In my real life, I’m a college English teacher. I spend a big part of each day writing on white boards and I love having a big space where I can sketch out ideas and then erase things and easily make changes. I wanted some of this flexibility in my home office, but commercial white […]
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I’m not usually one to build film props, but my wife and I were waiting on line for the new Avengers movie and she said, “You know, it would be great to have Thor’s hammer.” She wasn’t the least bit serious, but her remark got the old maker gears spinning. As soon as we got […]
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Tacit is a wearable system that translates the distance to anything you aim your hand toward into pressure on your wrist. The closer the object, the greater the pressure. Sweep your hand around, and the device conveys to you a tactile image of your surroundings. I designed Tacit to help vision-impaired people navigate their environments, […]
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Personally, I prefer art that has a function other than hanging on a wall. I look for various ways to incorporate my photographs and collages into everyday items — items that act as a vehicle to transport images to the outside world. I’ve created mobile exhibits with pendants, rings, purses, business card cases, and my […]
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Make and toss a bunch of these inexpensive little lights to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood.
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My friend Ed and I love quoting from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, especially the plot-inciting speech by Alec Baldwin’s character, in which he informs a veteran sales team that they will now compete against each other to keep their jobs (“Third prize: you’re fired.”) Toward the end of his harangue, he reverently reaches into […]
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Who hasn’t dreamed about owning their own metal detector and searching for buried treasure, or at least a few dropped coins? In this project, we will build a metal detector based on a dual oscillator circuit. One oscillator is fixed, and the other varies depending upon the proximity of metal objects. The beat frequency between […]
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