Westport Mini Maker Faire is the first for Connecticut

April 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’re in Westport CT, or within day-trip distance, you might want to check out the Mini Maker Faire happening there this weekend. Being held at the Westport Library & Jesup Green, there are going to be several interesting planned events, on top of the usual gathering of makers and hackers. Local hackerspaces will be in attendance as well.

Some of the planned events include a battle of the home made bands, rube goldberg events, and jam sessions with the home made bands. Check out the guest speakers as well, there are a few names there that we would love to see.

Filed Under: news Tagged With: ,

Pinball Stomp: part1

April 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Despite my atrociously short attention span, I’ve always loved pinball. Maybe it is something about all the flashing lights and clunking solenoids. Maybe it is just the simple physics at the center of it all. I’m not really sure.  My kids, however, don’t share my enthusiasm. I suspect part of it is that they never wandered through a fog filled arcade in the middle of the night, hopped up on Reese’s Pieces with a shrinking pile of quarters in their pocket. The other part might be the fact that they have gotten used to the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox Kinect (we just got one last week).

Watching them jump up and down playing an extremely simple and repetitive game with the Kinect gave me an idea. I envisioned pinball projected on the side of my house, the kids jumping up and down in front of it to move the paddles. Keep reading to see how I plan to build it and what I’ve done so far. There’s a full video, but also text of the entire thing.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: classic hacks, featured, how-to, peripherals hacks, toy hacks Tagged With: ,

µPhone is small and home made

April 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Victor] popped up in the comments of yesterday’s DIy Cellphone to show off his own home made phone, the µPhone (google translated). [Victor] has put some effort into making this thing very compact. As you can see in the video after the break, he even left off the number pad to save space. Instead, you do everything by using a small joystick and two buttons. He claims that he really only calls a small number of people, so this layout works fine once he has programmed their contact information in.

For some reason none of the pictures are showing up in the extensive forum thread on the project. It is fun though, to follow along as he tries to get this thing working.

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Filed Under: cellphones hacks Tagged With:

Hackerspace Intro: Hackerspace.gr in Athens Greece

April 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is a fitting video to be the first of our Hackerspace introductions.  After our call for hackerspace tours yesterday, [Nikos] emailed us to let us know that their hackerspace already had a video ready. While this is more of a general video, explaining the idea behind hackerspaces, we do get to see a little bit of what is going on there. You can catch the video after the break (english subtitled), or head on over to their site to see what is going on at Hackerspace.gr in Athens Greece.

Though this video is very well made, yours doesn’t have to be. We don’t care if you are filming in your basement with 2 other members, showing off a couple projects, we want to see it! If you’re making a video for us, remember that we already know what a hackerspace is, so show us what you are doing!

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Filed Under: Hackerspaces Tagged With: , , ,

DIY cellphone

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here’s an interesting concept. Lets make a kit to build your own super simple cell phone. Thats basically what a group at the MIT media lab is proposing with this prototype. Consisting of an SM5100b GSM module and a 1.8″ 160×128 pixel LCD screen on a very basic board holding some buttons, this thing is pretty bare bones. Barely any features aside from sending/receiving calls. It does have caller ID though. At$150, it isn’t really that competitive compared to the phones you’d get from your provider, but it is just a prototype.

We particularly like the laser cut flex areas for the buttons on the front.

[Thanks Paul]

Filed Under: cellphones hacks Tagged With: , , ,

3 axis Accelerometer with LED bar displays

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Viktor] doesn’t remember why he started this project. He doesn’t know what he had in mind in the beginning, nor what the intended use was.He knows he wanted something interactive with blue LEDs.  What he ended up with, was a 3 axis Accelerometer with a pretty cool display that sits on his desk to amuse visitors.

Constructed using a PIC16F887 for the brains and a Freescale MM7361 3 axis  accelerometer, you can pull the schematics from his site. The code is available on demand as well.

[via HackedGadgets]

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Filed Under: hardware Tagged With:
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