Collaborate Disseminate
If there’s any one thing that the average hacker is short on at a given moment (besides chips), it’s transient small part storage. Just as new projects are built from …read more Continue reading Bottoms Up: Soda Can Help with Almost Any Project
Aren’t ball races and marble runs fun? Wouldn’t they be so much more enjoyable if you didn’t have to climb back up the ladder each time, as it were, and …read more Continue reading Sisyphean Ball Race Robot Toils Gracefully, Magnetically
Today, prostheses and exoskeletons are controlled using electromyography. In other words, by recording the electrical activity in muscles as they contract. It’s neither intuitive nor human-like, and it really only …read more Continue reading Magnets Could Give Prosthetic Control a Leg Up
Timepieces are cool no matter how simplistic or granular they are. Sometimes its nice not to know exactly what time it is down to the second, and most of the really beautiful clocks are simple as can be. If you didn’t know this was a clock, it would still be …read more
Continue reading Minimalist Magnetic Minute Minder Mesmerizes
How do you prototype e-textiles? Any way you can that doesn’t drive you insane or waste precious conductive thread. We can’t imagine an easier way to breadboard wearables than this appropriately-named ThreadBoard.
If you’ve never played around with e-textiles, they can be quite fiddly to prototype. Of course, copper wires …read more
Here’s your quick and dirty hack for the day. Sometimes you just need something that will work for what you’re trying to do, and you don’t want to go through the motions of doing what’s prescribed. When this happens, it’s a cheap, disposable tool that fits the bill. No, we’re not talking about Harbor Freight—we mean those need-driven tools you make yourself that get the job done without fuss. If you’re really lucky, you can use them a couple of times before they break.
This is one of those tools. [Jake’s Workshop] wanted to be able to quickly tack a …read more
What if you could unlock a door with your shirtsleeve, or code a secret message into your tie? This could soon be a thing, because researchers at the University of Washington have created a fabric that can store data without any electronics whatsoever. The fabric can be washed, dried, and even ironed without losing data. Oh, and it’s way cheaper than RFID.
By harnessing the ferromagnetic properties of conductive thread, [Justin Chen] and [Shyam Gollakota] have proved the ability to store bit strings and 2D images through magnetization. The team used an embroidery machine to lay down thread in dense …read more
Continue reading Your Next Wearable May Not Need Electricity
There’s a trick in the world of plastic enclosures. The threaded insert is a small cylinder of metal with threads on the inside and a rough edge on the outside. To make a plastic part with a hole for securely connecting bolts that can be repeatedly screwed without destroying the plastic, you take the threaded insert and press it (usually with the help of a soldering iron to heat the insert) into a hole that’s slightly smaller than the insert. The heat melts the plastic a little bit and allows for the insert to go inside. Then when it cools …read more
Continue reading Fail of The Week — Accidental Demagnetization
