Bagleemo shows us how to modify the Gakken Mechamo Inchworm to make it crawl upside down along a string with some wire coat hangers and rubber bands. He dropped a comment about it on our Inchworm build. Nice work! In the Maker Shed: The Gakken Mechamo Inchworm kit is available through the Maker Shed.
The Bop It memory toy has seen many iterations, always with neat triggers. It’s a fun toy, especially for those with a more tactile memory (I was always great at Bop It and terrible at Simon). But the thing is annoying as hell unless you’re the one playing it, so Instructables user jzzsxm added a […]
Check out this repurposed IM-Me instant messaging toy turned pocket spectrum analyzer from embedded hacker Michael Ossmann. What’s more, he’s included source.
MAKE subscriber Rob Torcellini of Eastford, CT, sent in his extrusion system for turning HDPE pellets into thin, textured strips his plants liked. I built a plastic extrusion system to make synthetic growing media for my aquaponics system. It uses the Teensy AVR microprocessor from PJRC, an old windshield wiper motor and a few Legos!
Chris O’Shea emailed in with his super sweet Kinect hack, allowing him to play air guitar! Written in c++ using openFrameworks and openCV for image processing. Using the ofxKinect addon and the libfreenect driver on Mac. Thank you to the openframeworks and openkinect communities for enabling this to happen. A big thank you to Microsoft […]
The indubitably cool (though possibly non-ergo) gesture interface seen in the movie Minority Report as well as amazing real-world projects like Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense are mirrored in his Kinect hand detection experiment by Garratt Gallagher of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Pretty sweet, and you don’t even need cool cyber-gloves!
Extreme maker and all-around bare metal hacker Jeri Ellsworth cobbled together this DIY TSA-like body scanner using a feed horn from a surplus satellite dish, an optical mouse, some components, and copious amounts of hot glue.
