Tag: Diy

It’s that time of the year again. No, not Christmas, but Bit-tech’s annual awards for best casemod and custom case. They’ve got a lot of great entries this year and I don’t have a strong favorite.

We’ve seen a couple of outrageous heels with Star Wars-themed details. These BB-8 heels by Instructables employee Mike Warren aka mikeasaurus are stylish but not over the top. In fact, they’re under a pair of tops, because you can spin the droid-shaped heels.

A few days ago, we were envious of Redditor NinjaShira’s boyfriend because she gave him a Fallout 4-themed gift set for Christmas. It turns she’s also giving him a complete Gwent set. I don’t know if I should still envy him, because clearly this dude has to step his game up to unprecedented levels.

Need a cheap display for your Raspberry Pi? Or perhaps you’re building a Times Square for ants? Then check out this guide by Adafruit’s Tony Dicola. The project is based around Adafruit’s RGB Matrix HAT for the Raspberry Pi, which makes it easy to power and output to daisy chained LED matrices.

There are already commercially available mice that can be operated with the chin, mouth or tongue, but they tend to cost hundreds of dollars. Thingiverse member Tobias Wirtl hopes that he’s laid the foundation for a drastically cheaper alternative by creating a mouth-operated mouse using a 3D printer and about $20 (USD) worth of off the shelf electronics.

Last October, Allen Pan aka Sufficiently Advanced wowed us with his electromagnetic Mjölnir. Now he’s celebrating the return of Star Wars to cinemas by making a lightsaber with a fiery blade. It’s actually more of a supercharged lighter with a lightsaber handle, but it still looks really cool.

Normally, when you go into the store to buy a new controller after you broke the last one because your damned Fallout 4 companion refused to GTF out of the way in a narrow path AGAIN (not that I know anything about that), you end up with a few options to choose from and none of them are particularly cool.

YouTuber ZaziNombies’s DIY LEGO flamethrower is pretty awesome. It is based on the “Purifier” flamethrower from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. It took him about 1,200 bricks to create and yes, it actually shoots flames.

Redditor smashcuts made the simple act of opening his browser look cool by building an overhead control panel, which has tons of buttons, flip switches and LEDs. Smashcuts used a ton of wires and several USB controllers for the switches and an Arduino board for the LEDs.

Experienced makers looking for a flash of inspiration for their next project should check out the latest guide from Adafruit’s Philip Burgess. He shows us how to make the DotStar Pi, a large light painter made with the Raspberry Pi and Adafruit’s DotStar LED strip.

I’m sure we all have these random childhood memories of events that happened that weren’t particularly important or scary, but we still remember them with incredible clarity decades later. One of those random memories for me was going over to my cousin’s house back in the early ’80s and finding out he had just got one of those massive AT-AT walker toys as a gift.

YouTuber Astonishing Studios loves to make candy dispensers using LEGO. But recently he’s been making equally cute machines for other edibles, such as his viral hit, the McFlurry maker. His latest work is for another McDonald’s product, the mysterious Chicken McNuggets.

You can find lots of custom made gaming tables online. This one made by BoardGameGeek forum member Bum Kim is special not so much for what it is than for how it was made. Bum went to great lengths to document his project and is sharing his build log online.

Ryan Bates is working on a unicorn in the arcade world: a fair claw machine. Powered by an Arduino Mega, the machine isn’t easy to build, but at least it won’t screw you or your customers.

Laser enthusiast Patrick Priebe rides on the Star Wars hype train by making a much smaller version of the Death Star’s superlaser. It may not be able to destroy planets, but it probably could blind a Rebel or two.

Growing up, it always seemed that the LEGO bricks I had were white, yellow, red, green, or blue. As my daughter got older and started to play with some of the sets aimed at little girls, a bunch of pink bricks ended up around my house and under my toes.