Group items tagged

"The maker movement is gathering momentum. Slowly but surely people around the world are changing from passive consumer of the latest gizmo to active maker and modifier of existing designs. The promotion of an open source philosophy in the online era has given people access to myriad designs allowing them to make and modify almost anything. These days DIY not only applies to making simple home improvements, you can go online and learn how to build a robot if you feel up to the challenge! In America, MAKE magazine is the go-to publication for DIY and hack enthusiasts. Humans Invent spoke to MAKE's editor and overall hack guru, Mark Frauenfelder, to get an insight into how this movement is changing the nature of our consumerist culture."

We're really glad you're here to support your creative kid. It used to be that you hang their work on the fridge to let them know you're proud. Now they're older and the Internet is becoming a part of their life at home and school-this is a great opportunity to keep connected and cheer them on. Keep reading on below to learn more about DIY, or grab your kid and help them join.

The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

Building fully functional electronic devices yourself is a satisfying process. That magic moment when your experimentation combines software, hardware and mechanical know-how all together to become a finished product. Add a 3D printer to the mix, and you are really in for a treat. Rob Miles knows his way around Gadgeteer, the Microsoft .NET hardware enabler that turns a developer's dreams into reality. Although he was already off to a great start, it all changed when Rob set himself up with an Ultimaker 3D printer. Designing and printing his own enclosures has given him a whole new perspective on DIY development and hardware hacking. 

"One night in 2007, Kim Fraser, a sewing enthusiast and fabric lover, realized what was missing from her living room: curtains with big yellow polka dots. Instead of searching fabric stores for the perfect pattern, she thought, wouldn't it be cool if I designed my own? She wasn't a graphic designer, but she figured it couldn't be that hard."

The "maker" movement owes much to O'Reilly's Make magazine, which is like Popular Mechanics for a new generation of Arduino-enabled, LED-lit, UAV-launching DIY types. It's a monthly magazine packed with hobbyist projects: Everything from making your own homemade cigar box guitar to building a laser CNC router for fabricating stuff. With last week's day-long workshop, O'Reilly was making the case (pardon the pun) that making can be a business, too.

"If you're interested in human development, the opportunity set has never been more interesting. Search in the browser marked the beginning of anywhere/anytime learning opportunities, but the official beginning of the new era was a decade ago with the Wikipedia launch. As noted in the Lessons from SkillShare blog, anywhere, anytime learning sites have been popping up at an increasing rate. You can learn about rate of change and differential calculus on Khan Academy. Academic Earth was an early source of college knowledge. Udemy let anyone teach anything. Saylor.org and P2PU.org made it all free. Anya Kamenetz outlined the expanded post-sec landscape in DIY U last year. This year, massively open online courses (MOOC) from Coursera, Udacity, and Edx are all the rage. The aggregate impact is a dramatic increase in access to great content and great teachers."

Most learning goes on outside of school. Most learning goes on for personal reasons. What we're talking about are methods of recognizing that, and enriching the opportunities for people to engage in that. The ultimate outcome is to have lots of people in powerful positions in their communities who have engaged in this kind of self learning and they see this being respected. It'd be great to see, say, a local politician, who's a self taught person who's very very immersed in community issues and is proud of saying that they have taught themselves.

"Digital Art Director Dhani Sutanto has been developing a line of wearable Oyster Cards for Londoners and envisions a future of DIY wearable devices."

DIY app creation platform AppsBuilder just released a new, global version of its site, the Italian company announced today. While similar services have mushroomed over the last months, these new UX and UI could help it leapfrog its competitors.

Co-founders von Bengtson, an aerospace scientist and former NASA contractor, and Madsen, an entrepreneur and aerospace engineer, have a lot to be proud of since they founded their non-profit space program four years ago. In June 2011, for example, Copenhagen Suborbital's army of volunteers successfully built, launched and recovered a 31-foot-tall rocket - the largest "amateur" launcher ever built - with a crash-test dummy tucked inside.

In my latest book, Foresight 20/20: A Futurist Explores the Trends Transforming Tomorrow, I devote an entire chapter to how 3D printing will transform not only the manufacturing sector but everyday life.

"près le premier procès en contrefaçon intervenu l'an dernier, voici le premier DRM proposé aux industriels qui veulent vendre sur Internet des fichiers de modèles 3D à imprimer chez soi, ou à faire imprimer par un prestataire. Après la musique et le cinéma, les objets physiques seront les prochains à être piratés. Et la bataille s'annonce épique."

"The Raspberry Pi is a very cheap and reasonably powerful computing device but to get to work with it you have to master Linux. An easier way might be to use a Web IDE."

"Marcin Jakubowski est le fondateur d'Open Source Ecology (évoqué la première fois ici sur notre blog) C'est l'un des projets les plus enthousiasmants qui soit : disposer d'un kit de machines pour bâtir en toute autonomie les bases d'un village, d'une communauté ou d'une… civilisation ! Et là où tout ceci devient passionnant c'est que ces machines sont libres, permettant à tout un chacun de reprendre les plans pour s'en aller poser la première pierre de sa propre future communauté. Si vous ne connaissez pas bien, nous vous suggérons de commencer par cette conférence TED de Marcin sous-titrée en français. Et pour aller plus loin, nous vous proposons ci-dessous la traduction d'un récent entretien donné par Marcin Jakubowski au blog du site TED."

"Crowdfunding is supporting inventions which might otherwise have limited economic prospects, including gadgets appealing to narrow markets, hobby kits, and a 4,000-pound spider robot that can seat two (see "10 Emerging Technologies: Crowdfunding"). Perhaps most of all, it has become a fertile outlet for self-described "makers" such as Silver, who says his goal is to create "a more democratic world where everyone modifies their own space.""

"Arduino is probably the world's most popular open source physical computing platform. The little microcontrollers show up in everything from wild art projects to serious home automation efforts. It's great and all, but couldn't it be … smaller? Electrical engineer Ken Burns thought so, and got to work on the TinyDuino."

"The Hummingbird robotics kit is a spin-off product of Carnegie Mellon's CREATE lab. Hummingbird is designed to enable engineering and robotics activities for ages 10 and up that involve the making of robots, kinetic sculptures, and animatronics built out of a combination of kit parts and crafting materials. Combined with a cross-platform, very easy-to-use visual programming environment, Hummingbird provides a great way to introduce kids to robotics and engineering with construction materials that they are already familiar with. "

"The edge of technology is when it enables you to do something that you couldn't do before. It's one thing to put your imagination down onto a piece of paper, or into a computer program, but what if you could hold it in your hands? This is the vision of 3D printing. Digital designs can be turned into real objects using various kinds of plastic. This technology is not new, but bringing the machine home with you is - the people behind MakerBot started the company with a goal of making 3D printing more accessible."