A chance meeting with the EastSide Riders Bike Club leads us to the Georgia Street Community Center. Both organizations are dedicated to improving their community, through education, gardening, and neighborhood involvement.
Downriver Detroit native Anthony Reale shows us around the Downriver area, which is a major source of inspiration for his art and engineering projects. His most recent endeavor is an innovative hydrokinetic turbine system called Strait Power, which looks towards a brighter, and greener, future for Detroit.
Tony Buser’s F-Bomb packs soil and flower seeds into a bomb-shaped and biodegradable PLA shell. Sure, there are cheaper and more efficient ways to do this… but… pfft… The idea is to stuff it with some compost and seeds and then throw it somewhere that you think could use some color, but you either can’t […]
Imagine waking up and seeing your design for a circuit being used in a product by someone who never contacted you to ask if it was okay. You will not get any payment for their usage of your design, they’ve raised over $31,000 dollars, and they’re selling something you worked really hard on. You have no control over what someone does with something you made. Is this a nightmare? Perhaps for some, but this is actually a dream come true for others. And it’s what this week’s Soapbox is about: Open-source hardware kick-starting Kickstarters!
This past Sunday, the New York Times had a piece by Bradley Berman about owners of the Nissan Leaf and how, as with the Prius, there is a growing community of Leaf hackers who are making improvements to their cars and some who are developing products around some of these hacks.
Florida maker Daniel Fleischman designs and builds pedal-powered vehicles using PVC tubing for his company American Speedster. On his site you’ll find plans and component kits available for a small fee. Pedal-powered vehicles are becoming increasingly popular. Some folks are even hot-rodding them with electric conversions.
When a battery operated device runs out of juice, most of us reach for a fresh pair of AA’s. But when his daughter’s electronic toy piano had drained its batteries, Dominik instead installed a hand-cranked dynamo to power the instrument ad infinitum. He hacked apart an Ikea flashlight to co-opt its cranked generator and installed it inside his daughter’s plaything. Now a little bit of elbow grease keeps the tunes coming while saving the environment and a little bit of money to boot.
