make projects

Make: Arduino and RFID

Make: Arduino and RFID

Riley Porter, our Arduino projects guy, is going to be loading some basic Arduino tutorials to Make: Projects. These will be like project stubs, the basic details of doing something that you, dear reader, can then add to as you start using the tech sketched out in the project. His first one is on adding […]

DIY Projection Screen Paint Tests

DIY Projection Screen Paint Tests

Movie theater and other high quality screens are often surfaced with tiny glass beads to provide high “screen gain,” which is a measure of the screen’s reflectivity versus a reference surface. It occurred to me it might be possible to DIY this effect on the cheap using 80-grit glass bead sandblasting media from Harbor Freight. So I bought 25 lbs and ran some tests. The short version? It works! But, as usual, not quite like I expected it to. Keep reading for all the gritty (ha) details, or just hang tight and wait for the full tutorial, coming soon!

How-To: Giant Spin Art Rig

Whether the people you’re entertaining are pint-sized or adults, this super simple Giant Spin Art rig from the pages of MAKE Volume 25 is guaranteed to be entertaining. Brothers Bob and Pete Goldstein came up with the rig design in an attempt to supersize the old classic. The frame is easy to build, and power […]

Make: Projects – On-Demand Benchtop Gas Generator

Make: Projects – On-Demand Benchtop Gas Generator

Being made of glass, however, a proper Kipp generator is an expensive piece of apparatus, with new models costing upwards of $250US as of this writing. However, as the useful gas-generating reactions are usually aqueous, rather than organic, an all-plastic Kipp generator is almost as useful as a glass version. PVC pipe is inexpensive, durable, ubiquitous, and easily and securely joined using cement made for that purpose. Demountable PVC fittings are available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and can be used to provide the necessary “dismantlability” for loading solid reagent into the device. Presented here is my design for such a low cost Kipp-type generator, with instructions for its construction.