Kits

Aspic Ascension: Jell-O mold winners

Aspic Ascension: Jell-O mold winners

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo. Competitors in this year’s Gowanus Studio Space Jell-O Mold Competition brought their best and really wowed the judges (including me!) on a hot night in Brooklyn last month. The grand prize winner was Shelly Sable for […]

DIY server room monitoring

DIY server room monitoring

Jared Bouck is the driving force behind Sprout Board, an Arduino breakout board that lets you plug in a Duemilanove and a shield and provides a panel-mount set of screw terminals, all in a rack-mountable form factor. The prototype application for the SproutBoard is a DIY server room monitor that can be configured to provide remote temperature and humidity, motion, liquid water, smoke, room entry, and mains power monitoring. Local monitoring options include an LCD display and an audio alarm module. They’ll sell you the Sprout Board itself, in kit form, for $50, or a complete bare-bones server monitor with a fully assembled and tested Spout Board, an Arduino, an Ethernet Shield, a serial LCD display, a wall mount chassis, and a temperature/humidity sensor board for $250, which is about 1/5th the price of a comparable commercial system.

Make: Projects – POSC handheld audio oscillator

Make: Projects – POSC handheld audio oscillator

When you first turn the POSC on, the LED will light for a fraction of a second. If you’ve got it hooked up to an amplifier, it’ll also squawk for a second. Playing it is as easy as licking your finger and tapping, rubbing, pressing, or smearing it across the two contacts. The amount of incident light on the photoresistor controls the frequency, so experiment with playing it under different lighting conditions. Jim and Kat have produced a bunch of software for digital post-processing of the POSC signal. For mroe info, see the Sonodrome website.