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May 27, 2010

Bike rack hack

Maker and avid bike hacker Antoine was inspired by this Incredible Rim Rack instructable enough to go and build this very elegant bike rack out of a broken U-lock and busted rim.

Lashed together with a u-bolt and hose clamp, the finished rack looks like a high-end retail product that follows the line of the bike. It's also supposedly quite strong and dutifully performs its intended task. [via BikeHacks]

May 21, 2010

iPhone app & web-controlled soda machine

MAKE subscriber Chris Varenhorst of Cambridge, MA wrote to share his soda machine that can dispense on command via a custom iPhone app as well as through a website.

A few months ago I picked up a functioning old soda machine off craigslist. This machine was built in 1977 and has been comfortably vending soda the same way for over 30 years. Thats boring, lets make this retro machine a little more modern!

Vender has its credit functions, and dispense button electronically controlled and has two capacitive touch sensors to dispense free soda if you know the secret place to put your hands. It also has a police beacon light atop of it to signal when someone remotely dispenses a can. All of this is on a platform connected the internet, enabling operation from a website (buyusbeer.com) or my iPhone! It makes for a great living room decoration, and always serves up ice cold soda (and beer).

May 19, 2010

Low-tech R/C lawn mower

Make: Online reader Baz from Dublin, ireland, sent us this rad video of a low-tech robot lawn mower. He writes:

Self-propelled lawn mower guided by wrapping a string around a couple of posts so it mows a spiral of lawn. Quite hacky, but interesting idea!

In the MAKE offices we've been trying to guess what happens at the end. So far we're thinking the mower flips over, or perhaps it rips its tether out of the ground, mowing wildly amok. What do you think happened when the rope ran out?

Of course, this project is an incredibly great contrast to the R/C Lawnbot we have on the cover of MAKE Volume 22 (and show you how to make inside the issue).

MAKE Volume 22, Remote Control Everything
Automate your world with remote control. From pet care to power outlets, from toys to telepresence, we'll show you how to add a joystick, push-button, twist-knob, or timer to just about anything. Don't forget, subscribers can always read the digital edition here.

DIY Volume knob built using a tea caddy and tinfoil

Over at MAKE: Japan, Takumi Funada found this excellent tea caddy variable capacitor (translation), which uses a homemade capacitor to turn a little plastic container into a volume control. Nice hack!

More:

May 12, 2010

John Dillinger's fake escape pistol

I have often opined that truly creative problem solving comes from limiting one's options, rather than expanding them. Which is why prisoner's inventions fascinate me so much. (If you've not had a chance to browse Angelo's Prisoners' Inventions book, BTW, I highly recommend it--it's not about shivs or improvised weapons, but about how prisoners make game pieces, heat water, control the climate in their cells, etc., etc. using only the odds and ends they are permitted by, or can slip past the attention of, the state.) Compare an object like this prop handgun, which was reportedly used by John Dillinger in his escape from the Crown Point, Indiana Jail in 1934, to, say, a modern-day toothbrush handle, or a Nike sneaker, designed by a professional working with a CAD-CAM system, industrial machine tooling, and a smorgasboard of rainbow-colored polymers and elastomers, most of which add no functional value at all, and are employed just to make a product stand out from competitors on the shelf. Granted, an escaping prisoner and a product designer have wildly different goals, but if asked "who is doing more creative, original problem-solving," I know how I'd answer. [via Boing Boing]

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May 11, 2010

How-to: Sort by price on Digi-Key

This should come in handy, if you need to purchase electronics from Digikey. Sparkfun has a tutorial on how to use Alex Leone's sort by price greasemonkey script to allow components to be arranged by cost, making it much easier to pick out the cheapest options for generic parts.

May 10, 2010

How-To: DIY-chic hi-hat stand

I've been a drummer since I was 15, and I can tell you: Sturdy drum hardware is expensive. Sturdy drum hardware that looks this cool is priceless.

Oh, wait...no it's not. Turns out it costs $23.

From Instructables user macgeek.

Hand-built Cuban refugee boat

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, from user huebner5000. He quotes an unnamed source:

This Cuban chug arrived Wednesday, December 16th, 2009. The chug held 17 Cubans who are now legal U.S. citizens. The chug, we were told, left Cuba at 5am December 14th and landed at Dry Tortugas at 2am December 16th.

It's all made from scrap metal and junk. The hull, reportedly, is flattened corrugated roofing material. There's one more picture here.

May 9, 2010

Powdered rust reveals magstripe data

Very cool trick from anaglyph: Apply powdered iron oxide to the magnetic stripe on a swipe card to visualize the encoded data. [via Boing Boing]

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May 7, 2010

Observing the microscopic world using a cheap webcam

The fine folks over at Tweak Labs converted a cheap webcam into a microscope by inverting it's lens, then used it to create this excellent video of some microscopic creatures doing their thing. They don't have documentation about their build completed yet, however there is an Instructable that explains the process.

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May 6, 2010

Trim your SIM FTW

The $30 all-you-can-eat data plan from AT&T; for the iPad 3G is pretty decent considering it's a data-only plan. But what if you're in another country or on another carrier? You'd think this would be easy, the iPad 3G being an unlocked GSM device, right? Not so fast. Apple isn't going to make it that easy for you to switch. Sure, it's unlocked, and it's GSM, but you're going to have to find yourself a MicroSIM from your carrier if you want to use it with your new iPad 3G. Frustrating, huh?

It's not as bad as it seems, though. A GSM MicroSIM is pin compatible with a standard SIM. All you have to do is trim away the excess material and you'll have yourself a DIY MicroSIM. Now you can use your $5.99 T-Mobile EDGE plan or hop on to Vodaphone if you're abroad.

May 4, 2010

The 5-minute circuit board agitator, or, making temporary tools

I don't etch circuit boards very often, so I can't really justify purchasing or even storing much specialized equipment for it. Once in a while, though, I do need to produce a batch of boards, and having something as simple as an automatic agitator for the etchant tank can make the job much easier.

So what's a poor hacker to do? In cases like this, having a pile of junk and rapid prototyping tools such as the Arduino come to the rescue. In less time than it would take to agitate a single board by hand, I was able to re-purpose an old servo project as an improvised agitator robot. This allowed me to start soldering components onto the boards while the robot did the tedious work. I'm happy to report that this simple construction worked will through the whole build, gently rocking all 12 of the boards that had to be etched.

This is a pretty specific case, but the idea of building temporary tools can be a valuable labor-reducing skill. Do you cobble together one-off machines to help you finish tedious tasks? Have a favorite contraption you have built to solve a simple problem like this? Chime in in the comments, and let us know!

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May 3, 2010

"The Data-Driven Life"

02Self-Measurement-T Ca2-Articlelarge
The Data-Driven Life @ NYTimes.com explores a group of people that aren't quite collectors, they're trackers...

Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions. Where was I last week at this time? How long have I had this pain in my knee? How much money do I typically spend in a day? These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut.
That is, some of us do. Others use data. A timer running on Robin Barooah’s computer tells him that he has been living in the United States for 8 years, 2 months and 10 days. At various times in his life, Barooah — a 38-year-old self-employed software designer from England who now lives in Oakland, Calif. — has also made careful records of his work, his sleep and his diet.

A few months ago, Barooah began to wean himself from coffee. His method was precise. He made a large cup of coffee and removed 20 milliliters weekly. This went on for more than four months, until barely a sip remained in the cup. He drank it and called himself cured. Unlike his previous attempts to quit, this time there were no headaches, no extreme cravings.

Ok makers, what are you tracking? What tech or gadget do you use to log daily activities, etc. Right now I'm using Runkeeper and/or Nike+ shoe fob for running, testing out a Wi-Fi scale and for awhile keeping track of time with a text file. In the refrigerator there's an Arduino keeping tracking of temperature and use (beta logger shield!).

Install Android 2.1 on G1 and MyTouch 3G

G1 and MyTouch users can now easily update to the latest Android 2.1 version of CyanogenMod using this handy video.

May 1, 2010

Auto-opening trash can made from Ikea junk

I like the sentiment behind this build by Ikea hacker mcquarris. Using a bunch of leftover parts from previous furniture acquisitions, they cobbled together this garbage can mount to hide a trash can under their sink, complete with lid that lifts when you open the cupboard. It reminds me of some contraptions I made when I was a kid, except with much better style. Well done!

April 30, 2010

Mailing yourself money to get out of paying taxes hack (doesn't work)

Pt 2864
I was just reading our post about the "hollow spy bolt" and ran across the government group with RSS feed that looks for stuff like this (cool job) - so it turns out mailing yourself money hidden inside brochures to get out of paying taxes hack doesn't work via ANIMAL.

[he]... withdrew cash from his Swiss account and taped it to the inside pages of multiple brochures, careful to include just under $10,000 per brochure (staying under the federal reporting requirements). Packaging the cash-laden brochures in envelopes, he mailed each one at different times from different Swiss post offices to his Virginia residence.

It's the "ICE team" that looks for things like this, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

ICE agents have discovered that cash - lots of it - can crop up in unexpected places before its illegal journey is intercepted. ICE has found the following and more in recent years:

$176,320 packed inside the pant legs of an air traveler headed for Turkey

$3 million hidden in a compartment of a bus headed for Mexico

$515,000 in a false-bottom suitcase about to embark to Columbia

$2.1 million concealed in a boat in Puerto Rico

$147,921 strapped underneath the shirt of a woman headed to Mexico

$186,000 rolled and concealed in cigarette packs destined for Turkey

"At ICE, we follow the money trail to identify, disrupt and dismantle the most complicated financial schemes and seize criminal assets,"...

G1 gamepad modded from Atari 7800 Joypad

If you just installed the latest Cyanogen beta and you're unsatisfied with the current game controller options available for the HTC G1/Dream, you might be interested in this mod. YouTube user MrTobiable uploaded the following video of what appears to be a European Atari 7800 Joypad grafted onto the keyboard of a HTC G1/Dream in landscape mode. [via /r/Android]

Joypad in situ:

April 26, 2010

Spinning RGB LED Ball II

Laserpointerforums member FireMyLaser built this most excellent Spinning RGB LED Ball II, using a bit of junk from his scrap pile and lots of ingenuity. He mentions that it uses a total of nine slip ring contacts, which is no mean feat considering that the whole thing was made by hand and spins at quite a fast speed. [Thanks, Matt!]

April 25, 2010

DIY 3D photography

Polish maker Michal Zalewski created this very detailed how-to on using a laser to 3D scan objects with the help of a nicely executed custom gearbox, then capturing the result using a digital camera.

More:

April 22, 2010

iPhone running Android OS

From the folks who brought us Linux on iPhone comes Android OS booting on iPhone. Master iPhone hacker planetbeing and crew have managed to dual-boot a 2G iPhone into what appears to be a mostly functional Android 1.6. The obvious hardware limitations aside, they've got Wi-Fi and GSM working on boot. It's still fairly recent, but it looks like it will become fairly solid sooner rather than later.

It's nice to know that there's an alternative upgrade path for the first generation hardware when Apple decides to drop support for the 2G. [via Gizmodo]

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