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Nicely done, Modified easy bake oven. Jeri writes – Part of the home chip bath project, fiber optic manufacturing.
This was an attempt to make a small furnace that could be used for semiconductors and fusing fiber optics. It didn’t work so well, but it might be worth trying again in the future.
This is what Easy bake ovens were meant to do…
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Inspired by a heating pad they purchased, Windell and Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories show how to make a fake seven segment display. Using a carefully constructed plastic bezel, a potentiometer, and some regular LEDs, they were able to create a faux digital dial, with a way cooler color scheme than one would find on regular seven segment displays. Nice hack!
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Sunlight Labs, known for opening America’s government, had a problem when they recently moved facilities. Creating new keys for team members was becoming costly, so they figured out an alternative method of providing secure access using a WRT54GL, easily sourced components, and a trusty copy of Make: Electronics. [Thanks, Nicko!]
With the firmware installed, I was able to SSH into the router and perform some simple manipulations of the system’s GPIOs — General Purpose Input/Outputs. These connect to things like the system’s LEDs and switches, and can be controlled in software. I selected a GPIO that didn’t seem to be used by OpenWRT — it illuminates the “DMZ” LED on the front panel — and wrote a very simple script to control it. I could now flip a tiny light on and off from a network connection.
In the Maker Shed:
Make: Electronics
Our Price: $34.99
Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun and experiential way? Start working on some excellent projects as soon as you crack open this unique, hands-on book. Build the circuits first, then learn the theory behind them! With Make: Electronics, you’ll learn all of the basic components and important principles through a series of “learn by discovery” experiments. And you don’t need to know a thing about electricity to get started.
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Here’s an interesting idea by Kenyan maker Dominic Wanjihia. By taking the rim from a Sufuria cooking pot, flipping it upside down, and attaching it to a slightly smaller pot, he was able to more efficiently capture heat from a fire. The result should be that less fuel is required to cook a meal, which is both an economic and environmental win.
This might actually solve a problem that I’ve had at home. One of my cooking pots has small plastic handles on it’s sides instead of a single long one. So much heat escapes from my gas range around the side of the pot that it heats up the handles, making it difficult to pick up. Of course I could just use a pot with a different handle, however Dominic’s device makes me wonder if that heat would be better captured if the pot had an oversize bottom to completely cover the burner. Think it would work? Does anyone sell them? If not, I might have to break out the welder and do some experiments… [via afrigadget]
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The 50-cent word here is “steganography,” which per Wikipedia is “the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message.” You may have heard, for instance, that you can encode a hidden message in, say, an image file, in such a way that no one who wasn’t looking for it would know that it’s there.
Well, this morning Danger Room linked to a post at IEEE Spectrum to the effect that Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is particularly susceptible to steganographic hijinks. Wired’s David Pierce put it this way:
There’s only the smallest possible time for interception to happen since all data is stored locally rather than redirected through a central server. Plus, since so much data is being sent back and forth, large messages can be sent without causing any alarm. Unlike an image or video, which can be downloaded and analyzed at anytime, there’s no way to get at and store files sent with VoIP.
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Engadget disabled comments on their site because of the trolls, many other sites spend half their time battling people who chose to make others miserable – it’s what the web has become in many corners of netland. MAKE will always have a vibrant community and great comments, that’s a promise I know we can keep. We’re going to post our refined comment policy up in the next 24 hours or so (stay tuned for a great post from Gareth on this). From the start of MAKE, 5+ years ago now, we’ve actively encouraged great discussions and try to jump in to resolve issues in the MAKE comments — so far it’s worked out pretty well — MAKE is a safe place to post in the comments, it’s a safe place to post your projects.
But other places are not and never will be.
This is where “shutup.css” comes in. I just installed it and I love it. It just removes the comments on many sites so you can enjoy the content and not the poop-fest.
I’m not going to pick on any specific site out there, but I think it’s fair for me to say that I think the comments on some electronics-y related sites are pushing people away from sharing their projects lately. There are tons of great projects that make it to many of these sites, the editors do a great job with the sites and content, but there’s just too many people who are determined to make the comments an awful place. shutup.css is now installed, I visit these site more now, even in the few short hours I’ve been using it – they get the page views and I don’t need to accidentally glance at something awful. Eventually I think every site will work towards setting productive tones, it takes time and resources — not everyone has a community manager for their site(s) – until it gets better on some of the sites I frequent, I think I’ll use this comment blocker. shutup.css didn’t come with every site I visit in the list so I needed to edit it. The sites it includes are digg, slashdot, youtube, etc… For youtube, I was using the Feynman quote-comment-replacer, that worked well – but I like this “clean” web without comments even better.
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Micah Dowty is at it again, only this time he is hacking a digital bathroom scale rather than a sewing machine. Rather than taking the ‘easy’ route of just using the original electronics, and decoding what it output to the LCD display, he took the time to reverse engineer the analog components of the scale so that they could be interfaced directly. Nice project, and a fun read if you are interested in the process of reverse engineering things.
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If you redesign or remake gadgets for your own use, Sunyoung Kim and Eric Paulos want to hear from you.
Do you have any obsolete electronics that you remade or redesigned for difference purpose of use than originally designed? We want to hear about your experience of DIY remaking or redesigning of an obsolete electronics. Please share it with us for us to further research on sustainable design by completing the survey located at the website below:
http://www.wonderment.org/ewaste/ewaste.php
We are researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studying creative reuse of domestic e-waste for sustainability. This study is intended to explore the experience of green activists of how they reuse, redesign, and remanufacture their obsolete electronics for purposes than originally designed.
Pleo photo by Jeff Keyzer
More:
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Griffin I’Net has a nice story with pictures about hacking a Kindle DX to add Bluetooth support! [via RuutAckses]
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From the MAKE Flickr pool:
Flickr user rtadlock made this stylish panning timelapse camera using an old kitchen timer, and it came out beautifully!
If you need inspiration on how to make your own, check out the Time-lapse panning article in MAKE, Volume 15, page 159. Happy snapping!
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