Resistor

The Luna Mod Looper

The Luna Mod Looper

The Luna Mod is an easy and fun instrument that will have you making great-sounding loops in no time. Rather than sampling input like a traditional loop station, the Luna Mod synthesizes its own sounds, and you play it using two knobs and one button.

Beating Heart Pendant

Beating Heart Pendant

While reading through Charles Platt’s excellent book Make: Electronics, I came across this nice little circuit for making a gentle pulsing LED. I was struck by the “humanness” of the pulse, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Later I found a heart-shaped tag on some pants I had bought, and well, this […]

Lunchbox Laser Shows

Lunchbox Laser Shows

Back in the 1970s, my friend Wayne Gillis and I used to do light shows at science fiction conventions. We had the usual panoply of overhead, slide, and custom-made projectors, and a single, very expensive, helium-neon laser from Edmund Scientific. Calling ourselves Light Opera, and later, Illuminatus, we performed at ConFusion conventions in Ann Arbor, […]

Rock ‘n’ Roll Speakers

Rock ‘n’ Roll Speakers

Whether you’re at a Bangkok hostel or backpacking in Goa, you can rock out to your favorite tunes with these portable Rock ’n’ Roll Speakers, a set of customizable, low-fi travel speakers that allow you to take your music everywhere. The speakers are driven by a simple power amplifier circuit and a tilt switch. With […]

Dish-O-Tron 6000

Dish-O-Tron 6000

I’m absentminded in general, but especially when it comes to the dishwasher. I can never remember whether the dishes are clean, whether the machine needs to be run, or emptied, or whatever. I needed a solution to this problem. My first thought was to hang a flippable sign on the door that said “clean” on […]

Tweet-A-Watt Power Monitor

Tweet-A-Watt Power Monitor

By Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone We live in a rented apartment, so we don’t have hacking access to a power meter or breaker panel. But we still wanted to measure our household power usage long-term, so we developed the Tweet-a-Watt. It uses plug-in electricity monitors at each outlet to wirelessly send readings to a […]