Modular BeagleBoard touchscreen gadgets
The Antipasto folks have a short tutorial on how to assemble battery powered touchscreen BeagleBoard gadgets. There’s minimal soldering involved, but well worth heating up the iron.
Tools
New in the Maker Shed: TV-B-Gone Pro
The new TV-B-Gone Pro is a marvel to behold! TV-B-Gone Pro works the same way the TV-B-Gone keychain works, but it is way more powerful because it has more emitters and uses a bigger battery. Instead of the batman-like keychain, this new version looks like a small mP3 player, it even has a headphone jack […]
Beautiful overengineered tape dispenser
There’s a great thing that happens, every so often, when people have access to machine tools: They go a little bit nuts. They’re bumping along one day, doing what they do, and some mundane object crosses them for the last time. This or that thing never works as well as it should, or breaks too easily, or gets misplaced once too often, and it occurs to them: Hey, I could fix that–and not just for myself, for today or for the next couple of weeks or months, but for the rest of my natural life and possibly those of my descendants for the foreseeable future of the species. And something like this solid 6061 aluminum Scotch tape dispenser from Henry Herndon is the result. The sea may be vast, our boats may be small and constantly buffeted by the gales of an indifferent universe ruled by a howling demon of entropy, but that Scotch-tape-dispenser-problem is fixed now, by God. On to the next thing.
Adam Savage on “Problem Solving: How I Do It”
Here’s the video of Adam Savage’s wonderful talk at Maker Faire Bay Area 2010, captured by our friends at FORA.tv. Adam Savage Presents Problem Solving: How I Do It — Maker Faire More: Adam Savage, at Maker Faire, talking on the importance of failure
New in the Maker Shed: LoL Shield
The LoL Shield is a charlieplexed LED matrix for the Arduino, available in the Maker Shed. You can use it to display anything in a 9×14 grid. Scroll text, play games, display images, or anything else you want to do.
Hollow spy nickel conceals Micro SD card
Brian Dereu and his family have a thriving cottage industry machining these pocket concealments from real currency and selling them online. I have one of their MicroNickels, shown above, and it may well be the coolest thing I have ever owned. It’s sized perfectly to conceal a Micro SD card, and when assembled it really is indistinguishable from a regular nickel. So, you know, just don’t lose it.
Drum solenoid interface for Tactile Metronome
If you stopped by our table at the Maker Faire, you got to play around with our big drum demo of the Tactile Metronome. Lots of people had questions about how we drove the solenoid for the drum striker, so we decided to write it up once we got back home.