Toy Inventor’s Notebook — Root Beer Pong Bot
When making prototypes, I often “kit bash” broken toys to harvest useful components like motors, gear trains, or radio-control transmitters and receivers. No need to reinvent the wheel — literally!
Technology
North Paw and Heart Spark
Sensebridge is a maker of electronic kits geared toward personal hacking. It was started by a group of friends at the San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge.
Gateways to the Soul — Eyeboard
One of my high school classmates is quadriplegic, and from meeting him and hearing about others with similar conditions, I learned that many people with disabilities can’t afford technologies that could enable them to communicate — especially in places like Honduras, where I live.
Gateways to the Soul — EyeWriter
In 2003, my friend Tony, aka graffiti artist Tempt1, was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive disease that left him almost completely paralyzed except for his eyes. In order to help him continue to make his art, I collaborated with a group of software developers and hardware hackers to create a low-cost, open source, eye-tracking system that would allow Tempt1 and other ALS patients to draw and control a computer using just their eyes.
New Wearable Electronics Platform – FLORA
I’m really excited about this new sewable Arduino compatible board called the FLORA.
Detecting Dirty Dishes with OpenCV
What happens in a shared space like a hackerspace, where you could have as many as fifty people passing through the communal kitchen in a given day? All those cups start to pile up quickly, I’m sure. Not one to let things get out of hand, London Hackspace member Tom created a solution to combat the problem. True to hackerspace form, he combined different open source technologies to alert the members in the space when a dish has been left in the sink for more than a few minutes.
New in the Maker Shed: Digit Shield
Need a simple, low cost way to display digits using your Arduino? Look no further than the Digit Shield now available in the Maker Shed! This easy to assemble shield uses a bright green 4 digit, 7 segment display to give you the data you need.