Making things with wire looks simple, but it can be challenging. Pick up a few wire-bending tricks, though, and you can sketch in 3 dimensions and make anything from a tiny, delicate figurine to a large, mechanical sculpture with moving parts. Like sketching with a pen on paper, there’s no right way to do it, […]
This DIY Geiger counter clicks and flashes an LED each time it detects a radioactive particle. It works with most common Geiger–Müller tubes, and easily connects to radiation rate meters, data loggers, true random number generators, and the Radiation Network’s GeigerGraph software. Share your radiation readings with the whole world!
Like most geek-filled offices, at my workplace we have several Nerf guns and similar toy weapons floating about. Not impressed with the performance of my colleague Lester’s Nerf Maverick, a mainstay of Nerf’s suction-cup-dart-firing “N-Strike” series, I decided to build a better Nerf gun myself. Here’s the result: a simple weapon, single shot only, but […]
If you love wrapping packages as much as I do, you might enjoy making this mega-fringed flower. It’s reminiscent of a Gerbera daisy and is an attention-catching substitute for the usual bow. Based on the same technique as a much smaller quilled fringed flower, the cuts are made with detail scissors. Instead of regular paper […]
This guide will describe the steps required to build Skull Ball, a DIY interactive game using a teensy microcontroller and a Sharp IR sensor to count ping-pong balls being thrown into a plastic cup mounted in a plastic skull. I built this project in about 5-6 hours the week of my company Halloween party as […]
I began working with leather seven years ago when I stumbled across it during the hunt for the perfect collar for my dog, Paco. Since I’ve never taken a class, most of the following techniques are either self-taught or passed on to me by old-time leather workers. When working with leather, remember that it falls […]
The brilliant Meara O’Reilly describes how to wind your own electromagnetic guitar pickups on sewing machine bobbins.
