Month: March 2013

DIY Microwave Popcorn

DIY Microwave Popcorn

Here’s a money saver: Stop buying those boxes of prepackaged microwave popcorn, and do it yourself, cheaper and healthier. All you need is a brown paper bag and some popping-corn kernels, which you can purchase cheaply in bulk. Self-proclaimed tinkerer Wardie discovered this a few months ago, and shares the details on his blog, Wardie’s World. He also figured out how to successfully salt air-popped popcorn without oil or butter!

Roll Your Own Crowdfunding: The Scout Story Part 2

Roll Your Own Crowdfunding: The Scout Story Part 2

It’s been three weeks since we launched the Scout pre-order site to the world. Scout is a hassle-free, do-it-yourself home security system. You can check it out here: www.scoutalarm.com. As we mentioned in our last post, we “rolled our own” crowdfunding site. Following in the footsteps of Lockitron, and having forked their Self Starter project, we made the decision to forgo Kickstarter. If you haven’t read Part I of this post, you can check it out here.
Scout is currently ahead of pace to hit our campaign goal. We’ve learned a lot in the last two weeks and wanted to build on the first post. Once the press hits start to dry up, you have to get creative. (Read: Hustle like crazy.) Some of the things we’ve learned, we wish we would have learned BEFORE the campaign started. Our hope is that this post better prepares the next startup to follow in our path.

Top 3D Services: Part 1

Top 3D Services: Part 1

Let’s be honest, 3D CAD (computer aided design) is challenging to learn. Training your brain to manipulate and visualize parts in three dimensions is a learned skill. So where do you start? Thankfully, there’s a multitude of free tools available for everyone to try their hand at 3D design. And many of them don’t even require a download anymore. A simple web app will get you pretty far.

I’ve compiled the best resources I know of for dealing with 3D parts and I will list them here in two parts. This week I’m going to focus on 3D part creation and slicing, the two first steps in printing out a part on a 3D printer. Everything listed is free to use (at least to a certain extent)