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I've been looking for an excuse to build one of these clever tamper-detecting switches for a long time. When a mystery critter recently started raiding the fresh catnip I grow outside as a treat for my indoors-only cat, I saw my opportunity. Sure, I could've bought or borrowed a commercial trail camera, or hacked a PIR motion detector circuit, or set up an IR webcam with software-level motion detection, but I've long been charmed by the simple low-tech design of the ball-in-cage switch. Here's how I did it.

More:

• Make: Projects — Camera trap kits
• Make: Projects — Secret chessboard compartment
• Make: Projects — Dead drop device

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One of our most-trafficked original tutorials over the past couple of years has been this simple trick for etching designs on glass bottles by using the label itself as a stencil. It's a quick, satisfying, inexpensive project that yields long-lasting results with common equipment. In the process of porting the original blog post to our new Make: Projects platform, I took the opportunity to revisit the idea, updating the old images and adding a couple of helpful details, all of which was refreshingly easy using the new interface. Check it out.

More:

• Make: Projects - Bottle cutting
• Make: Projects - Jam jar jet
• Make: Projects - Concrete planters

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Being a year-round cyclist in Minnesota, Frank Yost had a problem. "Car drivers can lock things up while running errands," he noticed, "so why should cyclists have to carry everything around with them?" And when Frank has a problem, he reaches for his pop-rivet gun.

So he designed and built this all-weather, lockable College Bike Trunk out of riveted sheet metal, and he shows you how to build it in MAKE Volume 23 and our new online projects site, Make: Projects. For shopping errands, it'll hold two gallons of milk with room to spare, or for our collegiate readers, an equivalent volume of barley pop. Built for northern winters, it's sealed with auto body putty and weatherstripped with inner-tube rubber.

Frank is a one-of-a-kind MAKE author who kicks it old school -- with no home computer, he takes his assignments by phone, and mails us his hand-drawn blueprints in a cardboard tube. It's always fun unrolling them to see what's he's cooked up next.

Frank also wrote our Retro R/C Racer project in MAKE Volume 11, a super stylish sheet-metal 1930s British Midget racer body grafted onto a modern R/C car. In that article, Frank provides a mini-primer on sheet metal modeling, from bending in a sheet metal brake, to tips on cutting, drilling, and riveting. You couldn't ask for a better guide to learn basic sheet metal skills.

From the pages of MAKE Volume 23:

MAKE Volume 23, Gadgets?
This special issue is devoted to machines that do delightful and surprising things. In it, we show you how to make a miniature electronic Whac-a-Mole arcade game, a tiny but mighty see-through audio amp, a magic mirror that contains an animated soothsayer, a self-balancing one-wheeled Gyrocar, and the Most Useless Machine (as seen on The Colbert Report!). Plus we go behind the scenes and show you how Intellectual Ventures made their incredible laser targeting mosquito zapper -- yes, it's real, and you wish you had one for your patio barbecue. All this and much, much more.

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Have you created an account on Make: Projects yet? Have you perused our growing library of projects, techniques, and primer articles? It includes original projects from us, projects from the magazine and Make: Online, and contributions from the greater maker community. Thanks to everyone who's contributed so far.

We need your involvement to make this site truly great. If you have an expertise in something, share your wisdom with us by fleshing out a topic area. If you have a project, please post it. And, after you build one of the projects on the site, hit the "I did it! Success!" button, and let us know what you learned via the Notes feature. And remember, you can amend projects, so if you've figured out a better way to do something, have better pictures, have variations on the project, submit them.

Here are a few of the projects we're excited about this week.

Projects from MAKE magazine and Make: Online

Geared Candleholder
Here's an elegant, all-aluminum candleholder with a movement containing three handmade gears. The drive gear or pinion on the left pushes two candle-bearing arms up and down on either side, and because of the different sizes of the gears, the candles move at different rates.

Polycube Puzzles from Dice
How to make solid polyominoes and other polycube puzzles using six-sided dice.

User-Contributed Projects

Mousetrap Powered Car
In this project, we'll use the energy that a torsion spring can store to power a small car with laser-cut wheels.

Techniques and Primers

Importing Parts Files into Alibre Design

An exciting feature of some 3D modeling programs is that you can create assembly files that include multiple parts, and relate the parts to each other just like they relate to each other in real life. This allows you to move parts around on the screen to mimic their real functions, and make sure the pieces don't jam into each other when they move so there's plenty of space for the range of motion you want. This piece shows you how to import a CAD part file into an assembly file using Alibre Design.

A special virtual merit badge goes to Dustyn Roberts this week. She uploaded the "Mousetrap Car" project and the "Importing Parts Files" technique, featured above, and a making gears how-to. Thanks, Dustyn!

Sign up and get crackin' and hackin' at Make: Projects.

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