Author: Navarre Bartz

222 Articles

A black guitar with red rings on its body is held by a man in a black shirt. Text pointing to the red ring of guitar picks says, "This spins."

1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar

August 6, 2024 by 1 Comment

String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks?

[Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks and working up through various 3D printed multi-picks he tests all the feasible combinations of handheld picks.

After that, he switches gears to a fishing rod-actuated system of several picks in a ring. Not pleased with the initial acoustics of the picks in this system, he switched to printing his picks in a more flexible filament to better approximate the characteristics of the human thumb. Finally, he takes us to the undiscovered country of a spinning ring of 1000 picks strumming the underside of the strings and the… interesting acoustic result. As many pointed out in the comments, this blurs the line between a guitar and a hurdy gurdy.

If you want more melodic musical mischief, perhaps try this optical guitar pickup, a $30 guitar build, or get fancy with a 3D printed violin?

Continue reading “1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar” →

A rough cut piece of wood sits on a workbench. A light and a tumbleweed are mounted on top so that the light shines through the tumbleweed. A woman in a ball cap and white tank top is crouched in the background smiling.

Cisco Ball Is The Tumbleweed Opposite Of A Disco Ball

August 5, 2024 by 8 Comments

Inspiration can strike a maker at any moment. For [Laura Kampf], it happened in the desert when she saw a tumbleweed.

Tumbleweeds roll through the western United States, hitting cars on the interstate and providing some background motion for westerns. [Kampf] found the plant’s intricate, prickly structure mesmerizing, and decided to turn it into a piece of contemplative kinetic art.

[Kampf] attached the tumbleweed to a piece of wood using epoxy and mounted it to what appears to be a worm drive motor nestled inside an interestingly-shaped piece of wood. As the tumbleweed turns, a light shines through it to project a changing shadow on the wall to “create silence, it creates calmness, it takes away from the noise that surrounds it.” While [Kampf] has some work to do to get the sculpture to its finished state, we can get behind her mantra, “The most important thing about the phase of execution is to get started.”

Are you looking for some projects of your own to help you find calm? How about some ambient lighting, a sand drawing table, or a music player that keeps things simple?

Continue reading “Cisco Ball Is The Tumbleweed Opposite Of A Disco Ball” →

Bright green shelving units suspended with silver hardware from a black frame. They are against a dark wooden wall.

Sliding Shelves Supersize Storage

August 2, 2024 by 23 Comments

Organizing things in your home or workshop is a constant battle for some of us. Until we have access to a Tardis or bag of holding, maybe the next best thing is a sliding shelf system.

[HAXMAN] found a great set of sliding shelves online, but after recovering from sticker shock decided he could build something similar for much less. The frame for the shelving was built from 4×4 posts, some 2x4s, and strut channel track welded to steel 2x6s. Aluminum plates bolted to strut trolleys support the weight of the shelving units he built from plywood.

Everything was painted with a multi-material paint formulated for covering both wood and metal so everything has a uniform appearance. We love the bright shelving offset by the more classic black appearance of the rack. Just because its storage, doesn’t mean it has to look boring!

Looking for more clever storage solutions? You might like your to make your own shadow boards, favor Gridfinity, or just wonder what other readers do to organize their electronic odds and ends.
Continue reading “Sliding Shelves Supersize Storage” →

A circular concrete pond in a garden. A small round fountain jets water out in the center and a solar panel and control box are visible attached to the end of the pond opposite the camera. On the top left is the text, "3D printed, Solar powered, and Arduino controlled" in yellow

Solar Fountain Aerates Garden Pond

August 2, 2024 by 8 Comments

Sometimes off-the-shelf solutions to a problem don’t meet your expectations. That’s what led [TomGoff] to build his own solar pond fountain.

This build features a lot of creative reuse of materials [TomGoff] already had on hand, like the end of a cable reel for the platform and a wheelbarrow inner tube for flotation. A 3D printed nozzle in the center of this apparatus is attached to a 12 V water pump and the whole thing is controlled by an Arduino running 30 seconds on and 3 minutes off to conserve battery power.

A hand-built perfboard contains a light dependent resistor (LDR) to tell the Arduino not to run at night, the relay for the pump, and a battery charge monitor. Be sure to check out the full write-up to see the video of the Tinkercad electronics simulation as well as the code. A 20 W solar panel keeps the whole thing charged so you don’t have to run mains power out to your pond.

If you need more solar projects for your garden, how about this Charmander lamp or a solar powered irrigation system?

Continue reading “Solar Fountain Aerates Garden Pond” →

An odd looking apparatus for cleaning floppy disks. A neon green disk tray is suspended on metal linear rails in a vertical orientation. It can move back and forth through a set of cleaning heads and a set of drying fans. There are some control buttons on the font as well as a string of addressable LEDs and two speakers.

Rube Goldberg Floppy Disk Cleaner

August 2, 2024 by 6 Comments

Floppies were once the standard method of information exchange, but decades of storage can render them unreadable, especially if mold sets in. [Rob Smith] wanted to clean some floppies in style and made a Disco Rube Goldberg-Style device for the job.

Starting with a disk caddy on linear rails, [Smith] has a track for the floppy to follow. First it goes through a set of pads with cleaning solution on them, and is then dried off with heating elements. To make it more fun, the device has LEDs and a set of speakers at the bottom to treat the disk to a more complete car wash-esque experience.

Cotton swabs and a cleaning solution are all you really need to do the job by hand, but if you have a lot of floppies, that can get tedious quickly. [Smith] compares his machine’s performance to doing it by hand with both IPA and a dish soap solution showing that his machine does indeed clean the disks and usually makes them more readable than they were before. He cautions that it might be best to make multiple copies of the disk during the cleaning process as it isn’t always constructive though.

Thinking about archiving that stack of floppies under your workbench? While Linux doesn’t support the drives anymore, we’ve covered a couple different methods in the past and the importance of reading the flux.

Continue reading “Rube Goldberg Floppy Disk Cleaner” →

A finger points at a diagram of a battery with two green bars. Above it is another battery with four smaller green bars with a similar area to the first battery's two. The bottom batter is next to a blue box with a blue wave emanating from it and the top battery has a red box with a red wave emanating from it. Below the red wave is written "2x wavelength" and below the top battery is "1/2 energy in a photon."

What Are Photons, Anyway?

August 1, 2024 by 33 Comments

Photons are particles of light, or waves, or something like that, right? [Mithuna Yoganathan] explains this conundrum in more detail than you probably got in your high school physics class.

While quantum physics has been around for over a century, it can still be a bit tricky to wrap one’s head around since some of the behaviors of energy and matter at such a small scale aren’t what we’d expect based on our day-to-day experiences. In classical optics, for instance, a brighter light has more energy, and a greater amplitude of its electromagnetic wave. But, when it comes to ejecting an electron from a material via the photoelectric effect, if your wavelength of light is above a certain threshold (bigger wavelengths are less energetic), then nothing happens no matter how bright the light is.

Scientists pondered this for some time until the early 20th Century when Max Planck and Albert Einstein theorized that electromagnetic waves could only release energy in packets of energy, or photons. These quanta can be approximated as particles, but as [Yoganathan] explains, that’s not exactly what’s happening. Despite taking a few classes in quantum mechanics, I still learned something from this video myself. I definitely appreciate her including a failed experiment as anyone who has worked in a lab knows happens all the time. Science is never as tidy as it’s portrayed on TV.

If you want to do some quantum mechanics experiments at home (hopefully with more luck than [Yoganathan]), then how about trying to measure Planck’s Constant with a multimeter or LEGO? If you’re wondering how you might better explain electromagnetism to others, maybe this museum exhibit will be inspiring.

Continue reading “What Are Photons, Anyway?” →

A painted RC plane made of cardboard. It has an orange propeller and camo-esque markings along with concentric blue, white, and red circles near the wingtips.

Cardboard R/C Plane Actually Flies

August 1, 2024 by 19 Comments

Many makers start by building mock-ups from cardboard, but [Alex-08] has managed to build an R/C plane that actually flies, out of cardboard.

If you’ve been thinking of building an R/C plane from scratch yourself, this guide is an excellent place to start. [Alex-08] goes through excruciating detail on how he designed and constructed this marvel. The section on building the wings is particularly detailed since that’s the most crucial element in making sure this plane can get airborne.

Some off-the-shelf R/C parts and 3D printed components round out the parts list to complement the large cardboard box used for most of the structural components. The build instructions even go through some tips on getting that vintage aircraft feel and how to adjust everything for a smooth flight.

Need a wind tunnel instead? You can build that out of cardboard too. If paper airplanes are more your thing, how about launching them from space? And if you’re just trying to get a head start on Halloween, why not laser cut an airplane costume from cardboard?