Technology

Red Blinky POV

This kit is amazingly cool and easy to use. POV (persistence of vision) displays show words or patterns that seem to float in mid-air; if you’ve ever seen one, you know what a great effect it is. A line of LEDs flashes the Y component of what you’re displaying, and you provide the X by […]

Laser Ball Is Life of the Party, Makes Regular Tennis Balls Feel Inferior

Laser Ball Is Life of the Party, Makes Regular Tennis Balls Feel Inferior

LeoneLabs on Instructables posted this fantastic how-to on adding 14 lasers to a regular tennis ball to make a Laser Ball. Why? He says that it’s fun to build, it can be done in an afternoon, and “lasers are cool.” The lasers are driven by a Teensy USB Development Board, which is stuffed inside the ball and controlled from outside with an infrared remote control. The Instructable shows you how to make your own in painstaking detail, but you can also follow the build step-by-step in this fun video.

Rainbow Cube

The Rainbow Cube is a nerdy but gorgeous accent light consisting of a 4×4×4 cube of red-green-blue LEDs. Depending on how it’s programmed, colors appear to move, pulse, or wash through the cube in all directions, which is fascinating to watch. The LEDs connect to the PCB base via an ingenious structure consisting of thin […]

MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup

MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup

Owwwww, my head. I am still recovering from what will almost certainly be the best Elevensday celebration of my life. Unless I make it to 11/11/2111, that is. Fingers crossed. Anyway, to commemorate the event, and because Gronk think rainbows pretty, our featured image this week is johngineer’s 11.11.11. But it was a hard choice, because…

Arduino ADK TinkerKit

Android rocked the physical computing landscape last spring when it announced the Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK), an Arduino-based platform that combines the brains and connectivity of the Android with Arduino’s wealth of open source wares for controlling physical devices. The ADK presents almost limitless potential for projects. Now the ADK TinkerKit unleashes this […]