Live from Art Hack Day
Art Hack Day begins tonight, so if you’re in NYC and looking for something to do, come out and see a few dozen art-hacker projects that were all made over the last two days by over 50 participants.
Hacks
First Pictures From the Pegboard Phased Array Radar
Yesterday I mentioned MIT’s soon-to-be-released open-courseware materials detailing a DIY phrased radar array radar system built from pegboard and wi-fi antennae. The project, from MIT engineers Drs. Bradley Perry, Jonathan Paul Kitchens, Patrick Bell, Jeffrey Herd, and Greg Charvat produces ‘radar video’ at about three frames per second. Greg just e-mailed me a link to […]
How-To: Use a Stepper Motor as a DC Generator
MAKE pal Dino Segovis brings us this handy tutorial on running a stepper motor in “reverse,” i.e. turning the shaft mechanically in order to generate electrical power, instead of the normal usage. He writes: Any electric motor will also output a voltage when it’s freely spinning. Stepper motors are much better at this because they […]
DIY Phased Array Radar From Pegboard and Wi-Fi Antennas
Yes, you read that correctly. No hard technical details are out yet, but this amazing project from MIT radar hackers Drs. Bradley Perry, Jonathan Paul Kitchens, Patrick Bell, Jeffrey Herd, and MAKE regular Gregory L. Charvat is soon to be published as part of MIT’s open courseware initiative. Cost of parts is about $950. The […]
Ask MAKE: Beginning Electronics and Dog Transponder Dreams
Tony asks:
I am really interested in learning about electronics and how to make kits and potentially make things with my kids. However, I am more creative than technical and I was wondering where would be a good book/kit/guide to start with. I am not an engineer and I don’t know anything about circuits, semiconductors or arduino. My dream would to be able to make a gadget i could put on my dog’s leash and it would transmit signals via gps/3g as to where he was if he ran away (which he manages to a lot).
DIY iPad Augmented Reality Cars
Waiting out an unfortunately lengthy shipment, Stockholm area maker Johan von Konow decided to build for his son a working set of augmented reality game pieces for the Cars 2 AppMATes game on his iPad. To achieve a faithful representation of the characters in the game, Johan modified a couple of PEZ dispenser tops approximately […]
How-To: Keyboard Breakout Board
If you’re building a standalone project with an embedded PC (say, a CNC rig or a MAME cabinet) one of the easiest ways to get instructions to the software is using the PC’s baked-in keyboard interface. But if you don’t want to actually use a keyboard to control the thing, you need some way to convert button presses and/or joystick movements from your custom control panel into signals that look like keyboard input.
