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.
Chemical News & Engineering has a nice section on their site – all about what’s in the stuff use Ever wondered about what’s really in hair coloring, Silly Putty, Cheese Wiz, artificial snow, or self-tanners? C&EN presents a collection of articles that gives you a look at the chemistry behind a wide variety of everyday products. Link.
No User Serviceable Parts Inside? – a Maker’s bill of rights…Mr. Jalopy has a list of “rights” I think we’d all like to see as Makers when we buy our gadgets, parts and equipment. Screws not glues, replaceable batteries, stuff like that. The days of the Color TV tube tester at the drugstore are gone, but why give up control of what we buy? Link. Post up suggestions in the comments here and/or drop Mr. Jalopy an email.
…a solar-powered bike light, modified from a solar flashlight. (I did find one product that is advertised as a “solar bike light”, but it’s not good: it uses an incandescent lamp rather than LEDs, and it’s a one-piece unit so the whole big thing has to mount on the handlebars). With my home-made version, the solar cell and batteries mount on the rear rack, as you see here. Link.
Why would you want to interface the Keyboard? The IBM keyboard can be a cheap alternative to a keyboard on a Microprocessor development system. Or maybe you want a remote terminal, just couple it with a LCD Module. Maybe you have a RS-232 Barcode Scanner or other input devices, which you want to use with existing software which only allows you to key in numbers or letters. You could design yourself a little box to convert RS-232 into a Keyboard Transmission, making it transparent to the software. Link.
MAKE Flickr pool member wirehead writes “I’m bringing up the gen2 circuit board. This should be the sort of thing that a qualified electrical engineer would whip out in a matter of minutes. But, I’m a programmer who likes to mess around with technology, so things sometimes take a little longer than they ought to. Or I connect power to ground and ground to power. I do that sometimes, too. But now, I can program this board to do stuff, once I get the LEDs all soldered up. Soon, you will start seeing this board in my light art”… Link.
G4’s Attack of the Show has a short guide and software listing on how to edit game ROMs (the programs that run on Nintendo cartridges, emulators, etc). The really neat thing is you can change the graphics of games, add your own, as well as edit parameters in the games. Link.
Arimaa is the first game designed specifically to be hard for computers to play, while easy for people. With its billions of combinations and push-me-pull-you gameplay conditional value strategy, it’s too much for brute force computing. And yet, it’s simple enough for a child to play [