From traditional crafts to modern crafts, we’re covering news and interesting projects to educate you and keep you inspired. Design trends and pop culture related projects are here to inspire.
How to make the engine usually found in the BEAM solar roller – “…the most common use is in a solaroller which is a small wheeled car that charges up and then moves in a quick burst of speed. Since you can only use motors and coils with this circuit robots built with this circuit are mainly mechanical such as my artistic butterflies. One other common use is a little thing called a symet which can roam around and not get stuck using only one motor.” Link.
Great article by Cory Doctorow in the NYTimes about FabLabs and beyond…“Plastic created the age of whimsical forms. Suddenly a radio could look like a moo cow. A chair could look like an egg. Toy ray guns could bulge and swoop. The exuberant designers of the golden age of plastic explored all the wacky, nonfunctional, decorative shapes that household objects could take. Now that same plasticity is coming to microcontrollers, the computer chips that act as brains for the chirping, dancing, listening and seeing devices that line our knickknack shelves and dashboards and fill our pockets.” Link.
Learn how to tie stopper, hitches, loops and bend knots – great videos! “This is a site about knots: how to tie them, how to appreciate their beauty. Even the seriously knot-challenged among us can learn to tie many useful and popular knots by following along with the short, step-by-step instructional video clips on this site.” Link.
Here’s another iSight tripod – Steve writes “My dad is a master deal finder. Over the thanksgiving holiday, I traded him a broadband router for this super nice pro camera tripod that he located for $6.95 at his local Salvation Army store. The only thing it was missing was any way to mount a camera.. a problem I’m sure I can rectify with an inexpensive solution from a camera store, or an even less expensive solution from my garage. While my camera’s in the shop, I figured I can use it for a really great iSight tripod.” Link.
Handy open source app (Mac) – “I wanted to be able to listen to the songs on my iPod for some time now. This is because I don’t want to fill up the hard-drive of my iBook with music, but be able to access my Music when I’m on the way. I found some solutions but none really made me happy. Then I found mt-daapd which did exactly what I wanted except for one thing. mt-daapd can export any folder as an iTunes-music-share. The missing piece was, that it doesn’t detect if an iPod is connected. So I wrote a simple programm that detects if an iPod is connected and then automatically shares it with mt-daapd.” Link.
This is an incredibly cool, yet creepy panorama of a human head. I’d like to use this to make my Second Life avatar! “We’re trying to make high quality texture maps for game models. Using an FX-1 psuedo HD Sony camera, (its 1440 pixels, which is Sony’s anamorphic short-hand for a 1920 16:9 image,) placed sideways, I filmed Yoshi as he rotated on a turntable in front of the camera. The bank-robber cap was his idea. This resulted in about 1200 frames of a 360 degree pass around the head.” Thanks TowMater! Link.
Emlodnaor writes “i have a toshiba pdr-m700, and was wondereing if it is posible to somehow convert movies into the same format as the camera uses, too see them on the camera.. i’ve tryed some, but can’t seem to figure it out… any help would be nice.” Have any suggestions? Post them up! I’ve tried this with a few cameras and usually they store another file that you can’t replicate to play the movie you put on the camera. Link.
