I received the most special gift this Christmas. My husband, Chris, was holed up in our garage most nights since November, feverishly working on a secret project for me. He’s never attempted a woodworking project before, but tackled this project with absolute determination. I’m a huge space geek, and have been fascinated with the night […]
The Space Tweep Society Blog has an overview post up about the pros and cons of the four main types of telescopes, if you’re in the market! [Thanks, Rachel!] (Image: E550 with telescope finder, a Creative Commons Attribution image from R1CARD0’s photostream) In the Maker Shed: The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders Our Price: $29.99 […]
The Blinkybugs are here! These little electro-mechanical insects respond to movement, wind, and vibrations by blinking their LED eyes. Blinkybugs are fun for all ages…and addicting too!
Ian from weezey.com wired up a couple of Peggy2 light emitting pegboard kits to an Arduino and with a couple of tweaks to some existing code managed to get the display to run across both units.
The snap-together solar powered grasshopper kit teaches how solar energy can be used to generate electricity. It’s an easy to assemble electronics kit that’s great for first-time experimenters with little or no experience. Ages 10 and up.
The Atari punk console kit is a simple and fun sound generator that would make a great stocking stuffer. The original circuit was developed by Forrest M. Mims III.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use OpenSCAD to produce a simple 3D model by extruding a part profile produced in normal drawing software. I use Adobe Illustrator CS3 because I have access to it and am familiar with its interface, but the popular freeware drawing program InkScape will read and write DXF files natively, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t serve just as well if you prefer it. There are a number of other free and low-cost programs that will export DXF files. OpenSCAD’s developer mentions QCAD, which is available from its developer RibbonSoft for 24EUR.
