Author Archives: Kristina Panos

Bluetooth Photo Booth Gets Vetting at Wedding

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With just two weeks to go before his friends’ wedding, [gistnoesis] built a well-featured robotic photo booth. Using a Bluetooth PS3 controller, guests could move the camera around, take a picture, style it in one of several ways (or not), and print it out with a single button press.

The camera is mounted on a DIY 2-axis gimbal made from extruded aluminium and 3D-printed parts. It can be moved left/right with one joystick, and up/down with the other. [gistnoesis] set up a four-panel split-screen display that shows the live feed from the camera and a diagram for the controls. The …read more

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Lathe Turns the Corner, Makes a Cube

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[Tim] was tired of using his lathe to turn round things. He decided to make a gaming die—something that’s iconically square—out of cylindrical scrap. As it turns out, this is possible to do on a lathe with a three jaw chuck. [Tim] discovered that the bevel on the jaws will hold a cylindrical puck of scrap sideways while he squares off the round sides into faces.

Turning a cube on a lathe looks pretty fiddly, so we applaud [Tim]’s lovely handiwork even more. As you’ll see in the video down below, things were going gangbusters until he went to make …read more

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Pocket Woodwind MIDI Controller Helps You Carry a Tune

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It’s easy to become obsessed with music, especially once you start playing. You want to make music everywhere you go, which is completely impractical. Don’t believe me? See how long you can get away with whistling on the subway or drumming your hands on any number of bus surfaces before your fellow passengers revolt. There’s a better way, and that way is portable USB MIDI controllers.

[Johan] wanted a pocket-sized woodwind MIDI controller, but all the existing ones he found were too big and bulky to carry around. With little more than a Teensy and a pressure sensor, he created …read more

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Modern Technology for an Ancient Contest

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Certamen is a special class of  high school quiz bowl tournament that’s focused solely on the classics. No, not Austen and Dickens, the actual classics. All the questions are about stuff like ancient Greek and Roman civilization and culture, classical mythology, and the finer points of Latin grammar. Like any other quiz bowl, the contestants use buttons to buzz in and answer the questions.

To win at Certamen, a team needs more than just a vast working knowledge of classical antiquity. They also have to be fast on the buzzer. The best way to do that is to practice with …read more

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A Sandbox for DIY Pinball Design

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If you’ve always wanted to build your own pinball machine but have no idea where to start, this is the project for you. [Chris] is in the process of building a 3/4 size pinball table and is currently in the waiting-for-parts stage. As they arrive, he is testing them in a sandbox he built in an afternoon. Let [Chris]’s proving ground be your quick-start guide to all the ways you could approach the two most important parts of any pin: the flippers and targets.

The field of play is a sturdy piece of particle board, and the cardboard walls are …read more

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Go From Resin Caster to Resin Master

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When it comes to resin casting, time is of the essence. It helps to gather everything you’ll need and have it within reach before starting. But if you don’t know what you don’t know, it can be difficult to anticipate needs. Luckily, [Botzen Design] has a few tricks up his sleeve that will save time, materials, and sanity for novices and old hands alike.

It may seem somewhat obvious to mix up resin in a disposable or reusable plastic cup. But not all cups are created equal. Polypropylene cups won’t outgas into your resin, but polystyrene will. If you use …read more

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Evil Hotspot Costume Makes Valuable Connections

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This year for Hallowe’en, [Scott] went out dressed as a Comcast xfinity hotspot. Funny, yes, but there’s a deeper meaning here. [Scott] really went as a walking PSA that illustrates the dangers of making assumptions about the relative safety of WiFi networks based solely on their broadcast names.

[Scott] could have gone chaotic evil with this setup, but he didn’t. No one could actually get on the Internet through him. Inside the “hotspot” are a Wi-Fi adapter and a Pi Zero running a captive portal. It broadcasts the default ‘XFINITY’ and ‘xfinitywifi’ SSIDs, plus a bunch of other common network …read more

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Mendocino Motor Drives Cubicle Conversations

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Mendocino motors are solar-powered electric motors that rely on pseudo-levitation.  The levitation comes from magnets mounted on either end of the shaft, which repel same-field magnets fixed below them into the base.  When light shines on the solar panels, current flows through connected magnet wire windings, creating an electromagnetic field that interacts with a large stationary magnet mounted underneath. These constantly repelling forces spin the shaft, and the gaps between the solar panels provide the on-off cycle needed to make it spin 360°.

As [Konstantin] discovered, building this simple motor and getting it to spin depends on a lot of …read more

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DIY Multi-Touch All the Surfaces

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Ever wanted to build a touch table or other touch-input project, but got stuck figuring out the ‘touch’ part? [Jean Perardel] has your back with his multi-touch frame over on IO that makes any surface touch-reactive. In [Jean]’s case, that surface is ultimately a TV inside of a table.

Of course, it’s a bit of a misnomer to say the surface itself becomes touch-reactive. What’s really happening here is that [Jean] is using light triangulation to detect shadows and determine the coordinates of the shadow-casting object. Many barcode scanners and consumer-level document scanners use a contact image sensor (CIS) to …read more

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Why Wait? Just Plate Your Own PCB Vias

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[Jan Mrázek] is a pro when it comes to rolling his own PCBs. He can crank out a 6/6 mil double-sided PCB in 45 minutes flat. As a challenge to his prowess, he decided to experiment with plating through-hole PCBs at home, because sometimes you just can’t wait for China to deliver the goods.

The key here is to make a non-conductive surface—the walls of holes drilled in a sheet of copper clad–conductive. While there are some established ways of doing this at home, the chemicals are difficult to source. When his local supplier started stocking colloidal graphite paint, which …read more

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