When I was a kid, I read in a science book about how to make a directional compass. You magnetize a sewing needle and balance it on a cork floating in a bowl of water. Even today, this is the standard story. For example, How Stuff Works still says that this is how to make a compass. (There are a lot of other examples, too.) It turns out that it’s a whole lot easier than that. All you need is a really good magnet.
Continue reading Super-Easy Supermagnet Compass
Quartz Composer is an easy to use tool that lets you create amazing digital art, even interactive digital art, without writing a single line of code. You might already have it: Quartz Composer is included as part of developer tools package (Xcode) that comes with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. In this tutorial, I’ll show how to get started with Quartz Composer. No prior programming experience is required. As an example, we’ll build a video feedback screen saver that can take input from an iSight camera.
Continue reading Make a Video Feedback Screen Saver in Quartz Composer
Once upon a time, we lived in a small apartment. Things got worse once we got a washer and dryer, because the hookups were in the tiny kitchen. In order to allow for comfortable dining space for three, it turned out that we needed to position the table up against one corner of the room. If we had a rectangular dining table, then someone would always have to sit at the pointy end of the table. If we had a round or oblong table, it would also be rather awkward. The solution was to build a new (funny shaped) table from scratch. And as long as we’re building something, why not make it unique?
Continue reading Mixed-Media Mosaic Dining Table
Crispy wonton wrappers add cheerful crunch to an asian salad, but shouldn’t they be… more interesting? Presented here is the ideal upgrade. No more must you clutter your salad with amorphous crispies or chow mein noodles to obtain the requisite crunch: Crane Croutons will be your piece de resistance.
Continue reading Play with your food: Edible Origami. Crane croutons for your salad.
We set up the camera pointing at the hummingbird feeder on our front porch to try and take pictures of the birdies as they perched. But, holy smokes were we surprised to see a bird perch on a nearby vine and begin its performance, going through his checklist and pre-flight maintenance routine.
Embedded above, watch on YouTube or download the high-resolution Quicktime Version (3 MB).
This isn’t a time-lapse movie, this is real time.
Continue reading Video: Hummingbird preens like he means it.
You have one drywall screw, one 1.5 V alkaline cell, six inches of plain copper wire, one small neodymium disk magnet, and no other tools or supplies. You have 30 seconds to make an electric motor running in excess of ten thousand RPM. Can you do it? Surprisingly enough, you can.
Continue reading How to make the simplest electric motor
What is a good science project and turns really fast? An electric motor! I built an electric motor for my school science project in third grade. It was fun to build and got a lot of attention at the school’s science fair.
I was looking in a book for a science project idea when I saw instructions for building an electric motor. My parents approved the idea, so Windell and I went looking for parts.
Continue reading Building an Electric Motor
We’ve just posted a set of instructions on Instructables, showing how to cook papadums, a type of cracker-like bread that you get at Indian restaurants. Shown here: our serving suggestion.
We had a lot of fantastic entries in our supercapacitor contest! We now have a Grand Prize winner, two Second Prize winners, and a number of honorable mentions. A big thank you to everyone that submitted entries!
The Grand Prize (ten supercapacitors) goes to Stephen Kupiec, for his winning entry, “Supercap Project Luxeon V Throwie”:
A Luxeon V LED driven off of a LuxDrives 3021 buckpuck has been sporadically putting out a very short bright flash every 15-30 min on my desk startling coworkers. But it hasn’t been connected to power in over a month. The buckpuck has been harvesting power from 220 microfarad electrolytic capacitor which is in the circuit as a power line conditioner. Given a 1 farad supercap coupled with a very low (10000:1) duty cycle flasher circuit, a very distracting flasher could be made.
We selected this entry both for its originality, as well as for taking advantage of the low internal resistance of the supercaps.
Two second prize winners will get five caps each:
Chad Norman‘s entry is funny enough that it’s hard to read with a straight face:
Dress them up, adding little tiny bits of plasticine/playdough and dress them all up real purdy like. Then, using stop motion techniques, animate an epic saga of romance, death, intrigue and action with the supercapacitors as the actors.
From Mike Saz comes another very practical idea for using supercaps:
Mod your wireless mouse. They’ll soak up a day’s worth of juice in seconds, and you can stop buying AA’s, or worse, nicads.
Read on for the (long) list of honorable mentions!
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest: We Have Winners!
While we ponder the excellent selection of entries to the Supercapacitor Contest, it’s time that we do something far more important: look at pictures of baby animals. While we’re not Cute Overload, we do occasionally accumulate pictures of baby animals, and right now they’re burning holes in our proverbial pockets.
We might as well get this over with. Let’s start with the baby egrets:
