Makers
Use Op-Amps to Make a LED Color Organ
Collin Cunningham’s awesome videos are always great to watch. This time, Collin shows how to build a Color Organ, which is a light display that responds to sounds around it, allowing you to build cool visualizer effects to go with your tunes. Long before the dawn of digital music, folks […]
Hardware Innovation Workshop In Pictures
MAKE's 2nd annual Hardware Innovation Workshop concluded yesterday after two inspiring, thought-provoking days. Thanks to all our great sponsors, presenters, and attendees for making it a success. Here's a look back.
Rigol DS1022C hack brings it up to 100MHz speed
Mind the Gap – How 3D Printers Will Make the Jump to Consumer Products
Mechanical Engineer Jeff Landrum examines the future of 3D Printing and how the recent rapid developments in the industry could lead to a new "killer product". There's a countless number of game-changing developments that could arise and lead to a truly consumer-level product. When will we see "the Apple II of 3D Printers"? 
The Doctor is Where? Haptics, 3D Digital Reality in the Operating Room
How do bits and bytes feel on your fingertips? Like your controller’s gravelly rumble when a video game football player gets tackled? Like bubbles of turbulence on an airline simulator control wheel? Like the rubbery resilience of 3D digital clay? Like the hairline cracks on a fragile archaeological find? Yes. Could they feel like varying and unique human tissues as a surgeon in London performs surgery on a patient in Johannesburg? You bet. What we’re talking about here is called “haptics,” a class of technology that most of us have experienced most commonly in the form of a vibrating cell phone. But increasingly, it's coming to the medical world. 
HIW Day 2: “This is the Community I was Looking For.”
Hardware is hard as the quip goes, but there's never been a better time to be prototyping and launching hardware projects than right now. That seemed to be the consensus today as the second and final day of MAKE Hardware's Innovation Workshop wrapped up. The all-day schedule of speakers represented a deep pool of talent, creativity, and passion for the business of making.
The Viper 2.0
The Viper was one of the most popular projects at Maker Faire Bay Area last year, blowing minds, creating smiles, and eliciting screams of excitement. The Viper is a full-motion Battlestar Galactica-themed flight simulator built into the fuselage of a Piper PA-28 plane, complete with 360-degree rotation on both the pitch and roll axes, as well as a fully immersive flying environment inside. The most amazing part is that The Viper was made by a team of five high school students, guided by their mentors, as part of the Young Makers program. The Viper is coming back to Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, and it promises to be even more impressive. 
Retweetable Tweets from HIW
Today's great line-up of speakers at the second and final day of the Hardware Innovation Workshop let fly a flurry of great tweets. Here is but a sampling of the buzz.
HIW: Meet the Venture Capitalists
Makers have mixed opinions on venture capitalists (VCs) fueled by stories of entrepreneurs who lost control of the companies they built when they traded autonomy for capital. While projects are getting off the ground with crowd sourcing from Kickstarter and Indiegogo, many start ups still turn to VCs to get the funds they need to get off the ground. MAKE invited some of them to participate at the Hardware Innovation Workshop this week, so innovative makers could get the straight dope.
DiResta: Stacking Stools
In each bi-monthly episode of DiResta (every other Wednesday at 2pm PT), artist and master builder Jimmy DiResta (Dirty Money, Hammered, Against the Grain, Trash for Cash) lets us into his workshop, to look over his shoulder while he builds whatever strikes his fancy. On this episode of DiResta, Jimmy shows us more of his band saw skills as he whips up a set of interlocking stacking stools designed to fit in small spaces.
Converting a bottle style water cooler to self-fill from the tap
[Roy Bean] thought it was pretty silly for the Milwaukee Makerspace to keep buying bottles of water for their water cooler. He rigged up a system that automatically fills the refrigerated reservoir in their water cooler. It’s a functional hack that also provided an excuse for him to learn about a couple of different sensors.
What you see above is the meat and potatoes of the hack. The well is where water from a bottle drains into the cooler. This has been covered with a sheet of acrylic to keep the drinking water clean. There is a copper pipe which has been plumbed into the tap water supply. The other two bits are redundant level sensors to make sure the water valve shuts off without overflowing. One of them is a capacitive proximity sensor, the other is a conductivity sensor hacked together using stainless steel hardware submerged in the pool.
If you’re worried about the taste or odor of your tap water just add in a single or multiple stage under-counter filter system when plumbing in the water line. The filters are easy to find and we’d bet they cost less than a contract with a bottled water company.
[Thanks Pete]
Filed under: home hacks
The Otherworldly Nautilus Submarine Car
We're thrilled that Oakland art collective Five Ton Crane is joining us again at this year's Maker Faire Bay Area. This time around, they bring an interpretation of the nautilus submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to life in the gorgeous form of the Nautilus Submarine Art Car.
Ten Tips for Screws and Screwdrivers
Screws and screwdrivers might not seem like the most exciting topic on its face, but you could write a book on their uses and intricacies. There are so many tricks on how to use this type of hardware and their respective tools, and I've chosen ten that I hope will help you with future projects
Winch hack lets your change chandelier light bulbs at ground level
We’ve seen a lot of hacks from [Lou] and his latest continues the tradition of excellence. The entryway of his home is a couple of stories high and features a chandelier. Unfortunately he doesn’t have a ladder tall enough to use when changing light bulbs. Even if he did have a way to get up there it would be nice if the light fixture could come to him instead. This hack makes that happen by adding an electric winch to lower the light fixture.
Watching the installation process makes us think that [Lou] might be a little reckless. He’s up in the attic mounting a winch to the rafters before he cuts the board holding the fifty-pound chandelier’s junction box in place. He mentions foregoing the recommended cable fastener in lieu of some baling wire. But he does manage the task without dropping the ball so to speak — perhaps we shouldn’t be so critical of his methods. After altering the chandelier mounting bracket to work with a winch [Lou] wires an outlet in the attic and adds a plug to the cord on the light. This means he needs to go into the attic to unplug the light before lowering the fixture on the winch. But he’s not done yet. After the break you can watch the second part of the project with improves upon this by adding a wall switch to control the winch and extension cord management to route the power.
[Lou] really loves his automated home gadgets. Check out the gaming table which drops from the ceiling.
Filed under: home hacks
HAXLR8R Launches Startups at Maker Faire
One of Maker Faire's newest Blacksmith Sponsors is HAXLR8R, a hardware startup incubator based of both San Francisco and Shenzhen, China. Now in its second year, HAXLR8R takes promising startups to China to jumpstart their innovative hardware companies. HAXLR8R's latest batch of startups and the incubator itself (currently accepting applications for next year) will be at Maker Faire this week. Sponsors are key to making Maker Faire happen: most maker exhibits are provided free of charge to the folks showing off their projects, and it's the generous sponsors that make that possible. So be sure to swing by and see what they've got going on. I asked two of HAXLR8R's mentors, Zach Hoeken Smith and Cyril Ebersweiler, to answer some questions about the incubator and the companies that will be at the Faire.
ShopBot Unveils the Handibot at Hardware Innovation Workshop
A major manufacturer of CNC routers today launched what it hopes will be "a whole new class of digital tool" called the Handibot. The announcement was made at the Hardware Innovation Workshop, currently going on in San Mateo, California.
Bletchley Park, In Lego
Lego builder James Pegrum explores Britain’s elite codebreaking facility in brick form! 1944AD 1st June, Bletchley Park, England. The improved Colossus Mark 2 starts working in time for the Normandy Landings. The Colossus was the world’s first electronic digital computer that was at all programmable. It was designed by Tommy […]
3D scanner with remarkable resolution
Modeling simple objects in 3D can take some time. Modeling complex items… well you can get your college degree in that sort of thing. This method side-steps the artistic skill necessary to make the real virtual by using a laser and camera to map a three-dimensional object.
[Alessandro Grossi] is breaking the rules by using a 100mW laser for the project. He thinks that the Italian government prohibits anything over 5mW, but also mentions that the lens used to turn the laser dot into a vertical line drops the power dramatically. The beefy diode does still pay off, providing an incredibly intense line of light on the subject being mapped. The high-end DSLR camera mounted on the same arm as the laser captures a detailed image, which can be processed to dump everything other than the laser line itself. Because the two are mounted on different axes, the image provides plenty of perspective. That translates to the 3D coordinates used in the captured model shown in the inlaid image.
We’ve seen 3D scanners that move the subject; they usually rotate it to map every side. This method only captures one side, but the stepper motor moves in such small increments that the final resolution is astounding. See for yourself in the video after the break.
Filed under: laser hacks
HIW Day 1: “The World is our Construction Kit”
Innovation is one of those concepts that's hard to describe, but when you see it (or hear it), you know you've found it. It's certainly in abundance with the speakers and participants at the first day of the Make Hardware Innovation Workshop today.
BlinkyTape: The LED Strip Reinvented
Our friend Matt Mets, along with pals Max Henstell and Marty Mcguire, is developing a cool addressable LED light strip that packs a microprocessor on the strip for easy programming. Look cool? You can get in on the Kickstarter campaign and score some excellent tech. It looks awesome, Matt! Filed […]
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