Tools Hack Daily

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

ASK AN ENGINEER 11/29/17 LIVE with @at_makers @adafruit #adafruit

ASK AN ENGINEER 11/29/17 LIVE (video) with ATMakers.org ! What is “Ask an engineer”? From the electronics enthusiast to the professional community – “Ask an Engineer” has a little bit of everything for everyone. If you’re a beginner, or a seasoned engineer – stop in and see what we’re up to! We have demos of projects and products we’re working on, we answer your engineering and electronics questions and we have a trivia question + give away each week.

http://ift.tt/1bb6MK4

Live text chat in discord in the #livebroadcast channel, and we’ll have live video on Youtube, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook.

ATMakers.org is an experiment in solving problems in Assistive Technology using the skills and tools of the Maker community. In short, we’ve seen tools in the Open-Source Hardware and Software community that can be incredibly useful for people with severe physical and cognitive challenges – we’d like to help introduce these communities to each other.

Founded by Bill Binko, co-founder and principal technologist at LessonPix.com, we hope to provide descriptions and instructions that allow a community of Makers (for example a high-school robotics club or regulars at a MakerSpace) to build customized technology solutions for Assistive Technology Professionals and individuals whose lives would be enriched by them.

Learn more about ATMakers!

Watch this Homemade Lighter Get Made with Machining Precision

You don’t need to understand Russian to follow along with what is going on in this incredible video by YouTuber Levsha, showing the machining of a homemade lighter ‘ring’ – the lighter fuel ingeniously hid in the ring itself, which can be unscrewed to refill the unit as needed. The care – and precision – that goes into every part is exciting to watch:

(HINT: enable Closed Captions and set the setting to Auto Translate->English for pretty good on-the-fly translation!)

A Diablo III Costume with Pumping EL Wire Veins

Say you want to simulate the look of veins pumping blood in an upcoming costume. That’s what Egg Sisters Cosplay did for their Diablo III necromancer armor. They took the costume to BlizzCon earlier in November (you can see a photo below) and added a whole other level to the creepy cosplay by using EL wire to simulate veins. They wanted the chasing EL wire to come from a single inverter, and they documented the how-to process in the above video.

Check out a video showing off the finished veins in the necromancer armor.

Photo by Core Geek

via Tumblr

A Diablo III Costume with Pumping EL Wire Veins

Check out a video showing off the finished veins in the necromancer armor.

Photo by Core Geek

via Tumblr

Creating Fabrics and Fashion from Orange Peels #WearableWednesday

Two innovators have created a sustainable fabric from orange peels! Using waste from the citrus industry this pair have devised a method for extracting the cellulose a spinning a sort of orange silk. Via Orange Fiber:

A sustainable fabric, made in Italy and that is good for your skin? Two girls from Sicily have made a dream come true creating Orange Fiber, using the wastes coming from oranges.

From Catania, which has always been one of the most vibrant and hype cities in Sicily, to Milan, the undisputed capital of Italian fashion and to Rovereto, cultural and industrial centre in the heart of the Trentino region: the story of two Sicilian girls with a brilliant idea and their land in their hearts, progresses in these three cities, quite symbolic, although quite different.

Adriana Santanocito, 37 and Enrica Arena, 29, three years ago were only two students studying away from home in Milan who, during a chat in the kitchen, literally invented Orange Fiber, their innovative sustainable fabric made with oranges, and now they are going to make their dream come true.

What are the girls’ ambitions? “We are aiming to haute couture – they tell the Corriere della Sera newspaper – we have already been contacted by several Italian companies and also by a large foreign group. They like the fact that Orange Fiber is made in Italy, but above all, sustainable.” We too! #WearOrange

Learn more here. And if you want to read more from Adriana and Enrica check out this interview in Make.

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Virginia Becomes First State to Require Computer Science Instruction #MakerEducation

Computer class coding Blog560x292 Getty

Via Education Week.

In 2016, Virginia lawmakers made a short but significant revision to the required academic standards that all districts must teach, by adding these topics to a long list: “computer science and computational thinking, including computer coding.”

Now the state has completed a new set of computer-science standards (in Virginia jargon, the “standards of learning,” or SOLs), which will shape curriculum and what teachers are expected to teach at each grade level.

Virginia Becomes First State to Require Computer Science Instruction #MakerEducation

Computer class coding Blog560x292 Getty

Via Education Week.

In 2016, Virginia lawmakers made a short but significant revision to the required academic standards that all districts must teach, by adding these topics to a long list: “computer science and computational thinking, including computer coding.”

Now the state has completed a new set of computer-science standards (in Virginia jargon, the “standards of learning,” or SOLs), which will shape curriculum and what teachers are expected to teach at each grade level.