Gadgets
MAKE Makes Call for Makers for October Austin Faire
Posted by Kit Eaton at 9:01 PM on July 18, 2008
We love the whacky creativity of the Maker Faire here at Giz, and all you DIY gadget enthusiasts out there will be pleased to hear MAKE has just put out a call for Makers for the upcoming Austin Faire. You've got until September 4th to get your application in, and the faire itself will be happening October 18th and 19th at the Travis County Expo Centre. [MakerFaire via LaughingSquid]

Digital Wheel Art, a wheelchair painting program to help disabled people make art was on display at the Maker Faire event in NYC tonight. Creator YoungHyun Chung was inspired to create the device after seeing children with cerebral palsy whose limited movement stifled their artistic expression. Here's how it works, plus a video of the system in action.
Chris James' R2-D2 won four Make Magazine editors' choice ribbons at 
















Steampunk modding, love it or hate it, has caught on and led to everything from 


Here's a video of
Peter set up a robotic watering can to take directions from an iPhone. When Safari's screen state goes from horizontal to vertical, it sends a status update to a webserver via javascript that sets the watering can up or down. Pretty simple but clever setup. [
While yesterday's revelation at Maker Faire by MacGyver creator and real-life inspiration
We just saw the Wall-E toy in action, and its a pretty interesting toy (Although not US$190 worth of interesting.) The best features include fully articulating tank treads, 10 motors, audio and vision sensors, remote control by both joystick and touchpad, individual shutters on each eye, and collision detection. Wall E also has a "follow me" mode that'll allow a Wall-E to stick to a kid or dog and track it around the house. (We would have tried it out, but it was far to noisy and crowded at Maker Faire for Wall-E to track anything or anyone reliably.) [








Engineers at Eyebeam, a New York arts and technology centre, are drastically reducing the cost of ownership for multitouch tables by taking them open-source. Schematics for the Cubit, a multitouch tabletop display, are available online for people who want to make a scaled-down
Why do I need goggles to watch R/C ships sailing in a pond? Because these replicas of WWII battleships fire C02-powered projectiles. In the video above, you can see munitions bounce off the plexi shields protecting the crowd and make splashes as they ricochet off enemy hulls. The Western Warship Combat Club is recreating Axis vs. Allies fights where each side tries to sink the other. At 1/144 scale. [