For young makers, making is more than learning how to use a particular tool or a technique. It’s experiencing the power of a material, technology, or tool as a language of self expression. It’s PLAYING with different languages and experiencing the magic of connections that is made when what you have made makes someone laugh, [...]

Photo: Christian Haselgrübler Founded in 1989 by a handful of dedicated “pyros,” the Western Pyrotechnics Association is a west-coast answer to the older Pyrotechnics Guild International (PGI) and other fireworks enthusiast and advocacy groups. The WPA works with hobbyists and professionals to promote fireworks safety, educate about the science and art of fireworks display, and [...]

Number four in our daily line-up of Hardware Innovation Workshop prototype contest entries is the LumiGeek LED4DIY family of RGB LED control shields. LumiGeek recently made a big splash, online, for their part in the collaboration (with Autodesk engineers Arthur Harsuvanakit and Evan Atherton) that produced this beautiful one-off 3D-printed sound/light reactive speaker set:   [...]

Abe and Josie Connally are full-time makers who have been homesteading for the past 12 years. They’ve built their homestead from the ground up by hand and are raising their two boys completely off-grid. The Connallys are true makers who research, learn, build, and then take pride and joy in sharing their knowledge with the [...]

A massive installation consisting of 1.4 million feet of rope has just opened to the public in New York City’s Madison Square Park. The installation is called Red, Yellow and Blue and was created by Orly Genger, who collected nautical rope from various locations and then painted and hand-knotted it to make some impressive sculptural [...]

Need help with a project? Former Make: Labs intern Matthew Dalton and Jacob Rogers, both from Instructables, have launched a great new podcast called RD Media Labs, where they field project questions and offer answers. Matt writes: “The goal of the podcast is to assist people in brainstorming ideas for projects to be worked on, [...]

Big brother and little brother? A few of us here, including Dale Dougherty, author Michael Margolis (Arduino Cookbook and Make an Arduino-Controlled Robot), and me, have been discussing Arcbotics’ next-generation robot with their founder Joe Schlesinger. It was almost a year ago at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 that we first started peppering Joe with [...]

If fire wasn’t the first thing invented, it was probably the second. The human race has had a long relationship with fire, and now you can use it to charge your smart phone, GPS, or anything else that you can connect to this thermoelectric generation using a USB cable. David Johansson, from Göteborg in Sweden, has built a [...]

As much as I dislike patents and the culture of intellectual property, the cold hard fact is that patents are real and they are here to stay. Now, there are a few ways to handle this – one is to completely ignore them and do what you want anyway. Another way is to use the [...]

Nick Poole, a technologist for SparkFun Electronics, built this beautiful Arduino-powered rainbow box: Recently, I had the opportunity to see Phil Lapsley talk about his book “Exploding the Phone,” a history of phone phreaking. When I found out that he was coming to give the talk, I was reminded of a project that I had [...]