Anyone who has an otherwise indispensable PanaVise, Jr. knows that that the turning knob can be sort of a pain. MAKE Flickr pool member Triggerdog7 got fed up with his and came up with this larger, easier to crank wooden jobby. Nice. Panavise Jr Upgrade Crank
Inexpensive to make, and a lot better looking than the generic “tin can” variety.
When you first turn the POSC on, the LED will light for a fraction of a second. If you’ve got it hooked up to an amplifier, it’ll also squawk for a second. Playing it is as easy as licking your finger and tapping, rubbing, pressing, or smearing it across the two contacts. The amount of incident light on the photoresistor controls the frequency, so experiment with playing it under different lighting conditions. Jim and Kat have produced a bunch of software for digital post-processing of the POSC signal. For mroe info, see the Sonodrome website.
Al Linke has just thrown down the gauntlet by entering his DIY Magic Mirror in our Gadget Freak Design contest! Al’s prototype won the Tech Grand Prize in our 2008 DIY Halloween Contest, and the kit he’s developed is for sale now in Makers Market. It features a Sleeping-Beauty style floating, talking face in a gilt-framed mirror with an amazingly wide variety of integrated and integrable functions–even a breathalyzer!
I actually don’t care too much, personally, for the way this looks, but serious kudos to designer Nicola Zocca for outside-the-box thinking. What other clever off-label uses for polyolefin shrink film are we missing? [via NOTCOT]
You remember Simon, right? This through-hole soldering kit will bring back memories as you try to match the colored patterns. Plus, its ATmega168 microcontroller is re-programmable, so you can come up with your own games using the Arduino IDE and an FTDI board.
Here’s a fun conversation from Foo Camp between Dale Dougherty and Steven Levy on the 25th anniversary edition of his ground-breaking book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. This is one of those books that changed the direction of my life. How about you?
