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 Kris Magri, engineering intern How I designed Makey, Part II: Creating the “stretchy” robot body in Inventor When designing Makey the Robot for MAKE, Volume 19, I ran […]
Usually I write about ham radio. But looking at communication devices of the future from the past, I thought it would be fun to have a Star Trek: The Original Series Bluetooth communicator for a cell phone. I worked with Dave Clausen to hack one together from a toy Star Trek communicator, a Bluetooth module, and a microcontroller.
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 Kris Magri, engineering intern Part I: The First Design This summer I was given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a robot for the pages of MAKE Magazine (Volume […]
They could be from The Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or simply Poe’s “quaint and curious volume,” but everybody needs at least a few tattered leaves of ancient mind-blasting arcanum lying around to impress guests. Especially around Halloween.
This tutorial presents an easy method for producing weathered “antiqued” paper without much expense. The trick of soaking white paper in coffee or tea to give it an old, yellowed look is very familiar, but the process for selectively burning the edges of the paper is my own invention. A simple and safe chemical treatment is used to selectively burn the page, only where it has been applied, upon mild heat treatment.
I had two circuit boards nagging me to be etched this morning. Without a photo developing tray, it seemed some modifications in technique were in order. Into the recycling bin I went looking for a smallish, wide mouthed glass jar. Yesterday’s sandwich polished off a tasty mango chutney, and the jar was just about right. A little bit of cleaning, and it was ready for business.
The leftover etchant from yesterday’s vinyl pcb resist experiment was in a plastic bottle and still had some potency left in it. The tea water was still hot on the stove, so it was ready to provide some double boiler action. I poured some hot water into a steel pan, put the ferric chloride into the jar and dropped in the first board.
This is a simple kludge, really, but it’s worked out remarkably well, considering I knocked it together in about 40 minutes 5 years ago and it’s seen almost monthly use since then. What I started with was a pile of junk grill and smoker components, most of which came from a Brinkmann “Gourmet” smoker (as shown below) that my mother once accidentally set on fire. Lots of electric smokers have this three-part lid/body/base construction, however, and the exact make and model are not important.
The idea of a hollow card or paper form buried in plain sand as a sacrificial mold for poured metal parts interested me. As the internet papercraft explosion has taught us, paper is really not a bad medium for 3D design, especially for the cost. Software like Pepakura will convert any 3D digital model into a papercraft one that can be printed out, cut out, folded up, and glued or taped together to make a reasonably accurate real-world replica of the original. What if, instead of using the paper as a positive representation, one were to use it simply as a negative space–a volume, supported by dry sand, that would survive just long enough to impart its form to molten metal poured inside?
As a first experiment, I designed a paper template for the pieces of a classic put-together puzzle often called “The Four Piece Pyramid.” The challenge is to use the four identical pieces to form a symmetrical three-sided pyramid. I chose this as form, first, because I think the puzzle is elegant; second, because all four pieces are identical so only one template design is required; and three, because the pieces are fairly simple, geometrically, and thus so are the templates.
