DIY

Micro home enthusiasts Christopher and Malissa Tack have designed and hand-built a gorgeous 140 square foot eco-home on wheels. Dubbed the Tiny Tack House, the wooden home was built on top of a 20 by 8.5 foot flatbed utility trailer, which means the couple can move around as they wish. We recently interviewed Christopher about the his experience and love for tiny homes.  Read More

The 01LAMP desk lamp is what you get when four young Italian designers get together and start folding old pizza boxes. Created by Federico Trucchia, Daniele Schinaia, Antonio Scribano and Matt Compagnucci, 01LAMP pays homage to the idea of creating simple, economic and sustainable DIY furniture.  Read More

In the last week, over 3,000 people on Kickstarter ignored the fact it's next to impossible to keep a houseplant alive and backed the now fully-funded "Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity" campaign. The funds will be used to build upon existing technology and create a transgenic plant that has a soft blue-green glow to act as an electricity-free nightlight. Backer rewards, each glowing, include an arabidopsis plant, a rose plant, and arabidopsis seeds. We check in as the Glowing Plants team heads towards their first stretch goal and look at how this project is part of a bigger trend in DIY biology. But be warned: this is not your grandma's seed catalog.  Read More

Well, our cyberpunk-weapons-making friend Patrick Priebe has been at it again. Having previously built things like a gauss rifle, a rotary-blade-shooting crossbow and an Iron Man laser gauntlet, he recently let us know about his latest creation – the video game-based Plasma Cutter.  Read More

Italian designer, Andrea Scandella has created an open source series of DIY furniture pieces made from disused pallets. With a passion for designing furniture that incorporates eco-sustainability and the use of recycled materials, Scandella is offering his deigns free to the public.  Read More

Not long ago, we heard about how Dutch artist Jurgen Kuipers built a version of his Sawyer wooden-framed bicycle that could be sold flat-packed, like IKEA furniture. While that particular bike was intended as a one-off art piece, it turns out that we may soon be able to own a flat-packed wooden Dutch bike after all – the Sandwichbike, created by Amsterdam-based industrial design studio Bleijh, is now available for pre-order.  Read More

Pinoccio is a new Internet of Things-friendly microcontroller designed to get home-brew electronics projects talking to the internet and, usefully, each other. Pinoccios come with or without Wi-Fi capability, but can wirelessly natter away with each other by low-power radio using mesh networking. And an in-built battery untethers your projects (hence the name, d'uh). Think of these as Arduino's roaming gossipy cousins, then.  Read More

Pinhole cameras – that use a pin hole rather than a lens – have been around since the beginning of photography and could be, to coin a popular phrase, a form of "vintage" innovation. A recent Kickstarter project aims to bring this established photographic methodology back to today's users in the form of an assemble-it-yourself cardboard pinhole camera.  Read More

I must confess that the more time I spend tapping away on a computer keyboard, the more my guitars sit ignored and unplayed in the corner. This is also something that troubled Wieden+Kennedy's David Neevel. Unlike me though, he decided to do something about it. With a little help from a Roland GR-33 guitar synth, an Arduino Uno, some electronics and custom code, he managed to trick his laptop into treating his Flying V as if it was a standard keyboard input.  Read More