This time around on Tiny Yellow House, I decided to mess around with passive solar heat so as to warm the always-cold front foyer of my home. The result: a smallish, closeable, passive solar collector that fits into a window opening. Its not rocket science (and it NEVER will be here on Tiny Yellow House) but it does work- even in January, in New England.
Mike Estee has been laser-cutting hexapod limbs from cardboard and is making great progress on his hexapod project. As he explains:
As I’ve written about in the past, cost can be measured in many ways. For this exercise I’m primarily interested in cost of materials, cost of manufacturing, and assembly time. Design time isn’t particularly optimized here, but as we build on previous iterations, hopefully we can stay ahead of complexity. On the cold hard cash front, I think I’m doing pretty well. This little fellow consists of: $1.00 in cardboard, $54.60 in servos, and $29.95 in servo controllers.
I love the clever interface between this Mindstorms car and the web. Maker Leon from Rye, NY, built a Skype-based interface that changes the screen color based on the button clicked, and a light sensor (the second photo) detects the color change and sends a command to the car via bluetooth. To control the robot, […]
In a pinch, you can clip the earbuds off an iPhone headset to get a quick and dirty lav mic. Add a safety pin with a little hot glue and camouflage it with a smattering of sharpie and you’re good to go. If you’re curious about the quality of the audio produced with such a setup, check out the above video from maker Levi Allen, where he runs through a build while capturing the audio with his iPhone. It won’t win any awards, however it’ll get the job done.
Today’s dumpscore included a Guitar Hero drum controller. I don’t have any use for it as a controller at this time, but I’ve been curious what is inside this category of devices. There were also about a half dozen guitar controllers for various game systems, but I wasn’t as interested in those today.
When I got home, I cleared off the table and grabbed a screwdriver. A half hour later, I had a nice neat pile of the electronic parts, and the rest of it was stashed away in the recycle bin. There was some neat telescoping tube in the stand, but I don’t have an immediate use for that stuff, and don’t have enough of it to create a storage category for future use.
Build a pulse-sensing headband that flashes a heart-shaped LED display to the beating of your heart! Full instructions for this episode of Becky’s Workshop are available at Make: Projects: http://makeprojects.com/Project/Beating-Heart-Headband/1622/1
music by i am jen: http://iamjen.com/
Here’s a tutorial from Open Music Labs on piezo transducers.
