Friendstrument How-To

Look for the complete step-by-step for The Friendstrument on Boing Boing. It will run there on Wednesday, May 7. If you can't wait that long, you may purchase the entire Maker Dad book with 24 projects, as a Kindle ebook right now for $6.99!

Battery Powered Speaker Amplifier

Make this battery powered amplifier to add your paper plate speaker.

Kite Video Camera Template

Download this template for the Kite Video Camera project.

Mū Tōrere template

Here's a link to the template for making a 5-inch square Mū Tōrere board.

Grime's Dice simulator

Python program for Grime's Dice:

#Grime's Dice Simulator

#Variables to count how many times a particular color wins a 30-rolls game
bluewins = 0
greenwins = 0

#y is how many 30-rolls games you want to play
for y in range(0, 1000):

 #Variables to count how many times a particular color wins in a 30-rolls game
 bluetotal = 0
 greentotal = 0

 #x is how many rolls
 in a game
 for x in range(0, 30):
 
 
  #Blue die has five 3s and one 6
  import random
  roll = random.randint(1,6)
  if roll >  5:
   blue = 6
  else:
   blue = 3
   
   
  #Green die has three 5s and three 2s
  import random
  roll = random.randint(1,6)
  if roll >  3:
   green = 5
  else:
   green = 2
   
 
 
 # import random
 # roll = random.randint(1,6)
 # if roll >  5:
 #  purple = 1
 # else:
 #  purple = 4
   
 
  if blue > green:
   bluetotal = bluetotal + 1
  else:
   greentotal = greentotal + 1
 
 if bluetotal > greentotal:
  bluewins = bluewins + 1
 else:
  greenwins = greenwins + 1
  
print "Blue", bluewins
print "Green", greenwins
  

Chair Template

Download here.

A list of podcasts for kids and family

iTunes has a big list of podcasts that are good for kids and family.

Drawbot Template

Here is a link to the drawbot template.

Longboard Template

Here's a link to a PDF of a longboard cutting template with the truck bolt hole pattern.

Lloyd Kahn (age 76) on skateboarding

I love this video of my friend Lloyd Kahn (founder of Shelter Publications) talking about his joy of skateboarding. He's 76, and started boarding as a wee lad of 65.

Picoboard for Scratch

The Picoboard ($45) lets you connect Scratch to the real world. It comes with a a light sensor, a microphone, a push button, and a slider.

Dew Drop Game

Enjoy the Dew Drop retro video game, which was programmed using Scratch!

Pixel Dude drawing application for iPad

Pixel Dude is an image editing app for the iPad. Like the name suggests, it's pixel based, and is good for drawing chunky graphics. The drawing area is a 32 by 32 grid of squares, which I find to be more than enough for my purposes.

I've always liked the look of the Space Invaders aliens, and by using Pixel Dude's symmetrical drawing tool, it's very easy to create characters that have that Space Invaders look. The application has a lot of other features, like layer support and unlimited undo and redo.

Once you are done drawing something you can email it or save it to Dropbox.

Here's the PDF link for Getting Started With Scratch

Visit this site for a resistor color code guide.

Mitch Altman's Soldering Guide

Mitch Altman created this wonderful guide to soldering, called "Soldering is Easy." Here's a link to the PDF file.