure the backing to the frame. He coded the Arduino so that custom messages and patterns can be displayed and in the video above he shows it displaying “Thanks GE” for making these hackable Christmas lights.
