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 [...]

  Believe it or not, you’ve just watched the Guinness World Records-certified world’s smallest movie. Produced by a team of IBM nanophysicists, the movie was compiled from images captured using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) operating at near-absolute zero and magnified 100 million times. Each frame in the movie measures approximately 1/20,000th the width of [...]

This month’s Hardware Innovation Workshop (May 14-15) offers an impressive line-up of speakers, presentations, workshops, and product demos all aimed at showcasing innovation and the maker ecosystem–fundraising, strategic partners, technology, and manufacturing options. If you’re involved in the business of making, the Hardware Innovation Workshop is a one-of-a kind event. But if you can’t make it [...]

There’s no better way to spice up your garden than growing one of the world’s hottest chili peppers: Bhut Jolokia, otherwise known as the ghost chili. In 2007, the ghost chili was certified as the hottest pepper in the world by Guinness World Records, 400 times hotter than Tabasco sauce and 125 times hotter than [...]

The Freedom Room project   The Freedom Room project   The Freedom Room project   The Freedom Room project   The Freedom Room project   The Freedom Room project   ‹ › View All Plenty of small homes and small interior spaces take their cues from boat and airplane interiors, however this is the first [...]

Synthetic polymers play a role in almost every single commercially manufactured item on the planet. Plastics are not just ubiquitous, but extremely versatile: some of them are incredibly stretchy, while some are hard as nails; some are crystal clear, and others come in all colors of the rainbow; some can survive extreme temperatures, and yet [...]

Usually the most challenging and time-consuming step in building a zoetrope is positioning the individual still figures just right so they animate smoothly when it’s turned on. ITP student Sanniti Pimpley found a way around this by crafting her ballerinas from easily pose-able pink pipe cleaners. Using nothing more than papier mache, wire, cardboard, and [...]