After we put the kids to bed last night my wife and I realized we needed to set up some April Fools’ Day pranks. So I built this motion sensing alarm and tucked it into the shampoo bottle recess in the shower. When the kids entered the bathroom they got an earful of beeping piezo buzzer for their troubles!
Paul Overton at Dude Craft has got his maker priorities straight. Set simple, achievable goals, and make them a reality. Behold the disco bike helmet, a party on your head.
Found these ceramic tiles in the shape of floppy disks at the site of Australian design firm ENESS, who made a pretty cool game of augmented-reality Pong played on a whiteboard awhile back, and, I believe, are also responsible for making these. There’s no info about how it was done, however, and the post is titled “5 1/4 inch,” in spite of the fact that these are clearly 3 1/2 inch floppies. Cool idea, though. Anyone have more info?
This tutorial by Instructables user nepheron shows you how to embed ordered optical fibers in cast cement to produce a small lump of concrete that will transmit light. It’s based on Litracon, a commercial architectural material that, I believe, invented the concept. I’ve been considering a very similar “cast your own translucent cinder-block” type tutorial for the Make: Projects series for some time.
The problem of tiling a plane has fascinated builders and mathematicians alike since time immemorial. At first glance, the task is straightforward: squares, triangles, hexagons all do the trick producing well known periodic structures. Ditto any number of irregular shapes and combinations of them.
A much trickier question is to ask which shapes can tile a plane in a pattern that does not repeat. In 1962, the mathematician Robert Berger discovered the first set of tiles that did the trick. This set consisted of 20,426 shapes: not an easy set to tile your bathroom with.
With a warm regard for home improvers, Berger later reduced the set to 104 shapes and others have since reduced the number further. Today, the most famous are the Penrose aperiodic tiles, discovered in the early 1970s, which can cover a plane using only two shapes: kites and darts.
The problem of finding a single tile that can do the job is called the einstein problem; nothing to do with the great man but from the German for one– “ein”–and for tile–“stein”. But the search for an einstein has proven fruitless. Until now.
I recently put together a small video studio in the guest bedroom (not sure how the in-laws will like this) and wanted to design a high-quality, low-budget lighting setup. I wanted a bright, diffuse key light (that’s the primary light off to one side and slightly higher than your head to illuminate the subject) and a slightly less bright, lower-angle fill light. Here’s what I came up with.
From “You Built What?!” The Electronic Didgeridoo @ Popular Science… Kyle Evans, a 24-year-old artist, bought his first didgeridoo in a small shop in Cairns, Australia, three years ago. The owner helped him pick out one of his handmade Aboriginal instruments, and after Evans taught himself to play, he decided to build an enhanced version: […]
