MAKE Presents: The Capacitor
Collin Cunningham provides an elegant description of capacitors, including early caps called Leyden jars.
Skill Builders
Charles Guan: Build Your Everything Really Really Fast
Charles Guan is an MIT alumnus, and has been making projects that have been festive and amazing over the past few years. Charles has been influential in the MIT Makerspace/club MITERS, where students create all manner of great projects. He and MITERS members have been frequent fliers at various Maker Faires, so you may already be familiar with his work.
Charles has served as a Teaching Assistant at MIT in Mechanical Engineering, helping his fellow students to fabricate the contraptions of their dreams. As a TA, he’s heard the same questions over and over, so he created some instructional documentation to make his and his fellow students’ lives easier. This was a set of lectures and handouts he called How to Build Your Robot Really Really Fast (HTBYRRRF). In more recent times, he set out to update this as a more inclusive set of building guides. Drawing from his own online documentation, he was able to codify his ideas into a thorough Instructable: How to Build Your Everything Really Really Fast, or HTBYERRF.
Raspberry Pi: Up and Running
For those of you who haven’t yet played around with Raspberry Pi, this one’s for you. In this how-to video, Matt walks you through how to get a Raspberry Pi up and running. It’s the first in a series of Raspberry Pi videos that we’re releasing to accompany our new book, Getting Started with Raspberry Pi. It covers Raspberry Pi and Linux basics and then works up to using Scratch, Python, GPIO (to control LED’s and switches), and web development on the board.
Raspberry Pi Starter Kit: http://www.makershed.com/Raspberry_Pi_Starter_Kit_Includes_Raspberry_Pi_p/msrpik.htm&Click=127972
Getting Started with Raspberry Pi PDF: http://www.makershed.com/Getting_Started_with_Raspberry_Pi_PDF_p/emgsrp.htm&Click=127972
Raspberry Pi Model B: http://www.makershed.com/Raspberry_Pi_Model_B_Revision_2_512MB_p/mkrpi2.htm&Click=127972
Food Preservation: A MAKE Google+ Hangout Oct. 31
This week’s Food Makers hangout on Google+ will air Oct. 31 at 2pm PT and will focus on food preservation and fermentation. Guests will include Cama Davis from the Portland Meat Collective, Camas Davis of Happy Girl Kitchen and Sandor Katz, author of the encyclopedic “Art of Fermentation” and reigning guru of all things fermented.
A Fine Example of Dead Bug Style Circuit Wiring
“Dead bug style” circuit wiring is the cute name for soldering together components without a printed circuit board. The “dead bug” is the integrated circuit flipped upside down with its “legs” sticking up. Over at the Dangerous Prototypes forum, a maker shows off his dead bug skills, which he used to solder a Little Wire: […]
How-To: One Piece Slipcasting
Slipcasting is a molding process for ceramics that can be used to produce hollow forms having a relatively thin shell. It is an ancient, elegant, ingenious technique, consisting of six basic steps…
Weekend Projects – Projects in Motion
Complete instructions for this episode of Weekend Projects can be found at
http://makeprojects.com/Project/Projects-in-Motion-Control-Three-Types-of-Motors-with-555-Timers/2036/1
Learn to control three different types of motors – DC, Servo, and Stepper – using a breadboard, resistors, diodes, transistors, and some 555 timers (along with a sprinkling of CMOS logic). These motor drivers are the basis of many robotics and other motor-control applications.
