What's cooler than a clock that draws the time with a marker? One that does it with a laser of course! Build your own.
The post Telling the Time with Robots, Lasers, and Phosphorescence appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
We sit down to talk with Scott Shawcroft, an engineer at Adafruit, to discuss their hardware transition to CircuitPython.
The post CircuitPython Snakes its Way onto Adafruit Hardware appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
I read the other day that the hot career choice for kids these days is: YouTuber. That means every kid — yes, including mine — has two or three attempts at a YouTube show on their account and then they get into the next big thing and forget about it. On the other hand, sometimes you find someone who has a lot of ideas to share, and the dedication to keep sharing them.
[Kevin Zhou], an 11-year-old from Indonesia, has filmed around 70 videos in the past couple of years, with a fantastic variety of nerdy projects ranging from Mindstorms to Arduino to wood shop projects, and even a Blender tutorial. His projects show a lot of complexity, with serious, real-world concepts, and he shares the technical details about the various components in the project, and he walks you through the code as well.
He made a Mindstorms carving machine, pictured above, with a gantry system holding a motor steady while the user carves into a block of floral foam with LEGO bits. He does a lot of home automation projects using an Arduino and relay board, as well as a number of water-pumping robots. He doesn’t stick to one medium or technology. He has a jigsaw and in one video he shows how to build a Thor’s hammer out of wood. He prints out each layer’s design on office paper and glues the paper to a piece of wood, cutting out the cross-sections on his jigsaw. The whole stack is glued together and clamped. [Kevin]’s design featured a hollow space inside to save weight, which he cut by drilling a 1-inch hole in the center with his drill press, then threading the jigsaw blade through the hole to cut out the inside. As an amateur woodcrafter myself, I like seeing him branching out working on small wood projects.
[Kevin]’s full automatic water dispenser is one of a series of water-pumping projects including a couple of plant-watering robots. [Kevin] uses a relay-triggered pump and a water-level sensor, all running on an Arduino Mega plugged into a 1360-point breadboard.
He has a lot of common modules. He uses a LED display plugged directly into the breadboard, with its backpack plugged into same rows so it can lay flat. He plays around with an IR remote, as well as a 12 V / 5 A Peltier thermo-electric cooler running off of a relay. He has a couple of different relay boards making for a number of home automation projects, including a fairly complicated security system featuring RFID and keypad entry.
There are many LEGO and Mindstorms projects as well, including a complicated robot arm controlled by a smartphone app, as well as a Technic beam sorter that rolls the beams down a conveyor so that shorter elements fall through smaller holes, while longer pieces continue on to fall in larger holes down the line. Intriguingly to me, he did a couple of projects involving mixing Arduinos and LEGO/Mindstorms, and frequently uses the building set to build enclosures and support structure.
I suppose you could say the individual projects aren’t that challenging–connecting a relay board to an Arduino, for instance. All of these parts are fairly simple to run individually but together show he’s been working at this for a long time: 70 videos. A DIY security system is a far cry from turning on a LED.
Besides, I like how [Kevin] finishes projects, then riffs off of them. He tries out a few variants in a row, making changes and improvements. I just hope he keeps building–I can’t imagine what he’ll be making fifteen years from now.
Check out some of his videos:
This LED heads-up display is a simple modification for your car, but it makes your car look very futuristic.
The post Hack Your Car into the Future with an LED Heads-Up Display appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Use Circuito.io to drag and drop different parts together. It will compute all the necessary additional items and give you a wiring diagram.
The post Circuito.io Helps Beginners Assemble Electronic Projects appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Use JJ Robots' kit and your Android phone to build an air hockey partner who's always game.
The post Assemble a Robot Opponent for Air Hockey appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Here are a few things Jeremy Cook learned (or relearned) while building a ClearWalker Strandbeest and filming it in action.
The post 8 Lessons from Building the Strandbeest-Style ClearWalker appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
The Museum of Funny Ladies is an interactive way for people to experience the story of Sybil Adelman, a pioneer comedy writer from the 1970s.
The post Creating Interactive Art: The Museum of Funny Ladies appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Construct an Arduino guitar pedal stompbox with easy-to-find parts and you'll be having fun creating your own sounds in not time.
The post Build an Arduino Guitar Pedal Stompbox appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Four creators fixed an Arduino powered LED binary clock inside a wooden model of a Parisian building to create a fancy addition to any home.
The post This Model Parisian Building Is Actually a Binary Clock appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
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