Maker Ben Saks of KinetiGear is crowdfunding BoXZY , a desktop fabricator bringing micromanufacturing to the masses. Users can shape wood, plastics, and many metals using most commercial CAM programs. Read the rest
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BoXZY all-in-one 3D printer, CNC mill, & laser engraver
In this talk from Maker Faire New York, Bunnie Huang of Chibitronics gives an amazing run-down of the on-the-ground reality of having electronics manufactured in Shenzhen, China. It’s a wild 30 minutes, covering everything from choosing a supplier to coping with squat toilets and the special horrors awaiting vegetarians in the Pearl River Delta. There are some dropouts at the start of the video that you’ll need to scroll past, but it’s well worth the hassle. Getting it Made: Stories from Shenzhen ( via Make )
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Bunnie Huang explains the nuts-and-bolts of getting stuff made in Shenzhen
Anthill Art fills ant colonies with molten aluminum, creating massive, intricate castings of the architecture of the ants’ nests. They’re for sale on Ebay (surprisingly cheap, too), and they’re spectacular. I make casts of ant colonies using molten aluminum to fill the tunnels and chambers of the nest. The result is an amazing sculpture showing the intricate detail of the nest architecture. The cast is then mounted for display on a wood base. Each display has a stainless steel plaque mounted on it with information on the cast and a unique cast number. These make perfect displays for a home or as an educational piece for teachers and professors to display in a science classroom or laboratory. Anthill Art – Artistic and Educational Ant Colony Castings ( Thanks, Fipi Lele! )
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Aluminum castings of ant-nests
Noah Swartz writes, “Jie Qi from the MIT Media Lab and Bunnie Huang of Hacking the Xbox fame have teamed up to make LED stickers! Using adhesive copper tape you can turn any notebook into a fantastical light up circuit sketchbook. I got to play with them myself at FOO Camp and they’re as easy to use as the look, and in the time since Ji and Bunnie have gone back to the lab and made a number of sensor and controller stickerss that give you loads of options of what to make. They’re running a fundraiser to do a big production run of these over at Crowdsupply, and while they have funding I’m sure lots of people will be kicking themselves if they don’t manage to grab some of these while they can.” Circuit Stickers ( Thanks, Noah! )
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LED stickers: turn your notebook into a lightshow
Fiber Fix is a repair-tape impregnated with fast-curing, moisture-activated resin; the manufacturer claims it hardens to a strength 100 times that of duct-tape, comparable to steel. Baseline room-humidity is generally enough to activate it once it’s removed from its airtight pouch, but you can also soak it before applying. It cures to usability in 10 minutes, and fully sets in 24 hours. It’s $20 for three rolls in varying widths — though be careful, as it’s reportedly a real pain to get off your hands. Fiber Fix [Amazon] Fiberfix.com ( via Oh Gizmo )
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Fiber Fix: repair tape with embedded super-strong, fast-curing resin
Justin Engler and Paul Vines will demo a robot called the Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher (R2B2) at Defcon; it can work its way through every numeric screen-lock Android password in 19 hours.
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PIN-punching $200 robot can brute force every Android numeric screen-password in 19 hours
The Sikorsky prize for human-powered helicopters has been claimed by a Kickstarter-funded startup called Aerovelo. Aerovelo’s founders, Canadians Todd Reichert and Cameron Robertson, won the $250, 000 purse for the 30-second flight of Atlas, a huge quadrotor with a bike in the middle whose flight is an absolute marvel to behold.
Rich Lee, a “grinder” (someone who has surgical enhancements and/or modifications conducted upon their person), implanted a magnet in his ear that he can use as a speaker; he wears a coil on a necklace that he can use to transmit to it (he was inspired by this Instructable ), and is now branching out into some serious experimentation: Listening to music is nice and probably the most obvious answer, but I intend to do some very creative things with it. The implant itself is completely undetectable to the naked eye. The device & coil necklace are are easily concealed under my shirt so nobody can really see it. I can see myself using it with the gps on my smartphone to navigate city streets on foot. I plan to hook it up to a directional mic of some sort (possibly disguised as a shirt button or something) so I can hear conversations across a room. Having a mic hooked up to it and routed through my phone would be handy. You could use a simple voice stress analysis app to detect when people might be lying to you. Not to say that is a hard science, but I’m sure it could come in handy at the poker table or to pre-screen business clients. I have a contact mic that allows you to hear through walls. That might be my next implant actually. He also wants to hook it up to an ultrasonic rangefinder and learn to echolocate. He’s going blind, so being able to use his hearing for physical nav is going to be important to him. He also wants to hook it up to a Geiger counter. DIY Headphone Implant ( via M1k3y )
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Implanted invisible headphone
Matt sez, “Maya Weinstein is an artist who just finished her MFA at Parsons, with the awesomest thesis ever: a DIY kit for making your own High-Fructose Corn Syrup , the industrial sweetener that is, well, let’s say problematic these days. “Amazingly, HFCS is not available for consumers to buy, and as Weinstein discovered, making it yourself requires some pretty unusual (and expensive) components, like Glucose Isomerase. But it’s a totally fascinating process, and only the first in what Weinstein hopes will be a series of ‘citizen food science’ kits.” DIY High-Fructose Corn Syrup by Artist Maya Weinstein
Cary Walkin , an accountant in Toronto, knows a thing or two about Excel. So great is his expertise that he was able to create a full-fledged RPG inside of its scripting environment, called Arena.Xlsm. I couldn’t get it to run in LibreOffice, but it sounds like it’s very featurful and fun, provided that you’re willing to use Microsoft products: * Random enemies: Over 2000 possible enemies with different AI abilities. * Random items: 39 item modifiers result in over 1000 possible item combinations and attributes. * An interesting story with 4 different endings depending on how the player has played the game. * 8 boss encounters, each with their own tactics. * 4 pre-programmed arenas followed by procedurally generated arenas. Each play-through has its own challenges. * 31 Spells. There are many different strategies for success. * 15 Unique items. Unique items have special properties and can only drop from specific enemies. * 36 Achievements. * This is all in a Microsoft Excel workbook. Arena.Xlsm Released! ( via Digg )
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RPG inside an Excel workbook