Nat sent in a link to his brother-in-law’s Flickr photo set of the a great Cigarbox guitar construction. In MAKE 04, we have a fun article on how-to build and play a sweet-sounding 3-string instrument in an afternoon – Link. Bonus link – here’s MAKE Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder playing a version he made, right in your browser or in iTunes (QuickTime).
Greg sent in this great LED project that spells words or makes patterns when it spins “The way this works, is you have an EEprom (electronically eraseable programmable read only memory). This stores data on different lines. You retrieve this data by feeding it binary numbers, (ie. 1=0001, 2=0010, 3=0011, 4=0100, and so on). Each line of code has 8 bits of data, and directly corresponds to how the row of LEDs are lit up. If you put in 10000001, then the top and bottom led would be on. This is kind of tricky to figure out, but you have to make a grid. Since I am using a 4 bit counter, I have a possibility of 16 addresses. So to make a letter, you have to draw up a 16X8 grid, and color in the pixels you want.” Link.
MAKE subscriber John writes “I started this site because of the importance, to ma at least, of vehicles that get good mileage. You don’t necessarily need an overly complicated hybrid (though I’m a fan of hybrids) to get good mileage. My goal is to get at least 40 mpg out of my Nissan pickup simply by making the engine more efficient and improving the aerdynamics while not taking away from its utility. This is important to me because of the environmental impact of cars and because of national security. We are all impacted by the environment but I’m in the Navy, have been deployed to the Middle East four times and so have a keen interest in our nation weening itself from oil as much as possible.” Link.
Edward writes “The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics. Offered thru Project Gutenberg. 700 Things for Boys to Do. This book was my first intro to making things when I was a kid. Published in 1913. The PDF version is richly illustrated.” Link.
MAKE will be covering ABC’s American Inventor’s auditions November 17th at 8am in San Francisco. If you’re going, let us know (before or after if you want to share your experience). “AMERICAN INVENTOR is an exciting new primetime reality show for ABC from Simon Cowell and the producers of American Idol. Set to premiere in early 2006, the show will undertake the biggest search ever for America’s best new invention. An embodiment of the ultimate American dream, the show will uncover the hottest new product and make some struggling inventor’s dream come true. The show will celebrate the best in homespun American ingenuity and will turn one person’s idea into the next big thing.” – Link. Look for our special write up this week!
I saw the start of Fabienne Serriere’s awesome project at the Maker fair – here’s the how-to! She writes “This How-To is the first in a series of construction instructions for a project titled The Magic Phone. I was inspired by the Port-O-Rotary from Spark Fun but wanted to take the project to the next level and with hardware I already had on hand. You may be able to extrapolate these instructions to different models of telephones, different telephony protocols, and even different projects.” Link.
The “Spiral Rainbow Island” created by Richie Sowa is an island is anchored off the coast of Mexico, close to Cancun. The island is made from over 250,000 recycled plastic bottles, packed into netting. Link.
