Team Antipodes, a FIRST robotics team consisting of Emma, Kjersti, and Violet of Terra Nova High School in Pacifica, CA, built this sweet magnetic levitation vehicle, with a home-built 3-phase, 6-solenoid linear motor, on a Lego bed, all controlled via XBee wireless. It won an Editors’ Choice ribbon at Bay Area Maker Faire last month. [...]

From kids endlessly upcycling crafty bits into art, to an autonomous robot with multi-channel video playback who talks to the crowd as it moves through it – “Hi Photon!” – this past weekend’s Maker Faire North Carolina in Raleigh was an absolute success. While some projects such as Learning to Solder appear at almost every Maker Faire [...]

MAKE is teaming up with Google again for our 2nd annual Maker Camp July 8-Aug. 16—a virtual summer camp that features six weeks of projects, making, field trips, and fun for teens hosted on Google+. Last year during Maker Camp, more than 1 million campers added MAKE to their G+ circles. This year promises to be even [...]

Arc Reactor Build On the workbench Arc Reactor Build Parts Arc Reactor Build More parts Arc Reactor Build Repurposed materials Arc Reactor Build Design Arc Reactor Build Beginning to build Arc Reactor Build Throwing things together Arc Reactor Build Assembling the electronics Arc Reactor Build Wired for power Arc Reactor Build Adding illumination Arc Reactor [...]

For the Museum of Mathematics Math Mondays has been accumulating a lot of mail from all you fellow makers out there with a mathematical bent so today’s installment marks the beginning of a series (the length of which depends on how much more mail you all send) based on readers’ responses to earlier columns. We’re [...]

Everyone loves video games. But it can be difficult to enjoy certain games if you are injured or disabled and don’t have the manual dexterity needed to execute fast button combos. Fortunately, we can use an Arduino to do it for us. The Arduino can send signals to the controller that simulate the buttons being [...]

When I was around seven years old I wanted bunk beds. I had no particularly good reason for that– I had no siblings, and maybe the only time they’d be practical would be on the rare occasion I had a friend over. I think I was really just in love with having a bed that [...]

I’m here at the fourth annual Maker Faire North Carolina with Nick Normal, and we’re delighted to report that not only is it happening right now, but it’s their biggest Faire yet, with a huge list of makers with plenty of hands-on activities. Don’t let the crowd size in the photo scare you (the Whomping [...]

Last summer, a group of Stanford d.school students put a makerspace inside an old delivery truck and set out on a cross-country voyage to bring hands-on learning back to schools. We drove 15,323 miles and met 2,700 kids between California and Massachusetts, teaching them about tinkering, brainstorming, and how to get unstuck. This summer, SparkTruck [...]

About 70 campers showed up today at the offices of OATV for Hardware Summer Camp, organized by Nick Pinkston, Renee DiResta and Adam Ellsworth. I kicked off the Saturday session with a short talk, remarking that the maker movement has been built around a prototyping revolution more than a manufacturing revolution. One can see that [...]

There’s still time to get in on the launch of the Smart Citizen sensor and data platform; their fully-funded Kickstarter ends on Sunday. The Smart Citizen Kit looks to be one of the more polished efforts at building a distributed sensing and data aggregation platform. The kit is a microcontroller motherboard (wireless networking and Arduino-compatible [...]

Chris Anderson at Maker Faire Bay Area last month. We all know what drones can do in the hands of the military and law enforcement. For recreational use, they’re fun to fly around with a GoPro strapped to their bellies. Commercial uses are still in their infancy. Congress passed a law last year requiring the [...]