Solarbotics at the MAKE Faire

We use many, many devices with 0.1" spaced holes, which are pretty much an electronics design standard. We're finding these 0.1" space terminal blocks incredibly useful for making solid, secure, yet serviceable connections to the rest of our designs. We'll often reach for a microcontroller board, then reach for a necessary handful of these parts […]

Here's a little makeover of an inexpensive aftermarket heated car seat heating pad that stopped working. Designed to activate and warm up when sat upon, the electronics face a fair amount of abuse: since the seat is a soft frame, the wires inside constantly move and flex with the body. They are also subject to […]

Look! Bird (-shaped bullets) made holes in bird... feathers! Well, not quite, although that would have been awesome too. Actually we were doing some nitrogen-assisted laser tests on various regular, i.e. boring materials, such as plywood and mat board. Then I came across some feathers and here's what it turned out to be: Now that […]

Question: What ever happened to punch cards? Nobody really knows, but the world became a much much darker place without them. There was something undeniably magical about making a computer do your bidding through feeding it a piece of paper with a bunch of holes in it ("THE ULTIMATE POWER IS MINE! I CAN NOW […]