Author: Corbin Bowen

Play based learning is a concept that has been adopted by many preschools and kindergartens around the world. The theory is that allowing young children to learn through playing gives them many advantages and skills that they can use to build on their foundation of future learning. It allows kids to think creatively, to learn concepts at their own speed and to self regulate, explore, think creatively and actively problem solve. It also serves as the basis for literacy, math and language acquisition. So what then, does a preschool or kindergarten need in order to operate the play based learning…

If you are looking for a killer car audio system and would like to build your own then there are some things to keep in mind. Building your own system can be very gratifying but very challenging as well. Many audio components are designed for certain vehicles which can make it difficult to get them into the spaces you want them to occupy. It will be totally up to you as to whether you want to replace a few of the various components as you can or if you want to do the entire thing at once. Your receiver (or…

[ad_1] [Fraens] has been designing a number of fantastic 3D printed machines and making great videos that demonstrate how they work. The last installment was an automatic cigarette stuffing machine, and it’s got a number of pretty complex motions, and somehow manages to get the job done. While [Fraens] usually uploads STL files for all of his machines, this one is forbidden! Selling automatic cigarette loaders is illegal in Europe, and it’s not clear how close to the legal edge posting them up on Thingiverse is. So until the legal dust settles, you’re going to have to be content with…

[ad_1] When it comes to building a split keyboard, you have a lot of options when it comes to the cable. Many will use a standard 3.5 mm TRRS cable, and others might use something more esoteric like RJ-45 to run between the halves. This only works if you’re using two controllers; if you only want one controller, you have to pass the matrix from one side to the other, which typically requires more than the four wires offered by the aforementioned choices. While rummaging around, [Joe Scotto] found a VGA cable and thought, why not use that? This lovely…

[ad_1] Many of you will have heard of the esoteric programming language Brainf**k_. It’s an example language that’s nearly impossible to use because it’s too simple. It’s basically a Turing computer in code – you can essentially put characters into an array, read them out, increment, decrement, and branch. The rest is up to you. Good luck! What could be worse? Befunge, a language that parses code not just left-to-right or top-to-bottom, but in any direction depending on the use of ^, v, >, and <. (We love the way that GOTO 10 looks like a garden path in the…

[ad_1] Open-source technology brings a world that laws and regulations are not quite prepared for. As a result, every now and then, open projects need to work around governmental regulations. In today’s news, KrakenRF team has stumbled into an arms-trafficing legal roadblock for their KrakenSDR-based passive radar code, and is currently figuring it out. There’s no indication that there’s been any legal action from the USA government – the team’s being proactive, as fas as we’re told. KrakenSDR hardware, to simplify it a lot, is five RTL-SDRs on one PCB – with plenty of work put in to do it…

[ad_1] We’ve seen a lot of custom clocks here at Hackaday, many of which have pushed the traditional definition of the timepiece to its absolute limit. But for all their wild designs, most of them do have something in common: they assume you can actually read a clock and understand the concept of time. But what if you’re developing a clock for a toddler who’s only just coming to terms with such heady ideas? The answer, at least for [Riley Parish] is a set of 3D printed eyes that are illuminated with either yellow or green LEDs depending on whether…

[ad_1] The Barkhausen effect — named after German Physicist Heinrich Barkhausen — is the term given to the noise output produced by a ferromagnetic material due to the change in size and orientation of its discrete magnetic domains under the influence of an external magnetic field. The domains are small: smaller than the microcrystalline grains that form the magnetic material, but larger than the atomic scale. Barkausen discovered that as a magnetic field was brought close to a ferrous material, the local magnetic field would flip around randomly, as the magnetic domains rearranged themselves into a minimum energy configuration and…

[ad_1] One of the best things about hanging out with other hackers is the freewheeling brainstorming sessions that tend to occur. Case in point: I was at the Electronica trade fair and ended up hanging out with [Stephen Hawes] and [Lucian Chapar], two of the folks behind the LumenPnP open-source pick and place machine that we’ve covered a fair number of times in the past. Among many cool features, it has a camera mounted on the parts-moving head to find the fiducial markings on the PCB. But of course, this mean a camera mounted to an almost general purpose two-axis…

[ad_1] With everyone doing videos these days, you might want to up your narration game with a teleprompter. [Modern Hobbyist] can help. Since he does videos — like the one about the teleprompter below — we assume he built it out of his own need for the device. Actually, this is his second teleprompter. The first one was larger and not battery-powered, so this new version offers more portability. The camera shoots through the teleprompter screen so you can look right at the camera and still stay on script. The project reuses some of the original teleprompter code, showing a…