Project enclosure

Mini Rover Redux

Mini Rover Redux

This project is based on work by MAKE magazine contributor Tom Zimmerman. Tom, who was honored in 2009 as California’s Volunteer of the Year for his unpaid teaching campaign in public schools, developed the idea as a hands-on activity to accompany his talks about the Mars rover program. Basically, he mounted an X10 wireless surveillance […]

Optical Tremolo Box

Optical Tremolo Box

Plug your guitar into light-programmable waveforms with this unique effects box.

Gigantic Bubble Generator

Gigantic Bubble Generator

When I read the Geekcon 2010 call for projects, I thought, what the hack — I’ll do it. Inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I decided to let creativity into my life, and start inventing things. I watched Sterling Johnson’s magnificent “Giant Stinson Beach Bubbles” clip on YouTube, and when I described it to […]

WireFinder 9000

WireFinder 9000

By Christie, Jim, John, and Terry Noe Our dog, Maggie, loves to run around in our big yard. But how do we fence her in? Building a 500-foot fence is expensive and unsightly, so we use an “invisible fence.” This is a buried wire that runs around the edge of our yard. Maggie wears a […]

Lensless Microscope

Lensless Microscope

Inside your webcam is an imager chip with thousands of sensors, each much smaller than a hair. Replace the lens with an LED, place a sample directly on the the chip, and you have a lensless microscope capable of streaming live video of plankton or other microorganisms to any display.