If you like having lots of bells and whistles attached to your computer, we’ve got you at least partially covered here. Using a microcontroller and a homemade solenoid inside a desk bell, Instructables user Meseta walks you through how to create a USB-based dinging notification system. The bell can be used to notify you of […]
Nick Carter and his son Henry were browsing Goodwill when Henry spotted a Staples Easy Button for sale and wanted to try using it to make an Awesome Button, our DIY USB synonym generator project. Neither of them had much experience with electronics projects, and despite some difficulty with the soldering iron, they managed to […]
Michael Zoellner of Elangen, Germany, wrote in with a fun POV he created: Mounting 5 LEDs on a moving object creates one of the cheapest and largest displays: Persistence of Vision. It’s been done on bicycle wheels, fans and other rotating objects. In this project i am sewing a Lilypad wearable Arduino board and five […]
After a quick search of the posts I’ve written for MAKE, it’s clear that I overuse the word “awesome.” It’s not news to me, but I had no idea how bad my problem was. In fact, I think you could say that I abuse the word. In order to cut down on my usage of […]
This Instructable from Jared Foster doesn’t just show you how to make his cool persistence-of-vision business card. It takes you through the construction of a circulating etch tank, the modification of a laminating machine to make a stencil applicator, the assembly of a controller to turn a toaster into a reflow oven, and the cobbling-together of a vacuum pickup tool for SMT components. And then you get some practice using all that cool stuff making a POV business card. It even comes with obligatory American Psycho allusions.
Instructible user fungus amungus turned his broken Nintendo Entertainment System into a flash drive dock and modded his game cartridges with 8GB flash drives. Now when he inserts the game carts into the NES, the drives appear on his desktop. As a nice touch, he added custom icons for each drive so that he knows […]
Here’s a fairly radical way to motivate yourself to learn Morse, from Australian Ben Buxton. Got to agree with tipster Alan Dove, who described the build as, “a project involving Arduino programming, a mint tin, a USB interface, and International Morse Code, resulting in unassailable geek cred.” The USB key interface is built into a mint tin and provides a dual input port for a standard USB keyboard to access non-Morse characters. A numeric display on the tin displays your coding speed, and tapping out “SOS” without letter spaces brings up the settings menu. Software, schematics, and build notes at Ben’s site. [Thanks, Alan!]
