openMaterials

foldschool is website with free templates for making cardboard furniture for kids. The template patterns can be printed out with any printer. The designs are not only stable and extremely useful, but pretty cool looking too. Currently the site offers three designs; a stool, a chair and a rocker.

bionic yarn is a ‘new fabric made of recycled plastic bottles’ (PET). I’m loving the great ‘process’ section on the website, explaining the extrusion process and how the fibers are spun together to make the yarn.

Tonight at dockbot I will be giving a short talk about openMaterials and show some paper and wood based electronics projects I have been working on. The night starts at 8pm @ dock18 which is at Rote Fabrik, Zurich. Other presenters include members and friends of SGMK (Swiss Mechatronic Art Society). You can also [...]

Over at the Torvalds family blog, Linus has just written a really interesting post about helping his wife with a new computerised embroidery machine she got for Christmas. He talks about the problems with the proprietary/undocumented firmware and file formats. There’s progress being made in these series of posts (When you have an itch to [...]

I just found an interesting ‘Technical Note’ authored by Western Research Laboratory (WRL), a research group that was founded by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1982. ‘Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems’, inspired by the work of Bill Bidermann, investigates claims that by inserting electrodes into a dill pickle, and energizing with modest alternating currents, caused the pickle [...]

Just announced on the RepRap blog: The Foresight Institute has announced its Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize to design and build a better RepRap. There is an interim prize of $20,000, and a grand prize of $80,000. I am particularly excited about these specific aims of the contest: :: Print at least three different materials, including [...]