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.

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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 […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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