Piezoelectric materials are about as close to magic as you can get. They turn physical pressure into electricity and can even turn electricity into physical pressure – an amazing sort of bidirectional converter for mechanical and electrical energies. Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that you can easily ‘grow’ your own piezoelectric crystals overnight […]
What does the top edge of say, your utility closet door look like? I’m betting that you’ve probably never seen it, even if you’ve lived in your home for awhile. And although there’s not a lot of room to hide stuff in there, well, if you’re like me, the stuff you want to hide is usually on the smaller side. Not many people think of the space inside the door as a hiding spot, but it’s right there in easy reaching distance when you need to get to it. And it’s devious enough that, yes, I think this trick will still be effective even after we blog it all over the tubes.
As part of our Make: Arduino page, Riley Porter has posted a project that shows you how easy it is hook up a 7-segment LED display to your Arduino projects. This is the first, simplest method he explores. In a future project, he’ll show you more elegant solutions that don’t hog so many I/O pins. […]
In true spirit, Make: Live is very much a DIY production. Instead of tripods, we use zip ties to mount webcams to chairs and we jury rig an old monitor to act as our prompter. Along those lines, I decided to create an on air light to indicate when we’re broadcasting. While I could have […]
MAKE Volume 25 contributing writer Chris Reilly loves yogurt but is impatient. He writes, “My impatience often leads me to botch important steps when I make yogurt. So to get better control over the fermentation process, I made a crockpot thermostat attachment to precisely control the temperature.” Enter the Arduino microcontroller. From the introduction: You […]
Many an experimenter, hacker, tinkerer, & maker have heeded the call of the mighty matrix – and it’s no mystery why. A small army of LEDs elegantly wired in grid formation would be difficult for anyone with an appreciation for electronics hardware to pass up – even after considering the sometimes daunting wiring job that […]
The Monotron mini analog synthesizer is a simple but sweet-sounding synth that sports basic features that give a nod to us hardware hackers.
