Conference co-chair of the Open Hardware Summit, Alicia Gibb, brought a wonderful surprise to this year’s event – handcrafted silver pendants made by her father, James Gibb. This is my new favorite necklace! James cut each of ten Open Hardware logo gears to make these beautiful pendants, wouldn’t you like one? Show support in the comments if you’d like to see these made more widely available.
Unless your application is critical, cheap liquid paint stripper from the hardware store (not the gel, paste, or color-changing varieties) is a fine substitute for commercial acrylic solvent cement. Comparing one MSDS to another, we see that each product is about 75 wt% dichloromethane (AKA methylene chloride), which is the “active ingredient” that softens the plastic and allows it to weld. Purpose-made acrylic solvent is a bit thinner, in my experience, and evaporates a little faster, and contains trace amounts of acrylic monomer that may result in a slightly stronger bond, but for most practical purposes I have not found these qualities to justify paying twice as much for it.
Rounding-up the best and most beautiful shots in the MAKE Flickr pool this week was a real challenge. The popularity of the pool has been taking off over the past few weeks; that plus the “high tide” in the aftermath of World Maker Faire NY means tons of great images I wasn’t able to include here!
Daphne Oram headed up BBC’s electronic music department in the 1960s before starting heir own studio. In February 1962, she was awarded a grant to work on her “Oramics” drawn sound technique. This method of music composition and performance allowed the composer to draw an “alphabet of symbols” on paper and feed it through a […]
With short range wireless technology becoming increasing prevalent in the various cards we hold in our wallets, Serge Negrashov decided to make his own radio frequency shielded wallet to block any potential wireless data snoops. He used extremely strong Kevlar-Nomex as the fabric and painted the inside with silver epoxy to give the wallet its shielding quality. If you’re looking for a budget version, he says that regular epoxy with a layer of tin foil might work as well. What do you think of RF shielded wallets? Better safe than sorry or overboard paranoia?
Built as a submission to “Mach flott den Schrott”, a hardware hacking contest put on by German technology magazine c’t, Mario Lukas’ Toilettenpapier-Drucker (Toilet Paper Printer) combines parts scavenged from surplus CD-ROM drives, an Arduino, and some miscellaneous bits to create a printer with a unique output. Supplied with an RSS or Twitter feed, the device will inscribe up-to-the-minute news on your favorite 2-ply.
At World Maker Faire, I finally got to see paintable circuits in action. Matt Johnson spoke with me about the conductive paint that people were using and showed me a few projects that demonstrate the possibilities. The business cards they brought were printed with a swath of conductive paint suitable for some home experimenting.
Bare Conductive grew out of the founders’ graduate studies at the Innovation Design Engineering Course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The version of their conductive paints they had at Maker Faire is similar to the skin paint featured in a music video of a few years back.
The paints can be used to create traditional circuits, and for signalling with the Arduino. Since the company has just passed its’ regulatory approvals, we can expect to see many new experiments as the community of users grows.
