I’m building an Arduino-controlled Nerf sentry gun. Rather than build it and present the finished project all at once, I decided to chronicle the build here on Make: Online. The first step was to add wiring and a two-wire connector to control the trigger circuit. I opened up the Nerf Vulcan (about 30 screws) and soldered an 1/8″ female jack to the fire selection mode switch.
It’ll be no secret, to our regular readers, that I am a giant fan of Dustin Wallace’s “Robotagami” product and the concept behind it. Dustin, whose work I’ve covered here many times, just recently added a “mini” version of his original humanoid Robotagami figure, water-jet-cut in 0.035″ stainless steel, for $25. I ordered one immediately. Making these is a side-line for Dustin, who works full-time as a mechanic, and so far hasn’t had time to put together proper instructions for the “Mini.” So I thought I would help him out, promote his product, put together my new toy, and try out my fancy new light tent at the same time.
Communicate with satellites in space with this portable yagi antenna.
Electroluminescent (EL) wire is a great way to add electronic patterns to your clothing. EL wire is a flexible wire that has a phosphorescent glow when current is applied to it. EL wire is one continuous strand that can easily be bent into different shapes and applied to clothing. This tutorial will show you the basics of how to sew EL wire to a garment and how to program the EL wire to turn on and off and create an animated pattern.
Michael Boehm saw our post a couple of weeks ago about Etsy seller Stukenborg’s letterpress prints using dice as “type,” which mentioned the idea of using the same technique for making pixel-based images as well as geometric patterns. He got interested in the idea, went off to experiment, and eventually produced the dice-mosaic version of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres shown above. When he posted the results in the comment thread, I asked for, and he was nice enough to provide, a written explanation of the method, which uses Mark Probst’s open-source photomosaic utility Metapixel. I’ve reproduced Michael’s e-mail, with only minor edits, below. [Thanks, Michael!]
Every other week, MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next. By Eric Chu, engineering intern Building the Geared Candleholder by Benjamin Cowden in MAKE Volume 21 is one of my proudest builds, but it was no walk in the […]
Achieving good camera position for soldering and various tutorial shots has always been quite a challenge for me. I’ve tried Gorilla-Pods, table leaning tripods, and a few different DIY designs with varying amounts of success. Oddly, I never considered my own gooseneck/panavise hack as a possible solution – I suppose the weight of the camera […]
