MAKE pal Steve Cooley, who manufactures the Beatseqr hardware performance controller, has posted the lab notes from his recent experiments with various silicone products for casting monolithic soft button arrays. I love it when people do this–the steps and missteps that happen along the way are often as interesting, and as helpful, as the finished product.
According to the anonymous hacker-proprietor of Teravolt.org, shining a 250 mW green laser through a hanging drop of scummy plant water will project shadows of all the little microflora on the wall and you can watch them flitter about with the naked eye. The embedded video is nothing short of amazing. I felt just like that cat.
We just got the new line of Leatherman tools in the Maker Shed. There is the MAKE: Warranty Voider, MAKE: Bomb Defuser , and the MAKE: Circuit Breaker. All of these tools make the perfect companion for mobile fixing, hacking, and MacGyvering. This is a limited offering with custom MAKE laser etching.
The DrinkShield is an open source Breathalyzer kit for the Arduino. It’s a great starter kit that was originally designed for Hackerspace parties. The DrinkShield can work as a standalone breathalyzer or you can connect it to a computer for and interact directly with the results. Source code repository comes with a game to use […]
Designed for beginners, the LED Dice kit from the Maker Shed comes with everything you need to make your own ‘Electronic Die’. Just tap the completed Dice kit on the table and the LEDs light up, displaying a random number from 1 to 6. After a short period of time the LED dice will go […]
San Francisco, as many of our regular readers will know from experience, is hilly, and can be windy. It has many narrow, winding roads and lots of low-hanging power lines. Which is why the SFFD is the only major US fire department still using wooden ladders–they don’t conduct electricity, and won’t fault a power line to ground in the event of an accident. The SFFD ladder shop made its first wooden ladder in 1917, and they’re still crankin’ em out today, using Douglas Fir timbers that are first aged 15 years in the shop itself. Very cool maker story and an excellently produced video from Adam Kaplan of ASK Media Productions. [via Gizmodo]
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, this handy homebrew jig from the UK’s oomlaut:
We’ve recently grown annoyed with the slightly bow legged stance DIP ICs ship with (it makes inserting them into sockets ever so frustrating). Rather than continue to spend longer than we liked on less than perfect results we decided to make ourselves a little jig to help out.
Details and laser-cutter files are available at the link above. This post from EMSL is cited by way of inspiration.
