Wattcher, twittering Kill A Watt plans posted

kill-a-watt

You probably saw [Phillip Torrone] and [Limor Fried]‘s twittering Kill A Watt earlier this week. It was an entry in the Core77/Greener Gadgets Design Competition. We saw a little bit about how it was assembled, but now they’ve posted a full guide to assembling the hardware. Each Kill A Watt gets an XBee radio that transmits back to … Read the rest

Tiny projector teardown

projector

The team from Tech-On has taken the time to teardown two interesting microprojectors. The first model they tackled was the Optoma PK101. It’s based around a digital micromirror device (DMD) like those used in DLP. Separate high intensity red, green, and blue LEDs provide the light source. A fly-eye style lens reduces variations between images. They noted … Read the rest

Make: television premiering today

maketv

Make’s television series will be premiering on public television across the US over the next couple days. If it’s not showing in your area, you aren’t out of luck. All of the segments from the first episode have already been published online at makezine.tv.… Read the rest

Make: The Resistor

Embedded above is a short segment produced by Make about one of our most fundamental circuit components: the resistor. Although brief at just five minutes, it covers resistor basics and the historical development of Ohm’s law.… Read the rest

Arduino buyers guide and the Seeeduino

seeeduino

Make has assembled a buyers guide for the many different types of Arduino devices. The Arduino is an open hardware platform designed to make prototyping easily accessible. The design allows for other people to modify, expand, and improve on the base, and many people have started producing their own versions. The guide features a lot of the hardware we’ve covered … Read the rest

SketchUp adds dynamic components

Google just announced the release of SketchUp 7. SketchUp is a 3D modeling program with a fairly robust free version. They’ve added quite a few features and the one that caught our eye in particular was dynamic components. Dynamic components have behavior specific to the object. The example in the video above shows a staircase changing the number of … Read the rest

Dean Kamen’s Stirling engine car

kamen_car

[Dean Kamen]‘s company, the people behind the Segway, have created a hybrid car that uses a Stirling engine instead of a standard internal combustion engine. Stirling engines are closed cycle, meaning heat is applied to the outside of the cylinder walls. They are generally more efficient than standard car engines, but haven’t been used much outside of industrial applications. We … Read the rest