DIY Projects

DIY bike helmet fan

DIY bike helmet fan

From the MAKE Flickr pool Matt outfitted his headgear with some quick-n-dirty AC – I was bored one day at NYCR and started playing with my rising collections of motors. Ended up stuffing an 18v motor into my bike helmet and putting two 9vs in series on it. Runs awesome. Surprisingly effective as a cooling […]

How-To: Dapping punch from steel bolts

Instructables user cr8ive1 writes: This is how I make steel doming punches to shape soft metals (gold, silver, copper, brass) for jewellery making. Doming (or dapping punches as they are often referred to by jewellery makers) punches are expensive for what they are- basically highly polished pieces of curved steel. I have a few commercially […]

Soft circuit merit badge merits itself

Soft circuit merit badge merits itself

Here’s the latest project from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: The proliferation of spoof, nerd, science, and electronics merit badges has demonstrated that geeks like to show off their skills and accomplishments. One skill is particularly appropriate for the format: soft circuitry. By building your own soft circuit onto an actual badge you can demonstrate your […]

How-To: Ski-goggle camera mod

How-To: Ski-goggle camera mod

MAKE contributor Will O’Brien mounted an ATC3K camera into his skiing goggles in order to grab some first-person action shots. He even created an enclosure for most of the electronics – I thought about some complicated mounting tricks to attache the boxes to the straps, but found that electrical tape worked great. Keep in mind […]

Glowing button cycling jacket

One of the most common DIY LilyPad Arduino uses seems to be in bike wear. I don’t know if it’s because bike riders like electronics or what, but here’s another one! Instructables user kempton made this very attractive cycling jacket with LED buttons, and wrote up a detailed step-by-step tutorial for making your own, complete […]

Homemade bells from old gas bottles

Homemade bells from old gas bottles

In the mid-90s a book of homebrew musical instrument projects was published called Sound Designs, by John Scoville. Amongst the scores of awesome ideas within, the book suggests making hanging bells by cutting apart discarded gas bottles. There’s surprisingly little information about this trick on the web. This page, though an oldie, is still a […]