Makers

This is really cool, a MakerBot Industries-supported 3D printable prosthetic hand project. When Richard Van As, a master carpenter in Johannesburg, South Africa, decided to make a set of mechanical fingers, it wasn’t just for fun. He’d lost four of the fingers on his right hand in an unfortunate work […]

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If you're an early-adopter, like so many makers are, then there's a good chance you've already got a Pebble smartwatch. With the recent updates to the development platform, we're starting to see a rush of fun, and functional custom watchfaces for the Pebble, as well as web-based tools for generating them. In the MAKE spirit, and out of the imperative to show my maker pride at Maker Faire Bay Area in 9 days, I went ahead and made a custom MAKE watchface. If you see me at Maker Faire and show me your Pebble with the Make watchface, I'll show you the secret maker handshake.

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Erin “RobotGrrl” Kennedy has introduced the Buddy 4000 robot chassis. It’s an open source, 3D-printable robot: Buddy 4000 was created to look like a modern version of the old ‘tin toy’ robots. We put much effort into the design of the ‘bot, so hopefully it meets this goal. It took […]

Behold, something we’ve always wanted. [Matthieu] mounted his Raspberry Pi board inside of a computer monitor. His work makes for the cheapest smart-TV modification we can possibly think of.

The image above shows the monitor’s driver board on the left, with the Raspberry Pi mounted on the back plastic cover. [Matthieu] used a short HDMI cable to connect the two. The HDMI connector plugs into the RPi directly. The other end has been cut off and the wires soldered to the DVI pins on the monitor’s PCB. This is not a problem since HDMI and DVI use electrically identical protocols. The one thing missing is audio. But if you were pulling off the same hack with a device that had HDMI (like a television) it would just be a matter of also soldering in the audio connections. While he had his iron hot he also connected a 5V source from the monitor board to the RPi. He completes his hack by cutting a slot in the monitor case to allow access to the SD card.

We’ve long wanted an XBMC computer we could velcro to the back of the TV and the RPi turned out to be just the thing. Now we’ve got to consider cracking open the TV to replicate this internalization hack!

Filed under: home entertainment hacks

Why pay more for colored prints when you can use off-the-shelf dyes to make them any color you want? Atlanta-based designer Colleen Jordan walks us through the simple process of dying 3D Printed parts from Shapeways, or a similar service, in just a few steps.

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I really enjoy Jack Conte‘s music, creative video editing, and now, his behind-the-scenes look at the making of his latest video, Pedals. Please check out the video itself, and then enjoy his enthusiastic making-of video. Jack has maker skills!     The hexapod, Dmitiri, in the video was built and [...]

A new maker-oriented TV show, Big Brain Theory, pits 10 designers, engineers, and fabricators against 8 extremely hard challenges to be solved in very short periods of time.

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MAKE’s 2013 Hardware Innovation Workshop is only days away, and we still have a few more makers to feature as part of the “pitches with prototypes” contest. Next up is the Lumiglass Infinity sign by ProtoTank. We have featured a few variations of edge-lit displays before, but the ProtoTank team has turned it up a [...]

After a night of brainstorming, and then another week or so of indecision, maker Brian Dolan settled on making a Guitar-Hero-like rhythm game inside a Trader Joe's mint tin involving a single sensor, an LCD screen, and a small speaker for playing some cheesy music. I play drums, and I was kind of thinking of the whole mint tin as a drum, with the plastic screen acting like a drum head. The other side, made of metal, would host the LCD screen and speaker, facing the “player.”

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We're delighted to announce a new addition to this year's Maker Faire educational offerings: a Class Pack filled with behind-the-scenes information and activity sheets designed just for you: teachers and parents who look forward to Maker Faire as your favorite learning-packed weekend of the year! Whether or not you are coming to our sold out Education Day on Thursday, May 16, take a peek for materials that you might want to use in your classroom. We'd like to share some of the special treats you'll find in this 38-page bookl

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This is a story of two Michigan high school students putting their robotics expertise to great use. Wyatt Smrcka and Micah Stuhldreher of Pinckney Community High School, who took first place in the 2012 SkillsUSA robotics competition, were tapped with task of building a robotic locker door for fellow student Nick Torrance who suffers from muscular dystrophy.

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The blue board seen above is the guts of a product called the eeColor Color3. It was designed to act as a pass-through between your television and HDMI source device. It boasts the ability to adjust the color saturation to suit any viewing conditions. But [Taylor Killian] could care less about what the thing was made for, he tore it open and used the FPGA inside for his own purposes.

The obvious problem with this compared to a proper dev board is that the pins are not all broken out in a user-friendly way. But he got his hands on it for free after a mail-in-rebate (you might find one online for less than $10 if you’re lucky) and it’s got an Altera Cyclone IV chip with 30k (EP4CE30F23C6N) gates in it so he’s not complaining. The first project he took on with his new toy was to load up an open source Bitcoin mining program. The image above shows it grinding away at 15 megahashes per second while consuming only 2.5 watts. Not bad. Now he just needs to make a modular rack to hold a mining farm.

Filed under: FPGA

Rachel Kalmar will be easy to spot at the Hardware Innovation Workshop next week. She will be the one wearing 11 health monitoring devices: three on each wrist, four on her belt, and one on her upper arm.

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Today I had the pleasure of interviewing [PlatinumFungi] about this fantastic NES mod he did. This year is the 25th anniversary of the first Mega Man video game. Unhappy with the current celebratory actions of capcom, [PlatinumFungi] set out to create something he felt was worthy. He managed to pull that off pretty well.

The NES you can see in the video is fantastic looking. It has a beautiful shiny automotive finish, supplied by [Custom NES Guy] and a pixel perfect backlit Mega Man on top. Additional enhancements are stylized decals on the front of the game bay and matching labels on the sides and back. The cartridge is even illuminated while it is in place.

Check out some pictures after the break!

Filed under: nintendo hacks

Tom Fox of Vulpestruments has been making his own stringed instruments for years. Check out the myriad of DIY ways he keeps them all in tune.

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[x2jiggy] was given a non-functioning LCD monitor. He made a small effort to trouble-shoot its inability to display anything on the screen but couldn’t get it working again. When that failed he decided to repurpose it as light box instead of just sending it off for recycling.

Monitor manufacturers put in a lot of effort to make sure the back lights distribute brightness as evenly as possible and that will make this a pretty good light box. [x2jiggy] starts off the conversion by removing the case. While it was off he gave it a new coat of paint. The LCD panel, the PCB that drives it, and the light diffuser sheets were all removed, leaving just the backlight and inverter PCB. A bit of probing with the multimeter and he even found a place to connect a toggle switch to actuate the inverter’s power. You can see the silver switch he added to the bezel in the image above. The full build video is embedded after the break.

Filed under: tool hacks, video hacks

The Grow CNC, a portable CNC router system: I am the James Dyson Fellow at the Royal College of Art’s InnovationRCA. I have developed a new type of portable full scale flat bed CNC router. The design is aimed at professional power tool users and maker/hackers alike. The design is [...]

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The Redbull Creation contest is underway and the entries into the first stage have been submitted. As a judge, it is my duty to watch every single one of these and cast my vote on who should continue to round two. I won’t be sharing my vote with you, but I thought you might enjoy watching the entries yourself! Remember that the rules for this round were simply “build something amazing using this box full of cool stuff we sent you.”.

I have to say that the entrants really kicked things up a notch this year. These projects are so amazing that choosing 3 to be the “most awesome” is proving quite difficult. I’d also like to take yet another opportunity to mention that we think that this is such a wonderful method of promotion. RedBull could be making sappy commercials about polar bears drinking their beverage, but instead, they are encouraging people to make AWESOME things(yes, they have commercials too). Other companies should take note, like Oreo did!

You can view all the entries here.

 

Filed under: contests, news

Instructables user laserjocky built this function generator for a term project in school. It’s capable of producing a square, triangle, and approximate sine wave up to a frequency of around 300kHz. Op-amps are designed with negative feedback in mind and are typically slower, but they can be used for making [...]

[Will] likes Reddit so much he built this dedicated controller that lets him play the social website like a video game.

He calls it he Karma Controller. In this case, ‘Karma’ refers to ability to accumulate a large number of net up-votes on a Reddit post. The device features seven buttons which are all it takes to up and down vote, navigate up and down on the Reddit listings, toggle images, as well as open and close new tabs for the comments section. We’re wondering if it allows you to follow a link to the post source too?

One of the reasons that we’re featuring this is that it’s only [Will's] second electronics project. If you’re still reluctant to get your hands dirty we hope this acts as inspiration. He started by building the first version on a hunk of protoboard. The Digispark microcontroller seen at the top reads from his button network and communicates with the computer via USB. Once the design was proven he had some help etching this circuit board which is version 2. He shows it off in the clip after the jump.

If you just want some buttons for voting you should take a look at this project which includes a 3D printed enclosure and button covers.

Filed under: peripherals hacks