Hackyhack is a fun project by Dustin Jessen and Chanika Remest that packs an Arduino mini, an LED, a speaker and a piezo knock sensor into a hacky-sack ball. The LED flashes and the speaker emits a sound with every kick, and thirty successful kicks causes a song to be played.

More:HOW TO - Make your own hacky sack / footbag

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Stewart McCullough sent us this stop-motion music video he did for some friends, The Bran Flakes. He used (and recommends) Dragon Stop Motion software. He says it's "very well done... stable, with a good user interface, and lots of good features specifically for doing any kind of stop-motion animation." It costs $275.

The Bran Flakes Dragon Stop Motion

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This [Dwight Shrute]-esque project will let you try out your taxidermy skills. Apparently you can acquire a ‘wetware’ mouse fresh or frozen from pet stores. We just need to wait until fall when our pantry is visited by the less-domesticated variety. A travel-sized optical mouse acts as the replacement guts. Some creative dremeling brings the plastic housing down to a more acceptable shape. The furry bits need to be processed using the mouse taxidermy guide before they are fit over the electronics. What you end up with is a creepy peripheral that nobody wants to use.

In response to our DIY Movie Making theme, Derek "Deek" Diedricksen sent us this first episode of Tiny Yellow Houses, a series he's doing on backyard shackitecture, this one featuring his "Hickshaw," a movable small structure designed to be used as a backyard hang-out space/tiny office or festival sleeping space.

Derek also has a self-published, hand-drawn book of his wacky, whimsical backyard structures, called Humble Homes... You can order it on his blog, Relax Shacks.

More pics from the book after the jump.

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It’s easy to throw around the accusation that you waste time throughout the day. Now you can prove it by reviewing everything you did on your computer, all in just one minute. [Dan Paluska] ground out some code to take screenshots and assemble them into a video. His script ties together the open source tools FFmpeg, ImageMagick, and scrot. It takes a snap every 15 seconds in a 10 hour period for a total of 2400 frames. He even outlines the process to automatically upload these clips to YouTube. Just remember, if you’re doing something naughty, there’ll be a record of it.

I've had this long-standing concept for a theme restaurant where everything--tables, chairs, utensils, food, condiment dispensers--is like 30% bigger than normal. The idea is to make you feel like a kid again. We'd call it "Tiny's." (And yes, we're still seeking investors. Also waitstaff suffering from gigantism.) Look for one soon in a strip-mall near you. Believe me, you won't be able to miss it.

In the meantime, if you just can't wait for the experience, you could always start filling up your house with great big versions of the stuff you already have. Instructables has just posted a cool round-up of tutorials on how to do just that. Shown uppermost is user Tetranitrate's giant match. And yes, as the middle photo shows, it does (or did) actually work. At bottom, last but in no sense least, there's user indymogul's giant sandwich, which I think was part of a Halloween costume or something. But who cares? Giant sandwich!

Related:Claes Oldenburg is a famous Swedish sculptor, associated with the Pop Art movement, who made great big versions of stuff as sculpture. GreatBigStuff.com is an online store that only sells...well, you can guess, can't you?

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I Heart Robotics has posted a guide for building your own clean room. They’ve been clever with their materials, starting with heavy-duty shelving to provide the framework. We like that idea, it allows you to position your workspace at whatever height you desire. The side walls are MDF painted with white enamel. Light, power, and tools are mounted to these walls. To keep things clean, a ventilation system uses a vacuum filter and 12V fans to keep filtered air moving in and dirty air out. Maybe now we’ll be able to pull off that window hack without killing our hard drive. [Thanks Mawitö and Ciric]

[Yoshi Akai] built a sequencer that is part steampunk, part injection molded plastic. The LEGO sequencer MR II has eight steps in a loop that is manipulated by adding the colorful blocks to a green base plate. Each color corresponds to one particular sound which can be modified by building skyward. On the other side of things he’s added a beautifully crafted control area for knobs and switches. We didn’t see much info about what is inside the device so, watch the clip after the break and then feel free to start the speculation in the comments. This is a similar concept to the coin sequencer. From the picture above it seems the blocks have been altered and perhaps use light to identify the different blocks.

[Thanks Fuzzthed via Westword]

[Brian] wrote in to show us a site he’s been working on for a while. He’s been building a tube clock database. We didn’t realize there was actually a big enough draw for such a site, but we have to admit that we spent more than a few minutes browsing through the different clocks. There isn’t a ton of data for each clock, but there are links to individual project pages wherever available. There is also a growing amount of information on the different components themselves, so submit any data you have that he’s missing to help flesh it out. The video above wasn’t chosen for any reason other than it is quite stylish.

Tim Heath and Ryan Hickman's Truckbot could be built for under $20 (excluding mobile). That's pretty impressive for such an open and accessible robotics prototyping environment. Using a laser-cut cardboard chassis, $3 micro servos, and a bare bones Arduino, the duo have assembled one of the cheapest platforms to come along in a while. [via GadgetLab]

One of the main reasons for using cell phones as part of robots is to drive down costs. Today's phones come with wi-fi, cellular connections, Bluetooth, GPS, touch sensing, accelerometers, magnetometers, displays, microphones, speakers, and cameras. They are now being powered by 1Ghz processors and come with ample amounts of storage. Everything you need in a robot except for mobility is already in your pocket. We just needed to add some inexpensive mobility to it.

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The project description for this iPhone stabilizer is in Japanese but as usual you can rely on Google Translate's garbled assistance. The site's great diagrams and photos, however, need no translation! [thanks, recombu!]

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In honor of both DIY Movie Making Month and our ongoing love affair with simple machines that hurl stuff, Jeff DelPapa, founder of NERDS (The New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society), sent us a link to this time-lapse video of a group of teens building a trebuchet. Jeff describes the video as "stone-simple...120x real-time, using a webcam, 8 hours in 4 minutes." He's planning on doing another trebuchet build with teams of adults, in late April, early May, as a fundraiser for the Charles River Museum of Industry.

CRMI Spring Fundraiser: Be a Siege Engineer

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INCREDIBLE PROJECT! SMEEON writes...

Finally got around to adding together some video clips I took. I had a lot of people asking about what it does and how, so here is a little walk through.

Photos here!

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We're excited to announce the first meeting of Make:PGH, a new Make city group based in Pittsburgh. After the first attempt was thwarted by the snowpocalypse, we're eager to get started. In the area? You should definitely stop by!

Action! Excitement! Danger!

We're excited to announce the inaugural meeting of Make:PGH, the Steel City Makers! Interested in making stuff? Like the stuff that you see in MAKE magazine? Got cool projects to show off, or grand ideas that are soon to be realized? Want to hang out with other like-minded people? Then you should definitely come out to the meeting on Tuesday, February 9th, at 7pm!

We've got some good things lined up: presentations on the Makerbot, a laser harp, and an awesome activity, so be sure come out!

Marty McGuire: Makerbot

Marty McGuire is a research programmer at Carnegie Mellon and a council member for HackPittsburgh. He hopes one day to make "mad bank" thanks to open source hardware and the desktop fabbing revolution.

Marty will talk briefly about the MakerBot open source 3D printer, where it came from, and how it works. He'll also give a short printing demo, and answer your questions!

Andy Leer: Fighting Domo

Andy Leer will share with us his experiences using the ioBridge to create fun interactive web enabled dioramas. Find out how with a few minutes and some simple hardware you too can put almost anything on the web.

Mystery Activity

Following the two fine presentations will be an activity of great interest and possible import!

Make:PGH Meeting 1 (take 2) Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 7pm - 9pm Hack Pittsburgh 1936 5th Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15219 Cost: Freeeeeeeee

Want to see a Make: City group in your area? Gather some friends and some ideas, and make it happen! Be sure to let us know, and we can help you get started.

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Natural Deselection is an instrument that competes plants against each other. The device empowers plants to control the fate of others using sensors and mechanised shears in a Darwinian race for survival. The sensors set above the plants detect the first to grow to a specified height, at which point it is saved, and the others fatally chopped.

[via pruned]

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Steve Roberts is a maker OG (original gangsta). With his amazing Winnebiko and BEHEMOTH projects, and his longtime evangelizing of "high-tech nomadness," he's been a leading light in the maker movement for decades. I definitely count him as one of my great inspirations in pursuing artful-engineering (or is it engineered artfulness?) as a lifestyle. Steve has recently published an awesome book, called Reaching Escape Velocity. I review it in the current issue of MAKE, Volume 21. The book is subtitled: "Launching gonzo engineering projects with sponsors, media, volunteers, and other potent forces." It's a thin volume, but it's jam-packed with grand inspiration and practical ideas. I asked Steve if we could share some of it here, and he kindly obliged. -- Gareth

From the Foreword: A Grand Vision is only the beginning. No matter how much passion you bring to bear on the project of your dreams, the odds of actually escaping the "gravity well" are low... unless you find a way to leverage larger forces. This document, derived from 25 years of audacious feats of gonzo engineering, presents the keys to six tools that are essential to a large-scale project:

[ ] A Business Angle [ ] Your Own Education [ ] Corporate Sponsorship [ ] Media Coverage [ ] A Public Presence [ ] The Team of Volunteers

I have contemplated publishing a book on this subject for years, and only now (2009) have decided to do so. It can be considered the collection of "trade secrets" that have made my adventures possible... the art of working with sponsors, media, and volunteers to get an insanely ambitious project off the ground and keep it moving on its own momentum.

From Chapter 1: The Business Angle: The best generalization I can give you is that the boundaries between specialties are where it's at. It is no accident that most projects in the domain of gonzo engineering are, by their nature, comprised more of new ways of combining existing technologies than of linear envelope-pushing; the latter, while honorable and necessary for ongoing industrial progress, is less likely to yield the kinds of breakthroughs that make the media flock to your door. It's not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just that individuals have a much harder time with "straight ahead" advances in the state of the art than do well-funded companies... that sort of work does lend itself well to structured engineering methods and thus tends to be the most likely course of corporate product development (think Moore's Law).

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Who needs expensive acrylic based, microcontrolled robots with only a few sensors available when cardboard and an Android cellphone will work much better  for much less in cost! The team over at Cellbots have done just that. While they did cheat a little by using a laser cut cardboard for exact measurements and including an Arduino to control the servos, they certainly attained their goal of “cheap” (assuming the already had the cellphone). We’re just wondering why it took them 4 weeks for a little CAD and code. Regardless, one idea that immediately comes to mind is thousands hundreds a few little cardboard swarm bots ravaging homes everywhere, just don’t step on them. [Thanks Mashable]

Craig Smith, of Firefly Workshop, has been planning a home observatory and is working out the details of easily building a domed roof for it. He writes:

Anybody with a decent telescope knows that a telescope should be cool as the night air to prevent heat radiant distortion. Aside from keeping it out in an unheated shed yet still having to set it up, one will sometimes make an observatory of sorts. Many have built retractable roofed sheds and the like. But my mind kept working at a cheap lightweight dome roof built in the classic style. Anybody with basic carpentry skills can build a cylindrical wall structure or octagon walls, but the dome roof has always been a difficult and expensive build. Here's my prototype made from cardboard, 1/6th scale.

A single 3/4" sheet of 4' X 8' plywood, supplies the material for the framework. The circle makes the base, and circular cutouts outward from that make the frame ribs. Since there is some leftover waste, the framework will be lighter than the full sheet of plywood. But many little galvanized framing brackets used to fasten it together will add some weight, as well as the roofing material. A 24" wide roll of galvanized flashing will be used to make the 10 roof pie-segments and the rear rectangular segment. Put on with small galvanized box nails, each pie panel will overlap the one next to it, sealed waterproof with silver flashing seal caulk during assembly.

The retractable watertight sky opening will be tricky. But if all else fails it could be made like a standard flat roof access door only curved. Standard flashing and roofing techniques are a must here to keep an expensive telescope safe and dry.

Have you ever built such a structure? Got any design input for Craig?

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Need more digital outputs for your Arduino? If so, the EZ-Expander shield for Arduino might be a good solution. You can pick up a kit, or an assembled version, over in the Makers Market!

The EZ-Expander shield is an easy and inexpensive way to add digital output pins to your Arduino. This is accomplished by utilizing two 74HC595 shift registers. There are 16 new output pins on the shield (numbered 20-35), and the shield itself uses 3 existing Arduino pins to operate (pins 8, 12, and 13), so overall you get 13 additional output pins to use. I've provided an open source software library that makes it extremely easy to access the new pins 20-35 without having to worry about controlling the shift registers in your Arduino sketch.

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Unknown, via Reddit.

Banksy, via Flickr user goldenticket.

It's a simple idea: Find some bad art, whether original or a print, for a song at a thrift store, then modify it to make, if not "better art," then at least something that's more entertaining to look at. (Is it the same thing? Yeah, that sounds like a productive argument.)

Anyway. To quote a great sage, "there's a lot of guys doing it, but only one guy can be the best." That title probably goes to pseudonymous British graffiti artist Banksy. Most of the work presented below is his, but there are one or two gems from less-notables. I especially like the bland mountain landscape improved by the addition of an apocalyptic-scale katamari...

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