PERMISSION TO PLAY
MAGNIFICENT MOUSETRAP, MAGNIFIED
THERE’S SOMETHING INHERENTLY DELIGHTFUL about a familiar object made gigantic. Mark Perez’ Life Size Mousetrap taps into this whimsy-by-magnification as it transforms the children’s board game Mouse Trap into a Technicolor variety show. It’s a 30-foot-high, 16-piece, 50,000-pound, Rube Goldberg-style interactive kinetic sculpture set on a 6,500-square-foot game board, with an entourage of clown engineers and can-can dancer mice. An iconic crowd-pleaser at Maker Faire, the spectacle culminates in dropping a 2-ton bank safe from a crane. lifesizemousetrap.org
—Laura Cochrane
PING! Augmented Pixels
Your hands are the controllers in this retro-style, Pong-like video game developed by Niklas Roy. PING employs a video camera to capture the movement of your hands, and feeds the information to an ATmega8 microcontroller that evaluates the brightness around the virtual ball and incorporates your hands into the game. Make your own with the code and schematics provided. niklasroy.com/project/101
—Nick Raymond
WHAT’S COOLER THAN an automatic Nerf gun? An automatic Nerf gun controlled by your mind!
Blow Your Mind
BUILT BY CHRIS MEYER, the modified Nerf N-Strike Stampede incorporates an Arduino Uno with BlueSMiRF Bluetooth, controlled by a NeuroSky MindSet EEG reader strapped to the user’s head. Meyer says firing the gun feels “like a tickling or a rush of blood to the front of the head.” hex-machina.com/hw/mindbullets
—Craig Couden
LONG-DISTANCE DOODLING
Andrew Little, 22, brings the classic Etch A Sketch toy into the networked age with Connect A Sketch, which links two sketch screens together. A line drawn by one user appears on both screens, thus enabling collaborative plotter art. When one person decides to erase the drawing by shaking, the sister screen vibrates, telling the other user to do the same. designalittle.co.uk/connect-a-sketch
—LC
FUN FOR ALL AGES
ROLL OUT THE BARREL
PRINT YOUR OWN, BUT DON’T TELL MILTON BRADLEY.
You know those best-selling games that consist of nothing more than multiple copies of one small plastic shape? You may see a resemblance between one such game and Seth Horowitz’s “Monkey for Container Full of Primates” design, published on the 3D sharing site Thingiverse. thingiverse.com/thing:3748
—Paul Spinrad
HIGH ROLLER
WELCOME TO THE GATEWAY KIT: perfect for newbies and beyond, with through-hole soldering, abundantly clear instructions, and a well-labeled PCB. When you’re done with the fun build, tap the die on the table and get a random roll. Life is short, impress yourself. makezine.com/go/dicekit
—Goli Mohammadi
sheeryjay (Go Twitch)
Go Twitch
Radka “Chidori” Haneckova, 24, drew a comic celebrating Go, the ancient Chinese board game. In one panel, she depicted a version where players receive electric shocks — so she decided to actually build it. Her “Live Wire Go” board has an Arduino that controls a novelty shocker toy, to send non-lethal voltages unpredictably through the aluminum and copper game pieces. The board was a surprise hit when it debuted at a game convention in Prague, with players coming back for more. brmlab.cz/project/goban
—John Baichtal
One Drop Yo-Yos
One Drop makes amazing high-precision metal yo-yos, including one called the CODE1 whose specs were community-decided. Now they’ve developed a new hub design with interchangeable hub parts dubbed “Side Effects” that let you change the weight and look of your yo-yo; one even lets you connect Legos. To boot, all their products are designed and manufactured in Eugene, Ore. onedropyoyos.com
—Eric Chu
For tons of playful DIY projects, including Shrink Film Gaming Minis, a Pillow Mace, and rockets galore, head to: makeprojects.com/area/toys_and_games
TINY DIVER
AT 20 BUCKS, this mini R/C submarine offers hours of fun underwater exploration. Capable of diving 8–10 feet deep, it’s powered by two independent motors that control forward, reverse, turning, and diving. Plus, it’s intrinsically buoyant, so when the batteries fully discharge, it’ll float to the surface for easy retrieval. Plug it in for five minutes, and you’re ready to dive! mini-rc-cars.net/minircsubmarine.aspx
—NR
FOR KIDS INTERESTED IN ROBOTICS, CUBELETS ARE A GREAT JUMPING-OFF POINT.
BOT BLOCKS
This kit consists of modular, single-task, magnetic blocks with functions that include distance and temperature sensing, driving, and audio. Connect the Cubelets and your robot can think, sense, and act. The manufacturer is also working on a Bluetooth Cubelet that will make each Cubelet reprogrammable using a phone or PC. modrobotics.com/cubelets
—LC
RAD PROJECTS
WHISKEYDROME
What do you get when you mix a vintage board track with a shrunken velodrome? Head-spinning mayhem in the form of the Whiskeydrome, handcrafted by the badasses at Whiskeydrunk Cycles in Santa Rosa, Calif. The track has a 26-foot diameter at the top lip tapering to 18 feet at the bottom, and its current bicycle speed record of 17.7mph was clocked by Slow Larry at the 2011 Maker Faire Bay Area. This homage to motor stunt shows from the 1900s will put your neighbor’s skate ramp to shame.whiskeydrunkcycles.com
—GM
DIY PLAYGROUNDS
THE FOLKS AT THE NONPROFIT KABOOM are passionate about the importance of play. Their mission? To ensure that every child in America has a place to play within walking distance. So far they’ve helped local folks build 2,000 playgrounds, using their DIY instructions in grant writing, playground construction, landscaping and seating, and more. Sounds like a lot of fun! kaboom.org
—GM
Jon Lohne (Whiskeydrome)
JediBot
If you find your Jedi skills are getting a little soft, students from Stanford University have just the solution: JediBot. Created during a three-and-a-half-week Experimental Robotics course, the dexterous robot uses a Microsoft Kinect sensor and some AI to defend itself — and attack you — with its saber. I believe this is how the Clone Wars started. makezine.com/go/jedibot
—Jerry James Stone
Billboard Swing Set
Fly above the playground with this billboard-sized swing set. Built by French artist/architect Didier Faustino in Shenzhen, China, Double Happiness attempts to re-appropriate commercial billboard space for personal use.
This one’s built from scratch, but intrepid makers could convert their own. Jump off at your own risk! makezine.com/go/swingset
—CC
LEAVE YOUR TIGHTS AT HOME AND STILL LOOK GOOD FIGHTING CRIME WITH YOUR OWN FLYING R/C SUPERHERO.
HIVEMIND FOR KIDS
Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington have developed a fun game (or “participatory simulation”) called BeeSim to demonstrate systems thinking and collaborative learning to children ages 5–7. Wearing Arduino-powered bee puppets laced with conductive fabric and XBee radios, players respond to LEDs mimicking basic bee stimuli in a race to harvest digital nectar from electronic flowers and fill their team’s computerized hive. And if that doesn’t sound like my last desk job, I’ll bee darned. makezine.com/go/beesim
—Gregory Hayes
UP, UP, AND AWAY!
SOLD AS A KIT OR A PLAN from Greg Tanous of Portland, Ore., the RcSuperhero’s simple but elegant cut-foam shapes give the radio-controlled flier a heroic human figure that will delight fun-lovers and strike fear into the hearts of evildoers. rcsuperhero.com
—GH