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MAKE Magazine (4 unread)

Shawls Made from the Silk of Over One Million Spiders

Posted: January 26th, 2012, 9:48pm MST by bluemollusc

Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley teamed up to create materials from the silk produced from Golden Orb Spiders in Madagascar. They collected 1.2 million of these spiders and extracted their silk over the course of three years to create two golden silk capes. This shawl is the world’s largest piece of spider-silk cloth ever created, [...]
Build the Tiny Wanderer from MAKE Volume 29

Posted: January 26th, 2012, 8:03pm MST by Goli Mohammadi

Looking for a great starter robot project? Doug Paradis is an active member of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group, and last year, they were looking for a way to help their beginner members strengthen their robot-building chops. Thus, the Tiny Wanderer was born. We produced a series of lessons covering 5 topics needed to make [...]
ShapeShift Electroactive Polymer Sheets

Posted: January 26th, 2012, 2:02pm MST by Sean Ragan

DIY methods for electroactive polymer actuators are hard to come by, and none of them are kitchen-counter simple. But compared to the wet chemical methods circulating in the academic research community, the purely mechanical process documented in this video from the Swiss ShapeShift project is relatively accessible. Click here to skip the how-to and go [...]
Shrewbot, a Robot With Whiskers

Posted: January 26th, 2012, 12:00pm MST by John Baichtal

When the whiskers touch an object this causes them to vibrate and the vibration pattern is picked up by sensitive cells in the hair follicle at the base of the whisker. These patterns are turned into an electrical signal which is sent to the brain, enabling the mammal to make instant decisions about its environment [...]