Toy Inventor’s Notebook — Root Beer Pong Bot
When making prototypes, I often “kit bash” broken toys to harvest useful components like motors, gear trains, or radio-control transmitters and receivers. No need to reinvent the wheel — literally!
Month: January 2012
Recipe: Fresh Spring Rolls
I love spring rolls, I’ve made them three times this week! And they are so easy to make, just do the prep and you can make spring rolls all week. Kristin of Iowa Girl Eats gives us a wonderful step-by-step on fresh spring rolls with a great peanut dipping sauce.
Plush Tiny Houses
I am loving these sweet houses by Collected by Taska. They look really rad and double as a cozy floor pillow. Easily DIY-able right? Mmmmm, that gets me thinking…
North Paw and Heart Spark
Sensebridge is a maker of electronic kits geared toward personal hacking. It was started by a group of friends at the San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge.
Gateways to the Soul — Eyeboard
One of my high school classmates is quadriplegic, and from meeting him and hearing about others with similar conditions, I learned that many people with disabilities can’t afford technologies that could enable them to communicate — especially in places like Honduras, where I live.
Shape Memory Polymer Demo
Shape-memory metals get a fair amount of attention, but shape memory polymers exist, too. In fact, heat-shrink tubing is a familiar example of a simple shape-memory effect in a polymer. This video uploaded by MIT researcher Vikas Srivastava back in 2009 is a more impressive demonstration of heat-induced shape recovery. The plastic material is tBA […]
Gateways to the Soul — EyeWriter
In 2003, my friend Tony, aka graffiti artist Tempt1, was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive disease that left him almost completely paralyzed except for his eyes. In order to help him continue to make his art, I collaborated with a group of software developers and hardware hackers to create a low-cost, open source, eye-tracking system that would allow Tempt1 and other ALS patients to draw and control a computer using just their eyes.