It seems as though nearly everything “high performance” these days boasts some amount of carbon fiber in its construction. Originally used in aerospace, carbon fiber has moved into the mainstream and can be found in luxury automobiles, mountain bikes, and sports equipment. Some laptops and cellphones even use printed decals to simulate this lightweight material’s […]
I shoot a lot of still life and product photography, where a good light source is essential. On-camera flashes are almost useless, even bounced off the ceiling. Off-camera flashes and triggering systems are expensive. Natural light is unpredictable, uncontrollable and often unavailable. With the advent of cheap, low-power bulbs (‘Compact Fluorescent’, ‘CFL’, or ‘energy saving’ […]
This is a project that celebrates friends. The core group. The people you can count on for a ride to the airport at 6:30 in the morning, or to help you drag a new sofa up three flights of stairs. The people who allowed themselves to be seen with you in public through some of […]
Motorize a phenakistoscope, a 19th-century parlor novelty that preceded motion pictures, and keep its frames synched to an LED strobe by using a sensor and an Arduino microcontroller. Invented in 1832 by Joseph Plateau, this device creates a moving picture from a sequence of stills arranged on a spinning disk and viewed through strategically cut […]
In our consumer society, most materials are discarded once they become old or obsolete. Many of these rejects have a hidden beauty that can be brought back to life in a new form; discarded or never-used printed circuit boards (PCBs) fall into this category. A consequence of the high-tech bubble bust of a few years […]
Use a broken speaker, bits of wire, and tape to prepare a coneless voice coil driver, then use it to generate standing waves on a sheet of metal, making sound visible. Magic! My knowledgeable friend Robin once said that you don’t need to worry about having too big an audio amplifier, because speakers are usually […]
Do you like radio-controlled (R/C) cars? Do you like the desert, but hate the heat? Well, with wireless cameras on board, these radio-controlled racers give you virtual reality telepresence.
