The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
Our featured image from the MAKE Flickr pool this week is Pete Prodoehl’s lovely shot of his MakerGear Prusa Mendel printer frame. It looks like a piece of pricey Danish furniture! It was a hard choice, for me, between that and Rob Hopeless’s photograph of the transparent Venus de Milo bust he recently printed on his homemade stereolithography system.
What a difference a couple of years make. Back in 2009, you had to scrounge together a bunch of lenses and glue them to a jar lid if you wanted a smartphone lens carousel. Nowadays you’ve got options.
Click and mortar giant Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet is a zippy update to the Nook Color “ebook reader”. The folks at iFixit recently tore one apart to get a closer look at the magic smoke that powers the HD streaming dynamo.
Every Third Thursday the employees of Signal Snowboards get together to get creative with board design and materials, and generally hack on gear at the factory. Recently they laboriously toiled over one of the more creative snowboard designs I’ve seen: the iShred.
I had a sense, as early as Tuesday, that it was going to be a yellow kind of week, and sure enough, the MAKE Flickr pool has proved it out. And though yellow has lots of negative connotations, it happens to be my favorite color, probably because it reminds of me construction equipment and power tools. Oh, and flowers. I have credible reports from people who have actually seen nature that flowers are sometimes yellow, too.
It can be frustrating to have to take off your gloves to use your touch screen phone. Capacitive touch screens sense how conductive your fingers are, and gloves are, well, insulators. Learn to mod your gloves with conductive thread in this episode of Becky’s Workshop. See the complete how-to on Make: Projects.
For those of you who love using your smartphone while cycling in the rain, there’s this nifty hack from North Carolina maker jalexartis. After mounting your handset using your favorite method, cut the top off a plastic bottle, then make a slit down one side to accept the mounting hardware.
