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August 19, 2008

Cereal box to gift box

This Instructable shows you how to invert, cut, and refold a cereal box to turn it into a rectangular gift box.

Gift Box from a Cereal Box

Posted by Gareth Branwyn | Aug 19, 2008 11:00 AM
Crafts, Instructables | Permalink | Comments (0) | Suggest a Site

Cow poo for your amusement (rides)

The California State Fair has an amusement ride powered by cow manure. It's called the "Barnyard Animal Train", and uses biogas from Pacific Gas and Electric. The fair runs through September 1st, so there's still time to go! Via Ecogeek

More:
The power of poo
On Human Manure

Blimpin' ain't easy

St Obsessed F
Blimpin' Ain't Easy: Crossing the English Channel in a Pedal-Powered Airship*... Thanks Sam!

You know it's hard up here for a blimp. Or so says Stephane Rousson, a 39-year-old Frenchman who's hoping to cross the English Channel in a homemade, pedal-powered airship. As a child, he was captivated by the Gossamer Albatross, the first entirely human-powered craft to fly the turbulent stretch from England to France. Hoping to repeat that 1979 feat, Rousson acquired Zeppy, a crank-driven zeppelin. Built originally by Jean Marc Geiser and his son Luc back in 1984, the craft's forward momentum and steering come from a pair of 10-foot movable propellers, churned by a recumbent bike hanging from the ship's belly; Rousson modified the chassis to improve its stability and power. He has logged more than 30 hours of flight time, including a four-hour hop around the coastal town of Toulon. But so far, no English Channel. The problem: Breezes over 5 mph bat the blimp around like a cat playing with a moth. Also, the heat of the sun raises the temperature of the helium in the Zeppy, which could cause it to explode. With the channel typically experiencing only three windless days a year, Rousson will have to time his five-hour, 34-mile flight perfectly. He plans to try again in September. Here's hoping the attempt doesn't go down like a lead balloon.

LockWasher robots

We've written about Lockwasher's rayguns before - he has some great junk robots, too!

Dorkbot Austin: This Thursday!

Dorkbot Austin #16 is this Thursday, and it's full of steampunk wearable robotic wonders:

Jason Delaney's steampunk (literally) homebrew still that can be used to make alcohol, herbal oils, purify water, etc.
Chase Hammock's touchscreen driven wearable multimedia computer
Adam Iseman's Ard-e, a sub-$100 robotics platform

(Image courtesy Adrian Ward)

We're at Cafe Mundi, 8pm to 10; here's a map.

If you've got your own project to show off, be sure to bring it along and participate in the Opendork (ad-hoc 5-minute speeches at the end of the night)!

Project tracks its progress and location as it interacts

The "FOLKESTRONOMY" project consists of a mobile mapping device that connects to the Internet to update a map in realtime as participants interact with the project. The build consists of an Arduino connected to a GPS device that reads the coordinates and relays them to available wireless networks. This project is more complicated than this review merits, so I would suggest you to follow the link to read the excellent documentation of this project.

TagIt!

High-speed photo gallery

Highspeed Photo Gallery

Flickr user Nebarnix posted an awesome gallery of high-speed photo eye-candy -

High speed photography. If anyone has any requests I'd be happy to blow it up for you!

Most of these photos are taken with a special flash unit that uses a high voltage arc in air as the light source. The flash of light lasts only 500 nanoseconds!

- High-speed photography on Flickr [via NOTCOT]

Mkqt1-2
High-Speed Photography Kit Version 4

Olympic village in playing cards

Brian Berg spent 20 days recreating Beijing's Olympic Village using over 140,000 playing cards.
(and apparently didn't sneeze once during construction)

[via Gizmodo]

More:
Fciz7Xbxr7Erie1Odn.Medium
Playing Card Top Hat

HOW TO - CCD camera eyepiece for binoculars

Ccd Binoculars

Here's helpful instructable for fitting(and building) a CCD video camera to a basic pair of binoculars -

Have you ever looked through your binoculars and thought " I wish I could get this on tape" ? Well now you can. In this Instructable I'll show you how to build a cheap CCD eyepiece that will fit most binoculars.
You can use it with any camcorder that has a video input to capture whatever you can get a view on with your binoculars.

- CCD Eyepiece for Binoculars

Arduino based music visualization system

This inventive real-time music visualisation system uses an Arduino, piezo sensors, webcams, a 3G network card, Bluetooth adaptor, and other connectors to produce some pretty interesting visual output. Check out the link for the details on the hardware involved in this project.

Live Musical Performances Visualisation System

Ganzbot: An Arduino Robot That Twitters

This is a really cool robot head that can show emotions as it reads incoming twitter feeds. The web site has a lot of information about the build, including program downloads and the schematics of the interface board. I definitely want a Ganzbot in my studio.

This funny little robot has eyes, eyebrows and a mouth and will verbally read your latest Twitter status to you. It uses an Arduino Decima to control the head actions and receives the latest Twitter status information over USB from a host computer.
For those who don't know, Twitter is a micro blogging tool where users announce what they're doing with 140 characters or less. You can also send the robot something to say directly from the command line with a few Ganzbot moods to choose from.

How to: Make a wooden spoon...the Viking way

This is a great instructable on how to make a spoon. This project only uses the kind of tools the Vikings would have had available to them. How cool is that?!

Learn how to Make a wooden spoon...the Viking way

DIY Lamborghini

Unfortunately there isn't any information on the maker of this car, but the pictures are cool. If anyone knows more about this build, please post it in the comments and I will update the entry. If you can't afford a Lambo, make it!

Checkout the rest of the photo set

Update:
Apparently the car, called the "Woodighini" was made by a 33 year old Canadian named "Woody". You can read more about the project on the AutoBlog website. Also, there is a great interview that can be found on the Motor Foot Blog. A big Thank You goes to JohnW for sending in the links!

"Digital" wooden clock

Check out this wooden clock that's manually adjusted to reflect the current time. It's an art piece by Mark Formanek in collaboration with Datenstrudel. Via VVORK.

HP 20b biz calc can be modded

C01438144
Make Pt0926
A few makers sent this in... the latest HP 20b biz calc can be modded' (they're releasing a dev kit). I downloaded the dev kit, they're not messing around, schematic is included. Gang, this is an Atmel ARM, an LCD with the power supply done - what the heck is going on here? Way over powered for a calc, just asking for projects - Makers please do something cool with this!

Paper telephone sculpture

Jenny @ CRAFT found this sculpture of a rotary phone made from paper tickets and scotch tape, tring tring!

Contest: Instructable build tips, tricks and stories

As mentioned before, we're doing a Best of Instructables book. Instructables ran a contest on the site to find the 50 best Instructables, as voted on by the users. The results are now on the site. Congrats to the winners. Their projects will be listed in the book (some of them will be featured as full projects) and they'll each get a copy of the book when it's published.

We want to add value to the book by having some material that's not on the Instructables site (or anywhere else). We plan on running sidebars on some of the projects with tips from folks who've built them and can offer interesting tips, alternative build techniques, or just cool, amusing, or cautionary tales about the project. So, to collect some of these, Maker Media is running a contest.

Write up your tips/stories and send then to me at gareth@makezine.com. The submission can be about any Instructable, not just the ones we're running in the book. The Make: Books team will look over all of the submissions and award three winners. All three winners will get copies of The Maker's Notebook, MAKE rubber bands, and Maker's Notebook sticker sheets. The winning submissions (and other entries) will be considered for inclusion in The Best of Instructables. If we use your submission, you'll get a comp copy of the book it when it comes out.

In the Maker Shed:

Pick up The Maker's Notebook ($19.99) for all your ideas, diagrams, patterns, and great references in the back.

DIY mechanical magnetic levitation

Bill Beaty documents his recipe for levitating neodymium magnets using two rotating coppers tubes. Note: The aptly named "Fantastically Dangerous Mechanical MagLev" could indeed seriously injure a person (you'll notice Bill uses a clear plastic covering over the tubes to prevent the aforementioned nastiness) -

While working on science museum exhibits in 1990 I came up with the above idea: it is known that a spinning metal disk will lift and fling a strong magnet. Therefore, metal rods with opposite spin will lift a magnet but WON'T fling it sideways. It works! I used "sched-80" heavy wall copper tubes about 1-3/8" diameter, 12" long, with 1/4" wall thickness. I hammered aluminum plugs into the tubes, carved shaft-tips with a lathe, built endblocks and bearings, spun them with an AC/DC motor, and managed to levitate a stack of two 3/4" diameter neodymium magnets. The spinning tubes must move at about 5000 RPM before the magnet starts floating.

- All-mechanical magnetic levitation with neodymium supermagnets [via Hacked Gadgets]

Magneticsculpturekit Cc
Magnet Sculpture Kit

Controllerism 101

Brooklyn musician Moldover shows his approach to converting a standard MIDI controller into something more suited to the fast-paced live loop manipulation - aka 'controllerism'.

For a more in depth info on his hardware and software techniques be sure to check out Moldover's Approach to Controllerism part 1 & part 2

[via Matrixsynth]

A truck grows in Sacramento

MAKE Editor and Publisher Dale Dougherty writes from the California State Fair:

Here is one of my favorite sights, a "green" truck in the Farm area. It's an old truck covered in grass with vegetables and flowers growing in the flat bed. Talk about a raised bed! Think how the yards of rural America could be transformed once rusty wrecks become warm and fuzzy, like something out of a Pixar movie.

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Tel: 707-827-7311

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