The Best of MAKE This Week

What MAKE is making! Here’s a round up of projects, events and kits from MAKE this week!

Drawdio meets Unruly – Drawdio developed by Adafruit Industries and Jay Silver.  A pencil that lets you draw with music! Essentially, its a very simple musical synthesizer that uses the conductive properties of pencil graphite to create different sounds. This is a great project to make with your kids. Although, when you are done you most likely will not be too willing to share it. It’s just that much fun!

Build a mini-Theremin in under a minute. Assembly of the Gakken Mini-Theremin kit at warp-speed – complete with error correction! The theremin, invented in 1919 by Russian scientist Leon
Theremin, is one of the world’s earliest fully electronic instruments, and is also unique in that it was the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. The eerie, other-wordly tones as heard in the films mentioned above are created by the proximity of the player’s hands to the metal antennas, with the resulting radio frequency interference being transformed into musical tones.

Quantum of Solace – The Do-it-yourself version, more gadgets!
The latest James Bond movie is pretty high on action but lacking some of the gadgets and spy gear we’ve come to love – here are DIY versions you can make yourself to become a super high-tech spy!

Gakken Mechamo Inchworm. Patti and her son built the Mechamo Inchworm kit – actually, he built most of it himself,
Patti helped figure out a couple of parts issues and put together some tiny bits. This is a great kit for kids! He’s 14, but hasn’t built a lot of kits before, and it went really well. He learned a lot of little things from the build, like how to stabilize a nut while tightening a screw. It’s also a pretty forgiving design; twice he put something together backwards, but figured it out and was able to take it apart and put it back together correctly – a lot of kits won’t let you take things apart.

Maker Faire Austin 2008 – Crafts. There were so many different craft style projects at Maker Faire this year, from weaving to glassblowing and everything in between. Take a look at some of the highlights.

MAKE has a special code just for GeekDad readers, if you want 10% off kits use GKYDAD on check out of the Maker Shed store.

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