The third annual Red Bull Creation event is finally upon us! The fun begins with the first official build day today, June 13th, in Brooklyn alongside the Northside Festival. The competition, which is happening in Williamsburg’s McCarren Park, is open to the public and begins at 11 AM. The six participating teams were selected from [...]

Maker Faire North Carolina producer Jon Danforth is pretty thrilled with their front-page splash earlier this week on the Triangle’s largest newspaper, The Raleigh News Observer. “What that means is that North Carolina has maybe finally realized at an institutional level that making is real and is happening in the mainstream.” Danforth is also happy [...]

Our friends from Tested have released Know Your Arduino: A Practical Guide to The Most Common Boards. The guide is accompanied by a 30-minute video, below, with Will and Norm, where they show boards ranging from the Mini to the Mega, and then demo specific applications like gaming on the Esplora or driving the recently [...]

Advances in low-cost 3D printing and CNC machining have made it easy for a growing number of hobbyists to design and manufacture complex parts in the privacy of their homes. Alas, the technology itself is not always enough: functional prototypes made out of PLA or machined out of HDPE often prove to have surprisingly little [...]

Great modular robot project that needs just a bit of a bump in its last few days on Kickstarter: Atmel AVR Microcontroller Compatible with Arduino so you can re-flash with your own firmware using the on-board bootloader ZigBee-Capable Radio Communicate wirelessly with an 802.15.4-compliant radio, create mesh networks, control and monitor remotely Multi-Color (RGB) LED [...]

With the use of a deep frier and a little liquid nitrogen, Instructables technology editor Randy Sarafan managed to create a deep fried ice cream sandwich, which he claims is one of the most delicious things he’s ever eaten, and then he generously wrote a tutorial about how he did it. For those of you [...]

June’s Component of the Month is the diode, and a 7-segment display actually consists of seven light-emitting diodes! So, why not matrix them up? Skot Croshere built a matrix out of 512 7-segment displays: he calls it the DigitGrid: The DigitGrid is an array of seven-segment displays. There are 4096 LEDs, forming 512 7-segment digits [...]

The humble can opener might seem like an obvious invention today, but it took 50 years from the tin can’s invention to the very first can opener. Before then a hungry person had to use whatever tools were available, from bayonets to rocks. Over the last 150 years there have been hundreds of attempts to [...]

EMSL’s Windell Oskay plays around with solder paste, the er, soldering medium in paste form used in attaching surface mount components to PCBs. The part that particularly fascinated me was when Windell zoomed in on some paste with his microscope, revealing a multitude of tiny balls of solder suspended in goop: When you really get [...]

Los Angeles-based artist Mike Stilkey likes to experiment with the canvases he chooses for his whimsical paintings, including vintage paper, record covers, book pages, and most interestingly on hardcover books themselves. In a previous interview, Stilkey says: I was painting on book pages for forever, and actually published a book in 2005 titled “100 Portraits” [...]

At Maker Faire Bay Area this year, Jay from MakerBlock found himself needing to tighten some wingnuts, but he didn’t have a wrench. Rather than asking around (I’m sure he could have found one with all the makers on site), he hacked together a solution on his own. It’s super simple: just one piece of paper. Roll it [...]

MAKE community member, author, kit builder, educator, and all around swell guy Rick Schertle has been sharing his knowledge with us for years. On the pages of MAKE, he’s taught us how to make High-Pressure Foam Rockets, a Folding-Wing Glider, the Catapult Glider Launcher, and Compressed Air Rockets. He’s hosted workshops at Maker Faires teaching [...]