Category: DIY

Street Tech pal Thomas Edwards, of Dorkbot DC, has launched a website for his Physical Interactions over IP (or “Phy2Phy”) project. The first piece he’s working on is called “Touch” and it uses an MCU (the Comfile CUBLOC CB220), a serial motor controller (the Pololu micro serial servo controller), a servo motor, a force-sensitive resistor, and a serial-to-Ethernet network interface (the XPort) to create an Internet-connectible touch-input and force-feedback device. Connect another such unit elsewhere on the interwebs, and you can reach out and touch someone, over IP! Really interested to see where he takes this. The Phy2Phy project wiki will chronicle this piece and others to come. Thomas will also be demoing Touch at the next Dorkbot DC on Sept. 10.

The “Touch” project page has info on all of the tech mentioned above. There’s also a YouTube video of the “Touch” units thus far.

Here’s an Instructable on mixing up your own “Moo Glue,” called so ’cause milk is one of the chief ingredients (along with vinegar and baking soda). Quick, easy, curiously strong. Of course, with the price of milk spiking…

Instructables has teamed up with TreeHugger and Popular Science to create a Go Green! project contest. Grand Prize is a gorgeous Breezer Liberty commuter bike, first prize is a Solio Universal Solar Charger, and there are other prizes too. Any project that focuses on reducing, reusing, repurposing, recycling, and rebuilding is eligible. Further details at the link.

Lady Ada has the second installment of her Multimeter Tutorial on her site. This one covers resistance and the testing of resistors, potentiometers, and LDR (Light-Dependant Resistor) sensors.

Street Tech pal Datamancer is featured in a new Wall Street Journal Online vid talking about steampunk and showing off his basement workshop and his various casemods and steampunk keyboards. Congrats, Doc!

The dude even has Victorian hair. Now *that’s* commitment!

Vol 4, the “Crazy for Costumes” issue, of CRAFT is out now. I have a piece in their called “What the Hell is That Thing?,” on weird (but wonderful) crafting tools. The issue looks particularly tasty to me, design-wise. Really nice. And there are all sorts of cool craft coverage and projects, from beaten’ out your own copper buttons to making dresses with plastic bags to stuff on cosplay and other dress-up. But I’m sorry, dressing your pug up to look like a pirate? Well, that’s just wrong.

More “nixie tube” fun, this one a really gorgeous tube clock in a CNC-milled wooden enclosure. The builder has the schematics, layout, BOM (Bill of Materials), firmware, etc. on the site, and is also is making clocks for sale, for US$1,500 each. He says it’s about $190-200 in parts. Not the easiest build, with a lot of surface-mount components, but if you’re up for a challenge… Cool clock!

I’ve been meaning to pitch MAKE an article about the basics of how to use a Digital Multimeter (DMM). The manuals that come with most meters appear to be written by electrical engineers, for electrical engineers, and Radio Shack’s “Getting Started” guide on the subject is little better. I so wish, a decade ago, I’d had a tutorial like Lady Ada is constructing on her site. The first installment is on the basics of continuity testing.

Effectively using a DMM is really not that hard, and kind of fun, when it’s explained to you in human-readable language and decent photos. Looking forward to posting about the rest of the series.

Here’s our Street Tech guide to buying a decent DMM.

It’s not often that I get really excited about a piece of hardware that I spent under $20 on and want to tell all of my geek buds about. But such are the bargain hardware joys to be found in the Ultra Products’ Ultra 3.5″ Hard Drive Enclosure…

Read the rest of my review…

Here’s a MacGyver-ific battery hack. This fellow, looking at a 13-hour flight from Sydney to LA, decided to bodge up a backup power supply for his laptop. He took a 4 D-cell battery holder, sliced it in half and stretched it out to accommodate 20 cells. The whole thing was wrapped in cardboard and shipping tape. I cannot believe he got this thing through airport security. If I tried to take something like this on-board a plane, my nether cavities would never be the same. And I love how he gets on-board with such crude DIY device while this other fella doesn’t.

[Via hackAday]