Photo by James Moss (makesnow.net) As one of the biggest storms of the winter is hitting Lake Tahoe, MAKE Volume 21 is about to hit newsstands. What do these two phenomena have in common? Snow! In the DIY Outdoors section, we’re featuring a Combo Snow Gun project written by one of our own former MAKE […]
Australian maker Mark Stead recently got some chickens and found out the hard way that they’re early risers. In order to accommodate his new avian friends sleeping habits (and reduce the impact to his) he decided to build an automatic door opener using an inexpensive battery operated alarm clock.
Instructables user mrigsby writes: The Flock Clock uses male and female drinking birds to display time. Binary addition of the female birds (left to right) yields the hour. Binary addition of the male birds (multiplied by five) yields the minute–within five minutes. An Arduino processor provides the signals needed to drive Peltier cells which heat […]
From the MAKE Flickr pool Robert Hart posted a test run of his Cosmic Ray Muon Detector which uses three parallel Geiger–Müller Tubes. Simultaneous readings on all three tube sensors indicates the momentary presence of cosmic radiation. Robert built this device to assist in testing a similar unit which uses common fluorescent tubes for detection. […]
Hannah Perner-Wilson uses conductive yarn to make a stretch sensor, here’s how: Use a circular knitting machine to knit a stretch sensor with regular and conductive yarns in five minutes! The values of the sensor range from roughly 2.5 Mega Ohm when relaxed, to 1 Kilo Ohm when fully stretched. The stretch sensing is actually […]
Thingiverse user Daniel (“mind”) has uploaded a complete set of files to laser-cut all the pieces of this sweet SpiderBot hexapod. He comments:
A hexapod with servo joints. This design is quite big and needs strong servos but looks really cool…I used 20 HD-2213MG Servos…If you use other servos you need to modify the embeddings for the servos and servo horns. You may make the upper and lower legs shorter to get shorter leverage. Finally the parts get assembled with M2 thread rod and nuts.
There is serious fun to be had with this project from Paulbo of FangleTronics. He shows how he created an awesome glow-in-the-dark wall on which kids (and adults, of course) can write and draw with LED pens. [via Filth Wizardry]
