Ribbon cable

Tiny Wanderer

Tiny Wanderer

In early 2011 my robot club, the Dallas Personal Robotics Group, was looking for a way to help our beginning members build up their skills. To this end, we produced a series of lessons covering 5 topics needed to make a simple, programmable robot: making PCBs with the toner transfer method, programming ATtiny microprocessors, laying […]

Speed Vest

Speed Vest

This lightweight night-cycling vest displays your current speed in glowing, 7-inch-tall numbers easily visible to cars.

The BeatBearing Tangible Rhythm Sequencer

The BeatBearing Tangible Rhythm Sequencer

The BeatBearing is an exciting and intuitive way to make music. Move the balls on a grid, and you change the beat. Music sequencing couldn’t be simpler. Like countless other musicians, I use a computer to create beats and sequence them into mixes. Pointing and clicking with a mouse is fine for a studio, but […]

Pixelmusic 3000

Pixelmusic 3000

In 1976, Atari introduced Atari Video Music, a plugged-in music visualizer designed by Pong creator Bob Brown that bridged the yawning gap between consumers’ stereos and their TV sets. The quirky, psychedelic pixelation device never caught on, but watching it in action today (check it out on YouTube), one is taken back to another time, […]

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 […]