Chickens are notoriously low-maintenance animals to keep, and if you’re drawn to homesteading, even in urban environments, getting a couple of hens is a great way to start. Plus, nothing beats fresh eggs in the morning from your own mini farm. Home automation is all about simplifying daily tasks, and the same applies to your […]
The man behind the world’s largest Tesla coil (the 30,000-watt Electrum) is once again upping the ante on machine-generated lightning. Greg Leyh and his group Lightning On Demand (LOD) have launched a new a project, The Lightning Foundry, that will try to re-create super-long discharge effects normally found only in lightning.
Electrical engineer and MAKE contributor Jeff Tregre has two 10-year-old hot water heaters in the attic of his New Orleans home, and knowing that 10 years is about the life expectancy of such heaters, he started researching water leak detection devices. Being a maker, he realized he could create his own system for much less […]
Brown University Engineering and Visual Arts lecturer Ian Gonsher’s Generative Construction Toy is a set of snap together shapes that you can cut out on a laser cutter and use as building blocks to design and build compound three dimensional objects. It’s like an evolving desktop fab version of tinker toys or LEGO, but more organic. What’s most interesting about the GCT is that you are encouraged to modify and create your own shapes through an iterative process of design and play.
There are a lot of makers who really like SketchUp’s approach to 3D modeling. Personally, I think it’s a great way to get kids hooked on the idea of designing physical shapes that they may or may not fabricate with the laser cutter or 3D printer. While it may take a bit to get the hang of scale and accuracy, once you have these habits, your designs are repeatable with a variety of CNC tools and many different materials.
By looking about on Thingiverse and in the MAKE Flickr pool, you can see that Sketchup is a fairly popular tool for many of us who like to bring our ideas onto this side of the computer screen. The Make Ideas Real with SketchUp project is looking for examples of things that have been designed with SketchUp and brought into the world. The folks at SketchUp are gathering stories with the Make Ideas Real project about how people are using the program to design the things they make.
Bitcoin values are dropping, but this is an interesting glimpse of future ways malware authors will try to generate… coin.
Much to my mother’s chagrin, my Dad always held the philosophy of “Use it until you wear it out.” It made some of our stuff look shabby, but it stretched dollars and made for good learning experiences. One day the engine on our trusty Snapper lawnmower seized up. At this point I was around 12 years old, and past the point of just handing tools to Dad while he worked on something (though being the tool gopher is an important mill to be pulled through in and of itself), but now diving into the heady space of troubleshooting. Minor problems consisted of re-sewing the grass bag’s opening so its elastic cuff would fit snugly over the chute, or having to coax the engine back to life come springtime.
