My Instructable tutorial shows how to make your own notebooks which can save you lots of money, if you often purchase Field Note and Moleskine notebooks. Also, this tutorial gives you the basic structure of a notebook that you can personalize and make in an infinite number of ways with your choice of the cover materials, inner paper and type of string.
One of the more interesting projects I saw at Maker Faire was the Key Glove, a wearable, wireless, open-source input device. When wearing the glove, you can type with just one hand, and it’s developed with handicapped users in mind. You can see it in action in this video:
I took quite a few other photos while I was at the Faire, and you can see them all on my Flickr account here.
Here are two photos of the notes we took during the tutorial-overview class!
Design Sponge is a go-to website for inspiration, design projects, and interior design ideas. It does a great job of posting just enough of each post “above the fold” with all of the project details and how to’s after the jump. This tutorial shows how to turn an old barrel into a stepped planter. It has great photos, especially detail photos of the wood working. The descriptions are short and sweet, except for a few detailed explanations of the wood cutting that are very helpful for inexperienced wood workers.
I Still Love You’s tutorials have wonderful, bright photos and short, easy to follow directions. I really like her tutorial on how to make stamps. She covers just enough of a topic to keep it interesting, without loosing any readers to the length of the blog post. I also love the design of her blog!
Young House Love has tons of tutorials on all aspects of decorating, clean living and home repair. I chose this tutorial because of how comprehensive it is and its great photos. There’s a good balance of text to photos, and it’s easy to follow. I like how they describe their thought process too and alternative ways to make the lamp. The only downside is that this post is a little long for the final product; they could have gotten the same teaching results with fewer explanations.
I was truly floored by this book concept, originally seen on Adafruit’s blog here. Using an Arduino, this artist created a new way to combine a book and computer into one experience. The video does a great job illustrating the entire process from sketch through final interface. I love the idea of a physical, printed book being connected and controlling a digital interface, and one that is so beautifully made.
I’ve been writing a lot of code the past few days, and I finally got the LED to light up when I have email! Above is a photo of my components and some of my coding notes. I’m currently working on the code for the stepper motor, and will attach it to the bread board later today.
The main tutorial that’s been very helpful is this email notifier. I’ve taken their approach, but added extra code for determining how many emails there are and if that number is different from the previous count.
At first I was a little skeptical at how I could make something so digital into an edible experience. I did some research on different email notifiers and found that they are usually audible, distracting and annoying, and they only indicate and email received without incentivizing the reading of emails. I decided to remedy these issues by creating a fun, bright, incentive system for reading your emails.
My concept was for an M&M to drop into a glass every time an email is received, and the M&Ms are “released” to you once you have read all the emails. I drew inspiration from other DIY candy dispensers, especially this one, but decided to design my own acrylic candy stand. I designed the stand around a repurposed wine bottle and laser cut it out of acrylic so the bright colored M&Ms are visible throughout the spinning. The stand is adhered together by silicon sealer, for a solid attachment with some flexibility and give.
If this was a fully-functional unit, the white box would be a servo, to rotate the wheel, and it would connect to the circuit board that is programmed to relay when an email is sent and read. My goal is to make this unit fully functional once I’ve learned the necessary skills.
I also made a stop-motion video of the email notifier working. This video is my first time making and editing a stop-motion, so I used a few different tutorials to learn how to make one. I got a general idea of how to do stop-motion at this Instructables website: http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-Motion-3/. I used iMovie to make the video, and this youtube video was the most helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipE3nCjI0IU. The final tutorial I used helped me with the music on the video: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=596923.
