Excellent photos and write up from Mr.Bill –The Southern Cross I is a Z80-based single board computer kit from DIY Electronics. I finished assembling it on September 18th, after about eight total hours of work spread over three days. I’ll be using it to learn Z80 assembly language, with Programming the Z80 and Z80 Assembly Language Programming as references. Link.
William writes “Radio Shack has made the Vex Robotics Programming kit “in stock” for online and phone orders. Word on the street is that most ‘shacks don’t have them in-store”. I think Radio Shacks aren’t going to carry these in store as they continue to move towards a consumer electronics only inventory. Link.
MAKE Flickr photo pool member gkaufman posted up shots of his work area; be sure to post up yours! I have 2 workbenches in my garage. I built them both from a kit (StrongTite??) at Home Depot. The one in the back of the garage holds almost all of my tools, and is used when I need to do normal garage-type work (woodwork, grinding, auto repair, etc). The workbench up front is for computer-related activities, including any arcade stuff I might be working on. Link.
Two parts water, one part coolant, and one part guts are all it takes to water-cool your PC. It may seem a little extreme for a garden-variety desktop, but if your CPU runs hot or you’ve overclocked parts of your system, nothing beats the cooling power of classic H2O. Water conducts heat far better than air, and you don’t have to be a turbogeek to perform the conversion. Modern kits make installation little more challenging than swapping a fan or a heat sink. [via] Link.
Battle Kits are designed along the lines of the most successful combat robot ever: BioHazard. We started with some of the key features in BioHazard and developed four rugged, low-profile, high-performance, mobile platforms on which you can build the next killer robot! Thanks Doug! Link.
There are tons of kits out there, ranging from make your own hot sauce to build your own fiberglass and wood spherical treehouse kits. So, what are your favorites? What kits have you used, what did you like about them? Email us at — editor at makezine dot com and let us know. We’re cooking up a kit article for our 4th volume!
Ask Metafilter has a good discussion on choosing a multimeter. I’m ready to make the plunge into electronics repair/circuit building but I’m wondering what I should look for in a multimeter and electronics tool kit? Aside from auto-ranging, I’m not sure what features to look for in the multimeter, and are there any particularly good reasonably priced tool kits? Link.
