We’ve featured our fair share of pinhole photography projects here at MAKE, and it’s no wonder. As complicated as cameras have become, it seems amazing that photos can be taken with something as simple as a tiny hole in a shoe box. But if you still yearn for all the creature comforts that a modern-day DSLR affords and you want to experiment with pinhole photography, you’re not out of luck. This quick hack turns your DSLR into a rather advanced pinhole camera.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.

You’ll need to use a spare camera body cap, which is normally meant for protecting the camera from foreign matter entering through the lens port when there’s no lens attached. If you always keep a lens on your SLR, you can use the body cap that came with your camera. But if you store your camera without a lens, you’ll probably want to pick up a spare. Luckily, they’re quite cheap. Simply cut a hole in the center of the body cap and tape a small piece of needle-pricked aluminum foil. The larger the hole is, the more light will hit your camera’s sensor. The tradeoff is that the picture will be more blurry.

What’s great about DSLR pinhole photography is that you can combine it more easily with other photography techniques such as HDR or timelapse for an interesting effect. And if your DSLR supports video, you can even shoot pinhole video. If you shoot any cool photos with your pinhole DSLR, share them with the rest of us! Post them to the MAKE Flickr pool.

Join us Wednesday evening for the fifth episode of Make: Live, our streaming show and tell!

Make: Live 05 – Kinetic Contraptions
Wednesday March 23rd, 9pm ET/6pm PT
Watch at makezine.com/live or on UStream
Please join us in the UStream chat or mark tweets with #makelive to interact live with the show.

We also give away a fabulous prize from Digi-Key to one chat member who can solve our photo challenge. We can’t wait to share some of the joy of making with you, live 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, on Make: Live.

Featuring the lovely and talented:

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – Tabletop Mechanical Pong
Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay show off their tabletop representation of the 1972 video game PONG. They challenged themselves to realize the properties of the game in a physical space using motors, solenoids, and other surplus parts. Discover the subtle nuances and smell the physics jokes by these prolific and delightful makers. Lenore and Windell are also on the MAKE technical advisory board.

Dustyn Roberts – Wind Lantern
Check out our visit with mechanical engineer and teacher Dustyn Roberts. She gives us a tour of the wind lantern, a turbine-powered LED mechanism and circuit from her book Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the preview video m4v, or watch clips from the show on YouTube.

Make: Live ep04is all about DIY Musical Instruments! Thanks to our fill-in cohost Collin Cunningham and guests Ranjit Bhatnagar and Pete Edwards.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download Make: Live episode 04 in its entirety (m4v), or watch clips on YouTube. Also check out the chat room transcript!

Ranjit Bhatnagar – Instrument-A-Day
Ranjit Bhatnagar devotes the month of February to creating a musical instrument every day, documented on his blog. He joins us in-studio with samples from this year’s instrument-a-day series including a laser-cut violin and corn cob sequencer music. Special thanks to guest violinist (and CRAFT contributor) Alaina Zulli for her pixel-perfect performance.

Pete Edwards – Circuit bending & synths
MAKE contributer Pete Edwards (of Casper Electronics) joins us via video chat to talk circuit bending and shows us his den of electronic creations in Troy, NY. Barbie karaoke machines, a glitched-out NES, and a demo of a simple technique to turn cheap toys into circuit-bent gold.

Show notes:

• Call for Makers for Bay Area Maker Faire ends March 14
• 8-bit violin design files on Thingiverse
• Corn music
• Digi-Key giveaway prize: Weller WES51 soldering station, LED multipack, 10x 555 timers, Resistor multipack, coincell batteries and holders, 2x solderless breadboards, jumper wires, and 3 evaldi headsets
• Photo challenge correct answer: BeatBearing Sequencer in MAKE v17
• Maker Shed deal: Take 15% off any of our awesome guitar kits by Saga. Electric guitars, bass guitars, mandolin, even a banjo. Check out with code MAKELIVE2 good through March 23rd 2011.

Next show:
Make: Live 05 – Mechanical Creations from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
Wednesday March 23rd, 9pm ET/6pm PT
Watch at makezine.com/live or on UStream
Please join us in the UStream chat or mark tweets with #makelive to interact live with the show.

Join us Wednesday evening for the third episode of Make: Live, our streaming show and tell! Collin Cunningham is filling in as cohost this week for Matt Richardson.

Make: Live 04 – DIY Musical Instruments
Wednesday March 9th, 9pm ET/6pm PT
Watch at makezine.com/live or on UStream
Please join us in the UStream chat or mark tweets with #makelive to interact live with the show.

We also give away a fabulous prize from Digi-Key to one chat member who can solve our photo challenge. We can’t wait to share some of the joy of making with you, live 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, on Make: Live.

Featuring the lovely and talented:

Ranjit Bhatnagar – Instrument-A-Day
Ranjit Bhatnagar devotes the month of February to creating a musical instrument every day, documented on his blog. He joins us in-studio with samples from this year’s instrument-a-day series including the 8-bit violin and mechanical synthesizer.

Pete Edwards – Circuit Bending

MAKE contributer Pete Edwards (of Casper Electronics) joins us via Skype to talk circuit bending and shows us some of his electronic creations.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the preview video m4v, or watch clips from the show on YouTube.

I’m happy to present the pilot episode of an upcoming weekly MAKE video called This Week in Hobby Robotics, a roundup of interesting things happening in the world of — what else — hobby robotics. It’s hosted by Frits Lyneborg and Rik (no last name, please). Frits (from Denmark), who works professionally in web concept development, is the creator of Letsmakerobots.com, a very popular international source for hobby roboticists. His cohost Rik (from Holland) is part of the team that runs Letsmakerobots.com and assists its online community. Rik says he gets friendly mocking from his friends for not making more robots, but shrugs it off. Some day he will make a robot to do the shrugging. Stay tuned for an announcement regarding the launch of this new series.

In true spirit, Make: Live is very much a DIY production. Instead of tripods, we use zip ties to mount webcams to chairs and we jury rig an old monitor to act as our prompter. Along those lines, I decided to create an on air light to indicate when we’re broadcasting. While I could have just wired a switch to a light fixture, I wanted to take the idea a step further. Using Ustream’s API, I set up our on air light to turn on automatically when we start broadcasting. This project was just for fun, but learning how to use the XBee Internet Gateway to get the Arduino online wirelessly will come in very handy for future projects.

Most of my networked projects have used an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield. For this one, I tried the XBee Internet Gateway, which is free ConnectPort software that allows XBee wireless radios to retrieve web pages. This allowed us to hang the light wherever we wanted without the need to run an Ethernet cable to it. Having an XBee Internet Gateway in my home also means that I can easily add wireless sensors and other internet-connected projects without filling up my router’s Ethernet ports.

This project serves as a good template for any kind of wireless notifier; it’s not just for Ustream. You could customize the project to indicate when your significant other is online, when you receive a new @ reply on twitter, or if rain is expected today. The Arduino and XBee Internet Gateway make a great pair for many internet-connected projects. To learn more about XBee mesh networks and the XBee Internet Gateway, Robert Faludi’s book, Building Wireless Sensor Networks is a great resource.

Check out the full project write-up over on Make: Projects:

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.

Many an experimenter, hacker, tinkerer, & maker have heeded the call of the mighty matrix – and it’s no mystery why. A small army of LEDs elegantly wired in grid formation would be difficult for anyone with an appreciation for electronics hardware to pass up – even after considering the sometimes daunting wiring job that stands as prerequisite to entry.

Needless to say, I had a lot of fun working with LED matrices for this installment of the Circuit Skills series. Many folks have published code for their matrix projects and it was great to be able to try some of them out. Breadboarding a two-color matrix did end up being a pretty tedious task – interested experimentors can pick up a one-color matrix kit from Jameco which should prove much easier to work with.

Oh, and I’ll be posting some of the adapted code used for this project, once I have a few kinks worked out – stay tuned.

In this episode of Tiny Yellow House for MAKE, host Derek “Deek” Diedricksen shows us one of his salvage uses for freebie pallet wood— an ultra-simple deck chair that cost him 89 cents (screws/nails) to build.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube.

There are lots of great projects you can build out of old pallets. Check out our woodworking series to learn the basics and find more project inspiration.

More:

• Tiny Yellow House: “Boxy Lady” vending cart microcabin
• Fold-down fort — Tiny Yellow House
• Deek’s Vermont cabin (Tiny Yellow House #5)
• Humble Homes, Simple Shacks… preview and giveaway
• Another Tiny Yellow House

When I was a kid, my grandmother had a charming wind up music box that plucked the tune “Edelweiss” when you opened the lid. I was so fascinated by the mechanics inside the little box that I had spent a lot of time watching the movement turn.

I decided I wanted to do a modern-day maker’s riff on the old mechanical music box. I asked around for some advice on how to do it and got a lot of great suggestions such as using an Arduino Wave Shield, an MP3 trigger board, or my favorite idea, one of those electronic musical greeting cards. But I happened upon a $6 knockoff MP3 player that started playing songs when you flipped a switch on the side. When I opened it up, I was delighted to see that I could easily stop and start the music by opening and closing the circuit between the battery and the MP3 player’s circuit board.

Using a snap action switch inside a cigar box, I was able to control the music by opening and closing the lid, just like with a mechanical music box. The main difference being that my MP3 player would start the song over again after closing and reopening the box, which didn’t bother me. I found a pair of cheap speakers that had a headphone jack so that I could easily plug them into the MP3 player.

I wanted to be able to access the MP3 player as a data drive and charge it up without awkwardly plugging a cable into the MP3 player directly, so I added a panel mount female USB B jack to the back of the box and plugged it into the MP3 player inside the box. Loading songs into the music box becomes a cinch when you just plug the USB cable from your computer into the back of the box and then drag the files to the drive.

The MP3 Music Box makes a great, customized gift for anyone. You can see in the video that I turned mine into a Wii Remote box and added 8-bit video game style music to it. You could add romantic music if you make the box for your partner for Valentines Day, or lullabies if you make it for a child’s nightstand. Whatever it is, there’s no doubt that this whimsical electronic music box will surprise and delight the recipient.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download Make: Live episode 02 in its entirety (m4v), or watch clips on YouTube.

Limor “Ladyada” Fried – Soldering demo with the Game of Life Kit
Solder sorceress and Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried joins us in-studio for a soldering demo featuring the Game of Life kit.

Marc deVinck – Electronic Merit Badge
Maker Shed product developer Marc deVinck developed the popular learn-to-solder badge you may have seen at Maker Faire, where you can learn to solder for $1 in the Maker Shed, then show off your new skill.

Show notes:

• Call to makers for Maker Faire Bay Area
• Electronics archive on the Make: Online
• MAKE vol 01 soldering primer
• MAKE vol 16 SMD soldering primer
• Conway’s game of life kit
• Learn to solder merit badge: Maker Shed product and how-to on Make: Projects
• soldering section on Make: Projects
• Maker Shed discount: 10% off Deluxe Toolkit, check out with code MAKELIVE (valid through February 23, 2011)