TOOLBOX

Wireless signal detector for the paranoid, a fire-powered soak, iPhone hacks, and tales of sustainability.

Leatherman Wave

$90 leatherman.com

I just got a Leatherman Wave multi-tool, and to say I’m in love is an understatement. In the three days I’ve had it, it has left my side for no more than 15 minutes at a time. In addition to the two outer blades (serrated and normal) that can be deployed in seconds using only one hand, there’s a diamond-coated file and a saw.

Inside, you find not only the standard pliers (which are beautiful all by themselves) but also two bit drivers (large and small), a bottle opener, a ruler, and more.

Remember those flimsy Swiss Army scissors that can barely cut paper? The Wave’s scissors are far better; they have a real handle, not to mention that you can tell just by their look that the Swiss Army blades can’t even compare.

No matter which tool you’re using on this amazing 17-function knife, it feels great in your hand. As an added bonus, you can purchase a bit kit, which is full of different-sized flat, Phillips, and Torx bits.

Within two hours of getting my Wave, I’d already used it to fix my boot. Earlier today, I used it to help me build an iPod charger in an Altoids tin, from Volume 07 of MAKE.

—Adam Zeloof

TSX300 Portable Two-Way Radio

$40 trisquare.us

Ever tried to stay in touch with friends at a mall or sporting event using Family Radio Service or GMRS radios? Competing with other users can be a challenge, even with 21 channels and so-called privacy codes.

Switch to “eXtreme Radio Service” (eXRS) portables by Tri-Square Inc. to eliminate interference and ensure voice privacy. eXRS radios use digital spread spectrum (DSS) modulation, converting speech into a digital data stream transmitted over constantly changing 900MHz frequencies, to eliminate eavesdropping by all except eXRS radios you authorize.

The top-of-the-line TSX300 includes text messaging, multiple virtual channels and user groups, and a NOAA weather receiver. Initial setup simply requires programming each radio with a user-selected channel code, with wireless cloning possible.

I found the TSX300 to be superior to FRS/GMRS units in nearly every respect. A slight reduction in range was more than offset by communications privacy and freedom from interference. It sells for about $40 including rechargeable battery, charger, earpiece speaker/mic, and belt clip. No license is required, and they’re FCC-approved for both personal and business communications.

—L. Abraham Smith

Hidden Camera Wireless Signal and Wi-fi Detector

$11 dealextreme.com

Do you sometimes feel you’re being watched? Listened to? Are you quite certain you’re alone? Nobody will think you’re odd if you insist on using code words or ROT13 when speaking in public, but in the safety of your own home, it’s a bit excessive. That’s why DealExtreme’s Hidden Camera Wireless Signal and Wi-fi Detector is such a boon to the hopelessly paranoid and spies on a budget.

The unit is a tiny handheld device, smaller than most cellphones and not even the size of six isotope disks of polonium. A single button and two LEDs adorn the front of the detector. Press the button and the red LED lights up to indicate that the unit is activated. When the unit detects frequencies in the 100MHz to 3GHz range, the blue LED will blink. The more activity it detects, the faster the LED blinks.

The unit cannot, alas, distinguish between good and evil. To get a decent reading, you’ll have to turn off all your wireless devices. Then you can walk the house, antenna outstretched, searching for bugs.

I couldn’t find any bugs not of my own making, but for the wireless devices I planted myself, the detector worked flawlessly. It was easy to hone in on a device just by watching the frequency at which the LED blinked. The detector’s price is $11, and that includes shipping from Hong Kong. It’s a bargain if you have even a passing suspicion that the walls might have ears.

—Tom Owad

Hack Your iPhone and iPod Touch

iPhone Hacks by David Jurick, Adam Stolarz, and Damien Stolarz
$35 Make: Books

Editor’s Note: Instead of a review of this book, we thought we’d let the book speak for itself and offer you an excerpt of four helpful hardware hacks.

Hacking the Wire

The technical problem that normally prevents most headphones from connecting to the iPhone is the plastic sheath at the base of the plug. The girth of this plastic piece is too wide to fit in the narrow recess surrounding the iPhone’s headset port. If you compare the plug of the iPhone headset to that of a standard set of headphones, you’ll notice the difference in thickness. To get the 3.5mm plug of almost any standard pair of headphones to fit in your iPhone, you’ll need to shave off about 5mm of the plastic sheath.

Noise-Cancelling Headphones

What you may not know is that over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones work just fine over the headphones that come with your iPhone. If you own an original iPhone you’ll get the benefit of noise-cancellation, without having to buy an adapter.

Connect the iPhone to a Car

One problem with iPod integration in cars is that iPhone integration isn’t perfect. For one thing, the iPhone 3G won’t charge via many of the iPod integration systems, because they provide 12V to the FireWire pins instead of 5V. [Here are] two adapters that solve this problem: one by Scosche (scosche.com/products/productID/1667) and the other by CableJive (cablejive.com/chargeconverter.html).

Controlling Your iPhone/iPod Touch in the Car

The name of the game in driver safety is keeping your eyes on the road, hands on the wheel. Scosche also makes a clever device for controlling your iPod, from your steering wheel, which also happens to work for the iPod touch and iPhone (scosche.com/products/sfID1/210/sfID2/324).

Bob’s Knee

Directed by Michael Attie

Free online at vimeo.com/4045734

After having his own knee problems, inventor Bob Schneeveis started thinking about the way humans walk. “How do we walk?” he asked, and then admitted that he didn’t know. “The way to really know how something works is to make a model of it.” And so he created machine models of a walking man. His work culminated in the hand-built machine he calls RoboChariot, which roams the grounds of Maker Faire every year.

Schneeveis is the subject of a short documentary film by Stanford film student Michael Attie called Bob’s Knee. The film, shot in 16mm black and white, is handcrafted as well. “I used a Bolex, which is a spring-wound 16mm camera,” says Attie. “My model was from the 60s, but the design hasn’t changed since the 30s.”

Last year, Schneeveis had his walking man fitted with a mask of Arnold Schwarzenegger. This year’s model will feature President Barack Obama.

—Dale Dougherty

Michael Attie’s site: mikeattie.com/Mike_Attie/Bobs_Knee.html

MAKE LOOKS AT KITS

World’s First Embedded Power Controller

Cypress PSoC FirstTouch Starter Kit
$70 cypress.com

As someone whose microcontroller experience mostly centers around Arduino, the Cypress PSoC was very new to me. It’s a chip that’s part microcontroller, but the chip itself is reprogrammable; you reconfigure the circuits inside the chip, on the fly.

Want to turn a couple of pins into an I2C bus? Need to have a serial conversation over USB? No problem. And in addition to programmable logic, the chip also has a bunch of op-amps you can reconfigure on the fly. Want to generate some DTMF tones for wardialing? You can do that, too.

I got started with the PSoC FirstTouch kit. It comes with two other boards with chips and sensors on them, and a dongle that plugs into a USB port. Two of the devices (the dongle and one board) include RF chips for wireless communications.

If you want to build a PSoC-based project from the ground up, a PSoC DIP chip (suitable for a breadboard) runs less than $10 in single-unit quantities. The $25 PSoC MiniProg USB programmer (Digi-Key part #CY3217) is all you need to program the chip.

All the software needed for programming the PSoC is included for free (and available as a free download), but it has two downsides: it runs only on Windows, and the C compiler operates in a reduced-functionality mode ($1,995 for the full version).

Programming the PSoC is very different from what I’m used to: yes, there are some bits of C code at the heart of most projects, but the design software is visual: you’ll drag, drop, and connect analog and digital modules to define the way the chip behaves.

—Brian Jepson

Like Clockwork

Chronulator 2.0 Clock Kit

$49 sharebrained.com/chronulator

Alternative time-telling devices are compelling, but only if they’re easy to read. Building a kit can be satisfying, but only if it leaves room for creativity. The Chronulator 2.0 clock kit fits the bill on both counts.

Solder it together, and you’ve got a microcontroller-based clock that converts time to current, displaying hours and minutes on two analog panel meters. Print out the supplied clock face templates, or customize the meters. No housing is supplied, and this is where it gets interesting. I mounted my panels into a cigar box, and put the circuit board on top, its exposed wires lending to the retro-tech design. (I also considered using an old Mac G4 Cube case, or mounting it naked to the wall in a PanaVise.)

Based on an Arduino-compatible Atmel AT-mega168 chip, the Chronulator lets you download and modify the source code, connect to a computer via a USB-to-serial adapter, and display any kind of data. Would it be crass to have a “Number of People in My Facebook Friend Requests Purgatory” meter?

The Chronulator runs on a minimum of 1.8 volts and about 200 milliamps, so it’d be easy to power it from a small solar cell and a super capacitor. Then we’d have green time!

—John Edgar Park

MAKE LOOKS AT BOOKS

In the Future: Back to Basics

World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler

$14 Grove Press

In this sweet and sad novel, the population of the United States (and most likely, the world) has been decimated by an energy shortage, starvation, plagues, terrorism, and global warming. The story takes place in an unspecified time in the future (I’m guessing around 2025 or so).

The story is told by Robert Earle, a former software executive. Now he’s a hand-tool-using carpenter living in upstate New York. The electricity comes on every couple of weeks for a few minutes. When that happens, nothing’s on the radio but hysterical religious talk. Rumors of goings-on in the rest of the world are vague.

While life is lawless and harsh, it’s not without charms. Local communities are active and productive. Neighbors know and help each other. People grow and trade their own produce and livestock, and meals are tasty — lots of buttery cornbread, eggs, chicken, steaks, vegetables, and fish. They get together and play music, and because people aren’t in their living rooms watching TV, they attend live shows.

As a budding urban homesteader, I found this way of life fascinating. No one can predict the future, and I doubt ours will be much like the one depicted here, but I think it’s possible that Kunstler has come closer to showing us what might be in store than anyone else.

—Mark Frauenfelder

Simple, Clean, and Green

Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing by Michael de Jong

$8 Joost Eiffers Books

I’ve carried around this book for at least a year. At times, I’ve felt like a clean-freak Johnny Appleseed, whipping it out and offering up easy, green cleaning solutions to anyone who mentioned they had a dirty problem. And people keep coming back to borrow the book or look up another cleaning technique in the alphabetical index.

The list of ingredients includes just 5 common items: lemon, salt, baking soda, vinegar, and borax. The charts and instructions are elegantly simple: “Soak your rusty tools in white vinegar for a few hours or overnight.” And de Jong’s snippets of wisdom are to the point: “Fix it, change it, clean it, make it better, or get rid of it.”

At home, we’ve used it over and over again, and I’ve been amazed at how it’s helped get my copper teapot clean and de-tarnish a silver trinket, all while keeping the entire family entertained.

With strong-smelling and potentially harmful commercial products, there’s no way I’d want my kids to help polish copper or brass. But using some salt and a half a lemon rubbed in circles is fun, smells nice, and is a bit messy — perfect for my 6-year-old to help with. Plus, the results are nothing short of magic.

Even more magical was the neat way to get the tarnish off silver plate. Who knew aluminum foil, boiling water, and baking soda could make tarnish literally jump?

—Shawn Connally

Modern City Living, Perhaps

The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
$17 Process Books

This is a delightfully readable guide to front- and backyard vegetable gardening, food foraging and preserving, and other useful skills for anyone interested in taking an active role in growing the food they eat. I learned about composting, self-watering containers, mulching, raised bed gardens, and raising chickens by reading this info-dense book.

Unlike many self-sufficiency books, this one isn’t unrealistic, preachy, or dogmatic. Instead, it’s honest and often humorous. Coyne and Knutzen are wonderfully lucid and accessible writers (Knutzen wrote a drip irrigation how-to on page 72). They also walk the walk — I visited their Los Angeles home, touring their abundant vegetable gardens and henhouse filled with clownish chickens — plus they run a terrific blog at homegrownevolution.com.

—MF

Stabs at Meaningful Living

Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life by Jenna Woginrich
$21 Storey Publishing

Jenna Woginrich is a young web designer who wanted to meaningfully participate in the systems that keep her alive and well. Her book is a humorous and useful account of her attempts to raise chickens, grow vegetables, keep bees, raise rabbits, play mountain music, and preserve food. She’s not always successful (varmints tore her beehive apart, for instance) but she doesn’t let mishaps discourage her from experimenting with new ways to become more self-sufficient. The end of the book has an appendix with resources for getting started in modern homesteading. You can follow her continuing experiences on her blog at coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com.

—MF

Solar Tech History

A Golden Thread: 2,500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology by Ken Butti and John Perlin

Out of print Cheshire Books, Van Nostrand Reinhold

I’ll never forget the first image I saw when I picked up this book a few years ago — a vista of Los Angeles circa 1900 looking shockingly akin to a rural Swiss village, a number of roofs scattered with mysterious boxes soon explained to be solar water heaters.

In this magnificent book on the history of solar architecture and technology dating as far back as ancient Greece, the authors offer beautiful, often humbling technologies, city plans, and outlandish ideas that were somehow replaced, abandoned, or just plain forgotten.

More than just a fun read on the focusing of resources, A Golden Thread boldly challenges misconceptions that solar power is still in its developmental stages, yet leaves you feeling like this is just the beginning of something great.

—Meara O’Reilly

Chofu Wood-Fired Hot Tub

$800 islandhottub.com

The Chofu is a very simple, and very beautiful, DIY wood-fired hot tub heater. It looks like a potbellied stove with an Eastern aesthetic, and it comes from Japan. Any container that will hold water can be the hot tub (metal stock tanks are a great choice).

The stove is connected to the tub by two openings. The lower opening allows cold water to fill the stainless steel water jacket that makes up the Chofu’s round sides and top. As the water is heated by the fire, hot water rises to the top and pours out the upper opening into the tub, and colder water from the tank is drawn back in. This is the power of a thermosiphon; no pump is needed. The Chofu naturally circulates the water, letting you have a hot soak completely off-grid.

We got our Chofu in the mail, and setting it up was a very easy project. In fact, the hardest part is connecting the pieces of stovepipe together. It can all be done in under an hour.

To keep things eco, try burning pressed wood logs made from industry sawdust byproduct, and be sure to choose logs free from adhesives. Stoke the fire every 45 minutes, stir the water as well, and in about 4 hours, a 250-gallon tank will be close to 104˚F.

The Chofu setup is very open to mods: employ a lid to keep your tub cleaner, longer, without the use of chemicals, or insulate the tub to increase efficiency. It also appeals to the DIYer who’s budget-minded. While the stove ($800 including shipping) and tank ($200 locally) will certainly set you back, it’s a fraction of the cost of a new manufactured hot tub, and the Chofu will never cost you a penny in electricity.

It’s a must for the modern homestead.

—Brookelynn Morris

Get Your Fix

Free fixya.com

The radio on our Honda Civic Hybrid stopped working while we lent it out last year. The display just prompted “Code,” which we didn’t have since it was a salvage car we’d bought from a restorer. Our (replacement) owner’s manual informed us that this was an anti-theft feature that activated when the car’s power disconnected. Two garages I called told me that I had to take the car in and “have the radio pulled,” but after searching various online forums, I found a better solution. Thanks, hondacarforum.com member honda-guy!

More recently, I learned about FixYa, a website dedicated to sharing troubleshooting tips for all products. The Honda radio code trick is in there (it’s the first thing I checked), as are countless other nuggets, all organized clearly and ranked by other users. I’ve seen other sites attempt a similar function without reaching the critical mass needed to succeed, but FixYa seems to have finally done it, becoming the place people know to go for this kind of information. I have since “paid it forward” by posting a Netgear wireless router trick I learned from a patient and cheerful man on Netgear’s technical support line. Meanwhile, we’ve had no trouble with the Civic, and the only mystery is why its power was disconnected in the first place.

—Paul Spinrad

Game Creation for Everyone

Multimedia Fusion 2
$120 clickteam.com

If you can confidently surf the web, edit graphics on a computer, or use a spreadsheet, you can probably use Multimedia Fusion (MMF) to write your own programs and games. And you won’t have to learn a cryptic computer language either. Best of all, it’s fun!

MMF is a computer program that lets you easily create Windows programs. The secret is that a team of programmers have done a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes, so instead of writing code, you can “drag and drop” and use menus to create your program. My 9-year-old son has created his own games using MMF, and together we made a simple CD player in about 5 minutes. I use MMF to write computer programs for myself as well as the museum I work for, and the results have been outstanding.

My favorite thing about MMF is that it makes me look smarter than I really am. It lets me focus on what I want my program to do, rather than the actual coding. It’s like having access to a whole team of software developers.

The only drawback is that there’s no Mac version. Still, there’s a free trial version at clickteam.com, and it’s very helpful to talk to other users in the forums.

—Dave Stroud

Have you used something worth keeping in your toolbox? Let us know at [email protected].