- Rings of the Jawbreaker [via]
- ROV rescues Marlin
- Red Sea Urchins live a long time
- Urban art warning sign
- DIY outdoor cat table for your small apartment balcony
- Do you know what’s inside a digital bathroom scale?
- Amazing glass stairs
- Create a simple game in Processing
- DIY 7-segment RGB
- We suspect that this cat-oriented homing device could have other interesting applications
- Photos from the scary world of municipal wiring
- Perfectly executed Michelangelo-Nintendo mashup
All posts by Lenore Edman
A scarf to aid your search for terrestrial intelligence
The Arecibo Message, one of the most famous messages transmitted as part of SETI, loosely translated, says: “Hi! We’re intelligent! We’re made of meat! Here’s where we live!” Binary designs like the Arecibo message are popular with knitters and cross-stitchers since they can be pixelated easily. We found a pair of fingerless gloves, based on a muffler pattern. We think this type of binary pattern would be good for the message as well. It has also been made into a cross-stitched bookmark. We implemented the embroidered pixels as columns of satin stitching in a single color. The original binary message didn’t have any of the color coding that people have added to help explain it, and it seems more elegant to keep it this way. We machine embroidered the pattern on both ends of a piece of linen about 14″ x 76″. The linen is then sewn together on the back and at the ends, and turned right side out. The edges are stitched down to help it lie flat.
The embroidery design is about 3.5″ x 11.5″. We’re providing a couple of different embroidery formats for those with access to machines as well as a .pdf for cross stitch, hand embroidery, laser engraving, or whatever else you can think to do with it.
If you are inspired by the message or use one of the patterns, we’d love to see the results in the flickr auxiliary.
Young Makers at the Exploratorium
February 27th: Wearables & Soft Circuitry — Adrian Freed March 27th: Make Your Own Kind of Music — Walter Kitundu and Krys Bobrowski April 24th: Motors & Mechanisms — Brad Prether and Ernie Fosselius Update: Dale Dougherty posted an article about the event here.
Asteroids (the edible kind)
Marmalade is way easier than it looks
While trying to figure out what to do with about 75 pounds of fruit that our citrus trees bestowed upon us in January, we came across an interesting fact: marmalade is really easy to make. People of older generations may know this already, but so far as we knew, marmalade was one of those mysterious things that strictly comes from a jar. It turns out that all you need is citrus fruit, water, sugar and some time on the stovetop.
MakerBeam is here!
Woo-hoo! We got a box of MakerBeam to keep us busy through the long dark winter evenings. For more info, see their kickstarter page, and the google group. They’ve been busy actually getting stuff made, so we’ll forgive them for not updating much lately.
The beam cross section is shown here with an LED for scale.
ComBots Cup IV this weekend!
Come join us at the ComBots Cup at the San Mateo Fairgrounds on Saturday, December 19 and Sunday, December 20 from 2-7 pm. (Get tickets here.) And if taking your loved ones to see combat robotics wasn’t gift enough, you can do a little last minute holiday shopping without having to brave the mall! We’ll have a selection of kits (and a few robot repair parts) on hand. You can try out Meggy Jr RGB and see the new Bulbdial Clock in person.
Read more about the event at Suicide Bots. Special treat for our readers who attend: mention this post and we’ll give you an RGB LED in your choice of style. Hope to see you there!Deck the halls with fine components
Ever since our wine charm project, we’ve been amassing an ever-growing collection of interesting-looking electronic components. It turns out that they happen to make pretty good Christmas tree ornaments.
Typographic Character Coasters
A simple design project for font lovers: Single-character typographic coasters.
Refining Edge-Lit Holiday Cards
We’ve picked up a bunch of improvements on our Edge-Lit Holiday Cards since last year and we’ve collected them here for you to see. (Also, welcome Popular Science readers! This project is mentioned in the December 2009 issue.)
