LED Lighting – A Primer to Lighting the Future
LEDs are the future of lighting. Find out why in Sal Cangeloso’s new Maker Press book, LED Lighting – A Primer to Lighting the Future!
Science
DIY science is the perfect way to use your creative skills and learn something new. With the right supplies, some determination, and a curious mind, you can create amazing experiments that open up a whole world of possibilities. At home-made laboratories or tech workshops, makers from all backgrounds can explore new ideas by finding ways to study their environment in novel ways – allowing them to make breathtaking discoveries!
Giger Geiger Counter
Inside the Gigeresque enclosure by Steve D of Mad Art Lab resides functioning radiation sensing equipment capable of sensing minute amounts of radioactive material.
Maker Camp: CERN and the Large Hadron Collider
Week 5, Field Trip Friday at Maker Camp. We talk to the team at CERN, the home of the world’s biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.
Maker Camp, sponsored by MAKE magazine, was a virtual summer camp for teens, with a focus on creating, building, and discovering.From July 16th through August 24th, 2012, 30 awesome projects were made in 30 days, on Google+. Maker Camp is free and open to all.
Visit Makezine.com/maker-camp for more information.
You can learn more about makers who are creating their own DIY high-tech scientific tools in the current issue of MAKE Magazine. To get discounted a copy, visit MakerShed.com and use code CAMPERV31. If you’d like a discounted subscription starting with our current issue, use code CAMPERSUB. And please tune in tomorrow, 8/17 at 10am PST for a hangout with Ben Krasnow, who built his own Scanning Electron Microscope.
Maker Camp: Ben Krasnow
A follow up hangout to our field trip to CERN. Ben Krasnow built his own DIY Electron Scanning Microscope.
Etching Metalized Plastic
I have been hacking on some cheap R/C cars, lately, and wanted to etch metal films off of a few of the bits. I knew that the usual strong acid and base suspects would remove it, but many folks don’t keep these substances around, for whatever reasons. I got curious about milder etchants, and did a simple test with some household chemicals.
Metallurgical Eye Candy
Metallography is a method of materials analysis used to characterize the microscopic structure of a metal sample. Generally, the process involves cutting a sample from some object of interest, polishing its surface to high smoothness, and etching it with a chemical agent to highlight grain boundaries, inclusions, and other microstructural features. The sample is then imaged using one of a number of types of microscopy. The resulting pictures are often strikingly (if incidentally) beautiful. That’s OK by me, personally—incidental beauty is usually my favorite kind.
Top 10: Marvelous Metals
As promised, here’s a tasting menu featuring some of my favorite metallurgical content from our archives arranged, as usual, in mysteriously-appealing (and entirely arbitrary) top-ten format. Narrowing it down to just ten involved some hard choices; this subject is rich, and we’ve covered it a lot. A second round-up, perhaps at the close of the month, may be in order. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of cool stuff on my to-blog list, and it’s growing fast as your suggestions roll in.
