Science Projects

Laser cutter owners may find this online box design tool which [Jon] built quite useful. It’s got a few more joint options than the Inkscape box design add-on does. Apparently the US Navy has the ability to bring down drones in a flaming pile of laser-caused death. [Thanks Joshua] [Michail] has been working on a […]

Autodesk, MakerBot Join Forces. MakerBot and Autodesk, who are sharing a booth this weekend at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013, just announced a partnership deal involving the Replicator 2 and Autodesk’s 123D suite. Folks who purchase subscriptions to Autodesk’s 123D tools get a discount towards the purchase of a Rep2, and Autodesk has become an authorized reseller of the popular 3D printer. The “Autodesk edition” Replicator 2 also features custom face- and buildplates. Deets at Autodesk’s 123D site, below. Autodesk 123D Subscription Plans

One aspect of the Raspberry Pi that has always challenged us is the power supply. It was a great idea to power the board from a standard micro-USB port because economy of scale makes phone chargers (even in the 1A range necessary for stable operation of the RPi) cheap and easy to acquire. The thing we […]

Sending data from a microcontroller to a PC usually requires some sort of serial connection, either through fiddly on-chip USB, FTDI chips, or expensive radio ICs. [Scott] didn’t want to deal with this when creating a network of wireless temperature sensors, so he hacked up a few cheap 433 MHz radio transmitters and receivers to transmit data […]

Check out The Dogs of Late Night in 6 Seconds by insultcomicdog a short 6 second film for the Adafruit #adafruit6secs electronic film festival (Youtube playlist here for all the entries on YouTube).

For how awesome Google Voice is, we’re surprised we haven’t seen this before. [Steve] is using Google Voice to run commands on just about any Linux box. Google Voice doesn’t have an official API, and existing unofficial APIs weren’t up to snuff for [Steve]‘s project. He ended up writing his own that checks his unread […]

This isn’t an FPGA emulating Mario Bros., it’s an FPGA playing the game by analyzing the video and sending controller commands. It’s a final project for an engineering course. The ECE5760 Advanced FPGA course over at Cornell University that always provides entertainment for us every time the final projects are due. Developed by team members [Jeremy […]

There’s a Method to My Desk’s Madness @ NYTimes.com. Even the most modular, bland work space tends to succumb to the tastes or personality of its inhabitant. How can it not? The average office worker spends nearly six hours a day sitting at a desk. In the first of an occasional column, we take a close look at how successful people organize their work spaces. Their answers have been edited and condensed. Our founder and engineer, Ladyada, has her desk in this New York Times feature today!

Flickr: Maker Media’s Photostream. Some great ones in there!

If you program microcontrollers probably find yourself writing same functions over and over again. If you are smart enough, you simply write generalized functions that may be reused in other projects. But in many cases it happens that we write and forget. Here are several simple code snippets that may be useful in some cases. Some of the mare written by Rob Faludi with addition by Alasdair Allan. void blinkLED(byte targetPin, int numBlinks, int blinkRate) { for (int i=0; i The code snippets include blinking LED with predefined rate and duration, sounding buzzer at desired frequency and duration, checking free RAM, connecting to WiFi and working with EEPROM. Not much actually, but you are free to build up your own database and probably share with others.