Learning how to program Arduino was a must-do for my Zero to Maker process. For a beginner like me, this turns out to be an easier thing to say than to do. I wanted to learn it right and really understand what I was doing, which meant – and I’m really going to expose the Zero in me here – starting with basic electronics: soldering, circuit testing, and understanding fundamentals like Ohm’s Law.
Here’s an elegant idea: A treaded “tank” type platform for your smartphone, controlled via the headphone jack. All the software lives in the phone, and can be downloaded, installed, modified, and shared as apps. It’s the work of Peter Seid and Phu Nguyen at Seattle’s Romotive, Inc. Their already-funded Kickstarter is still ongoing.
John Wilson of Minneapolis, MN, created the Stella Amp, his own twist on the cigar box amp. The Stella Amp is a portable battery powered guitar amplifier! Perfect for making your own mini-practice amp, cigar box amplifier, headphone amplifier, or any other kind of battery powered amplifier you can think of. Engineered for a good […]
It rolls on tracks instead of walking, but this ditch-witch style tracked chassis retrofit with a pair of giant waldos is pretty much the power loader from Aliens. This video showing it in action is a great news segment from Ed Yeates of Utah’s KSL-TV, right up to the point where they start talking about the system as an “equalizer” opening up jobs to women “that might’ve otherwise been closed just based on strength issues.”
You can now go to fab.fritzing.org and order a PCB directly from your Fritzing sketch. (Just use your Fritzing.org account to log in.)
First Chess, then Jeopardy, now the Rubic’s Cube. Mike Dobson and David Gilday’s CubeStormer II Rubic’s Cube solving robot successfully beat Australian Feliks Zemdegs’ 5.66 second record by solving a cube in a mere 5.352 seconds. The feat was accomplished using four LEGO Mindstorm NXT kits controlled by a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone. The Singularity is near, I tell ya.
Materials researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have developed a highly conductive silver ink. In this video, Analisa Russo, a graduate student in the research group of Professor Jennifer Lewis shows exactly how to make this amazing ink, which could be used for a wide variety of hobby projects and in advanced electronics hardware. […]
