Make: Projects community member and winner of the MAKE Volume 27 Robot Contest, OddBot, recently shared a new project build with us in the form of a Playful Puppy Robot. How playful? You be the judge: OddBot shows you how to build the puppy bot, which is Arduino compatible and requires no soldering. The sample […]
Bring to Light took place last weekend as New York’s incarnation of Nuit Blanche, an international night time arts festival. The Bring to Light organizers invited artists to make site specific installations of light, sound, performance, and projection art in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. Among the artists were Sean McIntyre and Reid Bingham, who created this long exposure, programmable rainbow maker they call Rainbow Tracer.
You know those people that just love to change the channel on the TV? Put an end to it with this, the IR Jammer Kit from the Maker Shed. Just press the button and you can render infrared remotes completely useless.
RIP Steve Jobs. You, and your Homebrew Computer cohort and Apple Computer, fundamentally changed our lives, through technology. Multiple times. You (and Apple) made magic with technology. I literally gasped the first time I picked up the new MacBook Air. Not a lot of consumer tech makes me gasp.
Come one, come all, science geeks, food lovers, Arduino hackers. Build a magical box with Arduino-inspired technology that will control the temperature of an appliance you hack, up to 0.1 degrees accuracy. October 15th at the BioCurious hackerspace in Sunnyvale!
I am probably flattering myself, taking any sort of credit for inspiring this sweet custom temperature controller built by Adafruit reader Mike to keep his beer-brewing fridge at a constant temperature. Like my recent project, it simultaneously controls AC-powered heating and cooling equipment to maintain a constant temperature, and is mounted in a CANTEX PVC junction box. But there the similarities pretty much end: Whereas I used a cheap off-the-shelf thermostat module from China, Mike built and programmed his own controller using an Arduino for brains, an Xbee for remote temperature control and data logging, and a cool multicolor LED display with letters that turn red when the system is heating, blue when it is cooling, and green when it is at the correct temperature.
We’ve posted about Phillips’ Ambilight (Wikipedia) real-time multicolor display backlighting system, and various DIY versions thereof, before (see below). If you’re not familiar with the idea, watch a few seconds of the embedded video, as it’s hard to appreciate the effect from still images. If you believe the hype, this kind of dynamic backlighting improves viewing by making it more “immersive” and reducing “backlight bleed.” In any case, it’s certainly cool-looking.
