I love using old machine parts for my projects; often their workmanship surpasses that of anything new, and you can get them cheap or even free. Find a junkyard full of ancient, rusty industrial equipment, and you can build almost anything — or at least be inspired to, which is half the battle! But many […]
There’s energy all around us, just waiting to be tapped. Whether it’s a hot cup of coffee on a cold day, light from the sun, scented candles, or waste heat wafting from electronics, it’s all potential power waiting to be harnessed! This is the world of the Stirling engine. Have you ever tried this fun […]
How to fabricate, out of mostly recycled materials, an ultraviolet nighttime bug trap, since ultraviolet light attracts most insects. Tired of nighttime critters and drowning in bug spray? Try this blacklight device to control mosquitoes and other nighttime insects.
Hack a $30, single-use camcorder to make it reusable, then launch it up in a model rocket and capture thrilling astronaut’s-view footage of high-speed neighborhood escape and re-entry.
Looking for some punk-rock glam that shows off the creative crafter inside? Fishing lure earrings may be the perfect cure. Lots of inspiration can come from a tackle shop. People like shiny, colorful things, and they hope fish do, too.
It all started with a small LCD salvaged from an old printer. I recruited my code-savvy older brother, Adam, and we soon had the LCD displaying text from an Arduino microcontroller. This was neat, but it was inconvenient having to plug the Arduino into a computer for reprogramming whenever we wanted to change the text. […]
We started Escama (Portuguese for “fish scales”) three years ago after seeing the way Brazilian women incorporated used pull-tabs into their crocheting. We worked with two craft co-ops to design and produce a range of purses. Experts warned us that we’d need to use machines to get consistent quality. Luckily experts are sometimes wrong. 15,000 […]
