I’m old (never you mind the hard number). But I’m still a kid at heart and I love toys. And I’m not talking about motorcycles and cars and speed boats, aka “grown-up toys,” I’m talking model rockets, radio-controlled anything, little toy soldiers, and board games. TOYS! The cool thing about being an adult, and being […]
Recently I’ve been helping a friend’s 11-year-old daughter get started in electronics. The use of a solderless breadboard was counterintuitive to her until I presented her with one of these clear-cased versions, available through Solarbotics. As she puts it, “you can see where the metal is.”
I love “lazyweb” sites, Q&A sites, and other crowdsourced resources that deal in instant-gratification content. I especially like them when the signal-to-noise ratio is high; when a lot of really smart, inspired people come together to share their expertise. As of a few weeks ago, O’Reilly now has its own such site, O’Reilly Answers, a […]
Somewhere at the junction of modern open-source hardware and early 80’s Russia lives a beautiful new DIY kit from the Maker Shed called the Ice Tube Clock.
Spotted in the online portfolio of design firm Martus & Silvio, of Grand Rapids. It’s a sculpture, technically, entitled “Early Tools,” but I’d have a hard time not using it at least once, Office Space style, on something that really made me angry.
Peggy 2 is an updated version of the original Peggy light-emitting pegboard display. Version 2 adds simple animation capability and Arduino compatibility. Like its predecessor, the Peggy 2 provides a quick and efficient way to drive up to 625 LEDs.
The BigShot digital camera is a kit designed to teach kids how they work while they assemble and use it. It’s being developed by Shree Nayar and his team at the Computer Vision Lab at Columbia University.
