diy

I've just returned from an amazing weekend at the second annual Maker Faire held in San Mateo, CA. The event is packed with booths featuring hundreds of inventors and crafters showing off their latest and greatest projects. We're still collecting our notes and getting our photos together, but here are a few projects we really enjoyed.

Jeremy Boyle constructed an amazing MIDI-controlled music kit called the Trio1 that used dozens of pneumatic pistons to play a drum kit and electric guitar.

Roboticist Crabfu had his steam-powered R2S2 robot on display. I've seen his robots on video before, … Read more

Slooh is a do-it-yourself stargazing service that puts you behind powerful telescopes in real time. With Slooh's help, you can see a disco-ball-like cluster of stars, a sunflower galaxy, Comet Lovejoy, and other wonders from an observatory atop a Canary Island mountain--all from the comfort of your chair at home.

I found the most dazzling views by following Slooh's suggested astronomical points of interest. Guided missions happen at 9:00 p.m. (Universal Time) nightly. The longer you hang out, the riper the images get. Impressed by the blood-red Trifid Nebula, 5,500 light-years away in the Sagittarius … Read more

Up for a do-it-yourself project this weekend? Rarely does Web site swag get as intricate as the Digg button from Adafruit Industries. The $20 kit gives you everything you need (sans soldering tools) to put together a slick, working Digg button that has a three-digit counter on it to keep track of Diggs. Every time you click the tiny, red button, you get a nice "dug" message on the LED display, and the count goes up by one. The real-world possibilities for this are endless.

The kits were first made available at last month's Digg 1 million user party, … Read more

Me.com has launched a new tool called SNAPP that lets people put together their own social networking hubs. Like Ning.com, which launched a similar service in March, SNAPP gives users ready-made tools such as a blog, live chat, forums, and shared photo albums to create a fairly full-featured site without knowing any HTML. SNAPP also integrates Me.com's social networking system, so existing Me.com users will be able to join your network without any special signup.

While some of the tools and features are aimed at the younger social networking crowd (like the am i hot? rating tool), … Read more

Want to celebrate the predictable tragedy that your life has become by eating waffles shaped like the very instrument that invisibly shackles you to your desk? Artist Chris Dimino has modified an old typewriter to produce keyboard-shaped waffles, perfect for honing those typing skills before you get to work. The waffle maker is just a one-off, but hopefully some geek-minded, breakfast-loving entrepreneur will get cracking on a retail version soon (make a pirate toaster while you're at it).

(via TreeHugger)

iPod battery replacement kits are nothing new. Manufacturers like Sonnet Technologies have offered reasonably priced do-it-yourself battery replacement kits for the past few years. What distinguishes the latest line of Blue Raven iPod batteries from previous efforts is a boast of 30 to 50 percent better battery life over the factory original (depending on your iPod model). The Blue Raven batteries are also much more attractively packaged than other replacements I've seen, which seems silly to mention, but I think packaging can have a huge effect on how intimidating a DIY project appears. Kits are available for around $30 … Read more

Make magazine--purveyor of awesome and amusing DIY projects and kits--has added a new product to its online store -- the Cellular Automata video synthesizer kit. It may look like a hippie guitar pedal, but actually it creates endearingly retro (but mostly annoying) audio and video akin to an Atari 2600 meltdown. The kit offers RCA audio and video outputs, costs $50, and is mostly preassembled. You will have to find your own enclosure (the rainbow-colored wooden box is only a suggestion) and solder on the knobs and a reset button.

The video synthesizer works off a mathematical idea called … Read more

Want an iPod Nano, but stuck with a fourth-generation player? One DIYer has figured out a way to remove his iPod's hard drive and replace it with with an adapter that can accommodate plug-in flash memory cards.

Make Magazine spotted the most recent efforts of Mark Hoekestra, who posted his tips on Geektechnique.org. He took two iPods, a 40GB photo model and a 20GB regular model, and replaced the hard drives with a homemade adapter. After getting well-acquainted with his soldering iron, he produced a working iPod capable of storing songs on flash memory.

Flash memory is more expensive … Read more

If you're inspired to create your own MP3 player but are either too cheap or too clumsy (in my case, both) to use Make Magazine's Daisy MP3 player kit, South Korea has the solution. The MOTZ DIY Music Box is a coin-sized, flash-based MP3 player kit that sells for $40 (U.S.). Once you've got it, you can join the corporate bandwagon of cramming an MP3 player into just about anything. The tough part will be finding something ridiculous that someone hasn't already tried putting an MP3 player in. The MOTZ is USB 2.0 by … Read more