EL Wire Couch

It’s easy to add EL wire to furniture! Welted EL wire is great for applying with a stapler while standard EL wire makes great upholstery piping. Learn both techniques, as well as soldering to make easy-connect sections (if your couch is a sectional). Full list of supplies/materials at Adafruit.

New Position at Adafruit

 
I’m ecstatic to announce my new position at Adafruit Industries, heading up the wearable electronics group. It feels great to finally be able to tell you all about my new chapter starting today. Here’s my farewell post on MAKE with a little recap of my greatest hits in the four years I made CRAFT videos, blogged my socks off, and co-hosted Make: Live.

I made a little VHX playlist, the soundtrack to rocking my transition. See y’all around the web!

http://vhx.tv/embed/megaplaya.html?url=%2Fbekathwia%2Fcareer-moves

Beating Heart Headband

The Beating Heart Headband uses a heartrate sensor and perfboard Arduino to flash a heart-shaped LED display to the rhythm of your heart.

This project is a collaboration with Jimmie Rodgers. Build a pulse-sensing headband that flashes a heart-shaped LED display to the beating of your heart! Uses a scratch-built perf board Arduino built from Mintduino parts, the Open Heart LED display, Yury and Joel’s pulse sensor, and a rechargeable lithium battery and power board. The circuit is built into a brocade headband with elastic at the back.

For this project, you will need:

heartbeatheadband.zipDownload
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Quick LED Robot Ornament

Crafting under pressure is irresistible. This year the Craftzine gals suggested an ornament swap– 12 days before Christmas. With a lot on our plates, we all agreed to make time for crafting eight handmade ornaments each, and the deadline made it even more intense. Cheers to speed crafting!

Step 1

Spray paint some scrap cardboard — I chose silver.

Sketch out your robot designs, either in a notebook first or directly on the cardboard.

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Laser-Cut ASCII Heart Necklace

This geeky necklace depicts an ASCII heart, like you’d see in email or text messages: <3! The pieces are laser-cut in Sterling silver, then hand soldered to silver tubes that hang from the 20″ curb chain. The necklace has a high-shine finish and is treated to reduce tarnishing. The pendant measures 1.5″ square, and the two pieces dangle freely with a silver bead between them. This necklace makes a great gift for any special occasion, especially Valentine’s Day. Made with love and lasers in NYC – buy now at the Sternlab store as well as Adafruit and Maker Shed. Discontinued!

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I <3 Milgo Bufkin, they lasered my silver

A post shared by Becky Stern (@bekathwia) on

The 5000W laser cutter that cut these pieces is the size of a living room.

iPhone Gloves

For this project, you’ll need a needle and some conductive thread.

To make a pathway for the electricity to travel, sew a small spot of conductive thread to the fingertip of the glove.

Be sure to leave a long tail of thread inside the finger of the glove to make good contact with your skin.

Make many stitches with the thread to build up a conductive surface.

To cut the thread, first leave a long tail inside the finger of the glove. Then repeat the process on the glove’s thumb.

The hardest part about this project is doing everything left-handed.

When I paid attention to the way I use my phone, I found that the best place for the thumb pad was actually along the side of my thumb.

Try your gloves out on your touch-screen devices and enjoy!

If your gloves don’t work right away, try adding more conductive thread fringe on the insides of your gloves’ fingers.