#makers

Pico Bricks is a fantastic project development kit for STEM educators and makers of all levels

I've been a homeowner for about 20 years, and in that time I picked up a handful of DIY skills, but my work was always sloppy due to my limited experience. I was envious of uncles or neighbors with garages who could build or fix virtually anything as it seemed like having a superpower, like the kid in school who could solve any Rubik's cube.

A crank-driven automaton made from wood that endlessly types "I hope this email finds you well" on a laptop

Over the years, I’ve identified nine different ways to 3D print fabrics. In this article, I’m thrilled to share one with you: the lace method. If you’ve ever wanted to create intricate, detailed textiles that would take forever by hand, this technique is for you. Best of all, you just need a bit of 2D graphics know-how and access to vector software. I typically use Adobe Illustrator, but for this article, I’ll walk you through the steps using Affinity Designer’s free trial to keep things as accessible as possible.

If you were to walk into most of the world’s hackerspaces, it’s likely that the most frequent big-ticket tool you’ll find after a 3D printer is a laser cutter. A few years ago that would inevitably been one of the ubiquitous blue Chinese-made K40 machines, but here in 2024 it’s become common to see something far more sophisticated. For all that, many of us are still laser cutter noobs, and for us [Dominic Morrow] gave a talk at last summer’s EMF Camp in the UK entitled “Getting Started In Laser Cutting“. [Dominic] is a long-term laser cutting specialist who now works for Lightburn, so he’s ideally placed to deliver this subject.

Make it Yourself is a digital book that showcases this incredible talent, bringing together over 1000 useful DIY projects to demonstrate just what is possible when you make things yourself.

At PCC, we pride ourselves on exploring out-of-the-box ways to ignite a collaborative culture of innovation. At each of our campuses, we provide spaces outside the classroom for students and…

Highlight:At the entrance to the park was a sign that caught my eye. I’m fairly certain I have seen it in previous years, but this year it caught my attention enough to park itself in my brain. Lower Your Expectations I thought about that sign all weekend, joked on Slack about how to “win” it after the festival shuts down, and sketched some iterations of a desktop version while waiting for speakers to start. I wanted to be able to slide out the display board, so the toughest part was coming up with a retention mechanism. I did things like this in the past by sandwiching layers, but found tabbed guides to be a better way to achieve that in this form factor.

Your creation and a price → → a short link you can share to sell.

One dynamic that happens in a lot of idealist communities: we praise our opponents who make even a small step in our direction, but we attack our own mercilessly when they make even a small step away from us. It’s counter-productive.

One dynamic that happens in a lot of idealist communities: we praise our opponents who make even a small step in our direction, but we attack our own mercilessly when they make even a small step away from us. It’s counter-productive.

We can learn several crucial lessons from this diverse, creative group, and that understanding will allow us to encourage innovation. For some, the main impetus for DIY is that it provides an outlet from their daily grind: Many employees suffer the life of the cubicle-bound "knowledge worker." In his best-selling Shop Class As Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford argues that the elimination of industrial arts and home economics classes from public school curricula has left us dependent on machines that we don’t understand and frustrated by the outsourcing and off-shoring of production. We also derive little satisfaction from what we “produce” at work. We’ve become a nation of shoppers and consumers. DIY is a way to engage the physical things around us and create durable (and drinkable) objects. Based on informal conversations with other DIYers, some of these motivations include self-reliance, community-building, autonomy, independence from monopolies, an alternative to rampant consumerism, innate curiosity, and the desire to make something cool.

MakerBot has announced "MakerBot Playsets," a series of freely downloadable dollhouses, furnishings and dolls for your 3D printer. Whip up as pieces as needed, on demand, and amaze the wee ones (and compulsive hoarders) in your life.

"Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don't quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructions — but there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. It's about figuring out how things work and reworking them. Contraptions, machines, wildly mismatched objects working in harmony—this is the stuff of tinkering."

"Robert Harrison used his ingenuity and a collection of cheap parts worth just £500 to take the spectacular shots using a Canon camera which he launched 35km above the planet's surface."

"The assumption behind Transition Towns is that we’re reaching a convergence of three crises: 1) a moment when oil production can’t meet demand, forcing us to confront a future of dramatically lower energy use; 2) climate change, which requires a drastic reduction in carbon emissions; and 3) worldwide economic instability. The Transition Towns movement is all about preparing communities to retool for this future, and the 12-step program is an outline of how to do that."

"When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it."

"The new year could see new challenges to hardware reverse engineering."