MacArthur fellow and MIT Media Lab alumnus Karl Sims brings us this great tutorial on how to build your own complex harmonograph (Wikipedia) for making cool…um…”geometric figures?” I’m looking for a 50-cent mathematician’s word (which may or may not exist) for these periodic spirally figures. Can anybody help me out? [Thanks, David!]
The mysterious Jack Crossfire’s open source autonomous VTOL UAVs are amazing to watch. For around a hundred dollars you, too, can build your own.
This music visualizer project combines two of my favorite things, Arduino’s & BlinkM’s, with another one of my favorite things, music! In the video above, all the BlinkM’s are mapped to display the same value, but they can be controlled individually with some code modifications. Check out the link for complete build instructions and the Arduino code.
Its eyes blink with data transfer. Spotted first on my Sunday scroll through the CRAFT Flickr pool. Image/video after the jump to protect delicate sensibilities. As Mark Frauenfelder, Editor-in-chief of MAKE, wrote in 2006 about a similar project: Taxidermy is an ancient craft but contemporary concerns about using animals to make things are worthy of […]
From the MAKE Flickr pool Rob Cruickshank shares this tip for easily creating an evenly spaced jeweling pattern on metal – Inspired by the article in MAKE: #19, and needing to make an ugly piece of brass pretty in a hurry, I hit upon the idea of using perfboard as a jig for jewelling. (Also […]
I love this bird-feeder tutorial from Instructables user me13lake. It’s not flashy (indeed, with a title like “Small simple horizontally mounted squirrel resistant/proof bird feeder that requires no specialist tools to make,” I’m guessing it was written by a scientist or engineer) but it’s well thought-out, easy and inexpensive to make, and it looks like it would work very well. The clear squirrel-guard rotates freely so they can’t get a grip, and can be made from a 2-liter plastic bottle. Or you could try cutting one from a glass bottle.
This process animation makes it look easy. There should be a zillion different variations on the design of a chair like this. It looks like a good way to work with the concepts of compression, tension, torsion and shear with students as they design and build their own furniture. Have you used cardboard furniture design/build projects in a classroom setting? Let us know in the comments!
