MAKE Magazine

This PermaFLOW sink trap from PF Waterworks was featured in Popular Science's Best of What's New 2008. To be clear, I've neither owner nor use one of these, so I can't vouch for the quality of the product nor for its practical effectiveness. However, I admire the clever…… thinking that went into the design: the transparency lets you see at a glance how bad the clog is (or if your wedding...

106 years of flight... On this day in 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful sustained flights in an airplane—Orville first, gliding 120 feet (36.6 metres) through the air in 12 seconds. They gained the m……echanical skills essential for their success by working for years in their shop with printing presses, bicycles, motors, and other machinery....

Join me and fellow Make: Online contributor Sean Ragan this Friday for some LIVE 3D printing action using my MakerBot CupCake CNC machine. This will coincide with a Make: Projects 3D modeling tutorial using OpenSCAD, and will give you a chance to ask us questions about ……the models, the machine, and see it BZZTREEAAOOWWWing live in front of your very eyes....

When we asked some of our maker family what they had on their holiday wish lists, I-Wei Huang, aka Crabfu, responded with so many R/C vehicles (this...er-hurm.. grown man likes toys as much as I do!), we decided to make it into a mini, unofficial gift guide. Thanks, I-W……ei! And to all you fellow Peter Pans out there, enjoy! Beginner R/C E-flite Blade mCX ($120, E-flite) Indoor-only micro-coaxial (mCX) helicopter....

Instructable user incoherent, shared an intelligible explanation of his thorough PCB fabbing process along with a bit of background on how it came about. After experimenting with home PCB fabbing for a while, I've finally worked out a process that produces reasonably co……nsistent results that actually look pretty good. I spent lots of time trying to use the toner transfer method with varying degrees of success (OK, varying degrees of failure...

From the MAKE Flickr pool Another interesting project from Flickr member jiskar - he's developing a high-power LED light with adjustable color temperature. The goal of this project is to develop an energy efficient lighting system that not only produces light, but that…… produces light with a color and spectrum that actually has a positive influence one one's biological and mental state....

Interesting story on MSNBC about how the newer energy-efficient LED traffic lights are causing accidents because, unlike conventional incandescent traffic lights, they do not generate enough heat to keep themselves clear of snow, and thus can easily become obscured by i……t. I don't think anyone's saying LED traffic lights are a bad idea in general, but it is an interesting parable about thinking all the way through a problem from a...

Hundreds of makers all over the world have built compressed air rockets since we published the project in MAKE, Volume 15 (included in the kit). Now all the parts for making your own launcher and rockets are available in the Maker Shed! Just add a bicycle pump, masking ……tape, and two standard 9v batteries and you are ready to blast these paper and tape rockets hundreds of feet in the air! Tonight,...

Today, on O'Reilly Radar, Brady Forrest announced that Ignite, the popular five-minute presentation events that have spread from Seattle to cities across the US, is going planetary in 2010: This March, it gets much, much bigger. O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Glo……bal Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible....

Happy holidays from the Universe... Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our loca……l galactic neighborhood. The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region...

Recently, Ben Light, of BLight Design, did a workshop at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC on turning manila envelopes into stars to decorate holiday light strings. He has the star pattern and pics (as well as pics of the event) in his Flickr sets. Building Star Ligh……t Minis Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | ...

Our finely-wired friends at Solarbotics have released their latest Arduino kit, the Ardweeny, "the smallest Arduino you can build yourself with through-hole components." I love the backpack PCB concept which puts the support electronics for the ATmega328 chip on a board…… that stacks on top of the chip and is soldered to the chip's pins....

Howard Boys made this awesome steampunk-y camera body from soldered brass. The lens and shutter were purchased components. [Thanks, Billy!] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Photography | Digg this!...

This looks neat, a team of scientists from the Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University have figured out how to get bacteria to spin tiny gears. Though the gears themselves are small, the bacteria are even smaller, so apparently it takes hundreds of them ……swimming in swarms to produce enough energy to turn the gears....

Artist Andrew Salomone has a new take on the traditional gingerbread house: Abandonded Gingerbread House Building Sites is a site-specific project I made for my show, everything is as it seems to be, at The Space in Cork City [Ireland]. When the global economy unrav……elled last year the Irish countryside was left with a lot of empty, unsold, and unfinished housing estates....

Michael Mandiberg developed a kit for making your bike super visible to car headlights with retroreflective vinyl tape! It's easy to apply, looks fly, and comes in several colors. I did up my ride too, check it out above in normal light and below in flash (simulating he……adlights). The kit makes a great gift for your cycling friends and family members. Read more | Permalink | Comments | ...

Swedish artist Michael Johansson made this life-size dinghy "model kit" from a real boat and related equipment. The pieces of "TOYS'R'US," as it's called, are fastened together by a welded tubular frame and painted a uniform gray. Michael has done several of these 1:1 "……model" kits made from life-size original objects....

From the MAKE Flickr pool Fridgebuzzzzz's MK 1 MIDI controller reminds me of my Dad's old Gretsch Tennessean … but yaknow, in an elegant, future-y kind of way. the MK1 prototype is a user programmable midi controller featuring 32 LED pushbutton switches and 6 touch sen……sitive copper plate switches. an example user mapping would have the top row of twelve buttons be designated as major chords arranged in the cirle of fifths....

by Cameo Wood I opened my beekeeping store in downtown San Francisco in June, and I've found that everyone loves beekeepers or bees, and that beekeepers are serious makers. What they can't find to buy, they generally end up building. I've also been stocking my store wit……h the beekeeper in mind, and here are some of the top sellers, at my store and abroad! 8-Frame English Garden Hive If you're just getting started in...

Built by Associate Professor Yojiro Ishino of the Nagoya Institute of Technology, this giant camera took six months to build and has reportedly been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the camera with the record-holding highest number of lenses. It's abou……t 3 inches high and 18.5 inches across, and was built to study flames by capturing them simultaneously from as many angles as possible....

MAKE subscriber Michael C. Reilly writes -As a followup to our Geek Wreath from a few years ago, we decided to make a Geek Tree inspired by the velleman 3D tree kit. Construction was funded by our new company Neighborhood Workshop.Nice. Added bonus - looks like it can fold up and be stored flat for next year....

Researchers from Delft University of Technology have assembled inexpensive alternatives to costly scientific sensors using the Nintendo Wiimote. Luxemburg's team aimed the Wiimote at a problem that can be very tricky for hydrologists: measuring evaporation on a body ……of water. The easiest way to measure evaporation is to place pans of water near the lake, or whatever water is being studied, and put pressure sensors in them....

Kayla Kromer made this sweet Millenium Falcon bed - complete with stowaway compartments and headlights. Check out more pics in the Facebook photo gallery. [via Geekologie] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!...

This is my first circuit from the new Make: Electronics book! It's Experiment 33: Moving in steps from page 286. You might be asking why I chose the stepper circuit for my first project? The simple answer is, I like stepper motors and thought it would be fun. The book i……s filled with great illustrations, diagrams, and pictures, making all the projects very easy to understand and build....

Yep, that's right! The Maker Shed is offering FREE shipping on orders of $175 or more, and we guaranteed delivery for December 25th! What's the catch? Well, there are some stipulations. It's not to be combined with any other offer, and you must use coupon code ELF175 at…… checkout. Lastly, it's only for packages delivered in the continental US. But wait!...