How it’s made

Glowing cube

Glowing cube

Intructables member Alex the Great has a clever Awesome LED Cube project. Use the cube to slow, stop, or reverse time, or even turn ordinary technology into transformers. Your choice. This project looks like a great way to introduce kids to a number of valuable skills we have covered here at Make: Online, such as […]

Waffle shoes – Responding to a need

Waffle shoes – Responding to a need

Image from InsideNikeRunning Did you know that your sneakers are probably the result of a vision of insight at the breakfast table? Maybe you recall wearing shoes that looked like these back in the day. Bill Bowerman, was a successful track coach when he appropriated his wife’s waffle iron one day after breakfast. Bowerman and […]

Amy Smith and the low-tech solution

Have you seen the great work of Amy Smith? She operates D-lab nestled beneath the infinite corridor at MIT. Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal. […]

Make your own radio programming

Make your own radio programming

[Photo from MetroMode] Michael Jackson’s death caused radio’s roboprogrammers to take a back seat for a while. Increasingly, over the past few decades, broadcast radio has ceased to be a local affair. As the FCC regulations on local ownership of media outlets has faded towards corporate behemoths, radio programming more and more these days is […]

AIDG: water solutions

AIDG: water solutions

AIDG is a NonGovernmental Organization (NGO) that helps provide low technology solutions to help address environmental and health needs to people living in communities without great access to the systems that many of us consider requirements. Here are a few of their water-based initiatives: Solar Hot Water: XelaTeco, with support from AIDG’s wonderful interns, recently […]

Wearable metadata

Wearable metadata

Patty Maes of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab introduces what may be the must have gadget in the not so far future. The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector […]

Well-documented robotic snake

Well-documented robotic snake

This is a great example of a well documented group project. Their wiki has loads of information. There is sample code, parts lists, descriptions of the circuits, explanation of the components. Photo from Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems The robotic snake consists of a head segment and several body segments. The head segment houses the […]