Normally MIG welding requires a big fancy machine, sometimes also with a large tank of pressurized gas. Instructables user TimAnderson managed to hack together a hand-held wirefeed MIG welding gun and a couple car batteries for a more portable effect. He writes:

Here's my new wire-feed (MIG) welder.
All of it.
They sell these things as accessories for commercial MIG units, but they can also work great on 24 volts from two car batteries.
I have it loaded with .030" flux-core welding wire.
It cost me less than $100 on ebay.
The "Ready Welder" is a similar commercial product.
WARNING: The tip is electrically on all the time!

One of the highlights of the Faire for me was seeing Steve Davee's work-in-progress Maker's Notebook hacks. He's adding a binary page indexing system with a conductive bookmark and LEDs on the cover that tell you where the marker is in the book. He also has plans to solarize the book and to add an Arduino and capacitive touch to the cover to do something (play sounds, maybe).

He says he has trouble following through on projects, so Steve, if you're reading this: follow through! We'll send you more Notebooks if you finish this one, document it, and send us the docs. This is just the type of project we were hoping to inspire with the book. We want more of this!

If YOU have a physical computing/electronics hack of your notebook, or any sort of mod, send us pics. We want to see what folks are doing with their notebooks. Also: If you've designed a cool project IN your notebook, we'd like to see how people are actually using the book.

In the Maker Shed:

You can't tell from the video that there's no throttle: just an on-off switch. Because adding a motor to a tallbike wasn't dangerous enough;)

John Edgar Park writes on his blog:

I love coffee and I love laser cutters, so I was thrilled to read about this collision of the two on Tonx's blog.

jpixl.net

Okay so this one is not scary or hardcore at all. It's basically two skeletons on a see-saw that is powered by a simple to use and cheap wiper motor. Not scary but for those Halloween parties or kid friendly events it's very whimsical.

Jerry shares his strategy for weather-proofing a webcam for use on his balcony. Nice video documentation - one might consider using some silicone to seal up those cable ports. You can see the results of his rig on his site.

More:
DIY $27 Outdoor Webcam Enclosure

Here's the link to learn more on EFF's site.

On Sunday afternoon at Maker Faire Austin, the lights went out. All power was lost in one whole area of the fairgrounds. It turned out that a dome tent from the camping area had taken flight in a dust devil and crashed into the power lines. Fernando Rizo got a couple of great shots of the tent moments before impact.

The story does not end well for the tent

MIDI input added to a classic Dubreq Stylophone by by Diabolical Devices / Class A Electronics. [via Synthtopia]

Just some background, Josh is behind the very cool Stribe project and we've posted about it before (and again right before Maker Faire since it was there). When it was posted up we said "open source" project, but since some folks consider "open source" as something you can sell I added an update that said, it's actually non-commercial since that's what the Maker (Josh) wanted, no commercial versions... Well, this sparked off a very, spirited, discussion about what "open source" is. So check out the thread and comment there (or here) with your thoughts. It's all very new and it seems like a lot of hardware is now released under Creative Commons, folks are calling things open source hardware, open hardware or just not calling it anything... and some are releasing all but one part of a project. I think we're going to all end up calling things "Open Hardware" and then have some indicator of the usage... This is an "Open Hardware Project" with a "Non-commercial manufacturing license". Dive in!

THE NEW MILLENNIUM PAPER AIRPLANE CONTEST and corresponding book by Klara Hobza is a multifaceted artwork inspired by a historic paper airplane contest that took place in 1967 at the Great Hall in what is now the New York Hall of Science. Built by Wallace K. Harrison to display rockets in the 1964 World's Fair, the Great Hall is a secular cathedral of concrete and colored glass; for Hobza's one-day event, this unique location will harbor aircraft of a different scale.

The competition is open to the public, and participants are invited to fly their planes in any and all of the judging categories listed below:

• Distance flown (measured in a straight line from start point to finish point)
  
• Duration aloft (measured from time released to time it lands on any surface)
  
• Beauty (subjective measurement based on judges' assessment of both the plane's physical qualities and the beauty of the flight itself; this category does not depend on distance flown or duration aloft)
  
• Spectacular Failure (subjective measurement based on the audience's assessment of both the plane's physical qualities and the most spectacular crashes)
  
• Children's division (competition for participants under ages 13)
  
• Surprise category

Airplanes may be folded from letter-size paper, up to 8.5" x 11" / A4, or smaller; larger sizes are not allowed. The paper should be an average office paper (20-24 lb weight). Cutting and minor gluing of your airplane is permitted; stapling is not.

When I was working for Wired, we coined the term jitteratti (what the digerati become after too many cups of coffee). Caffeine and tech journalism (all journalism, for that matter) seem to go hand-in-hand. So it's sort of fitting that Wired is doing a Starbucks art contest. The idea is to make something cool and interesting exclusively out of Starbucks junk (cups, stirrers, drink holders, etc). Tape, glue, and string are allowed. There doesn't appear to be any prize for the winner, except coverage on the site. C'mon Wired, pony up something decent.

To inspire you, Wired posted this incredible TIE Fighter, made by Wired photographer Dan Winters.

Contest: Make Art From Starbuck's Junk [via Bonnie Burton's Twitter feed]

Interruption-resistant direct drive:
The "direct drive" circuits work well for their design function, but are rather basic. They provide no energy storage, and so are quite vulnerable to blinking out when a bird or cloud passes overhead. For some applications, like running a small fan or pump, that may be perfectly acceptable. For other cases, like powering a microcontroller or other computer, a brief power interruption can be disruptive. Our next circuit design adds a supercapacitor as a "flywheel" to provide continued power during brief interruptions.

Adding a microcontroller:
Our last circuit examples extend the previous designs by adding a small AVR microcontroller. We use the voltage output from the solar panel again to perform darkness detection, but instead take it to an analog input of the microcontroller. The microcontroller is potentially a very low current, efficient device that lets you save power by not running the LED all the time, but (for example) waiting until an hour or two after darkness and/or fading the LEDs on or off, or even intermittently blinking for very low average power consumption.

Simple Solar Circuits

This is a really cool project posted by our friends over at instructables.com. Learn how to make it here.

Of course if you have the skills to make something like this be sure to enter our huge Halloween DIY Contest when you have the chance. Time is running out!

Many who admire Stanley's entrepreneurial pluck are turned off by his cavalier attitude toward risk. "The guy's amazing - he's really cool," says Richard Boggs, technical superintendent at yacht brokerage firm Camper & Nicholsons International. "What disturbs me is that he's taking down people who don't fully understand the risk. That's just wrong, morally and ethically. It's illegal everywhere but the Third World, and for very good reason."

In the course of nearly 1,000 dives, Stanley has managed to amass an enthusiastic clientele. At the end of one ride, a customer was so wowed that he told Stanley that he owned a machine-tool plant in the rural town of Idabel, Okla., and that Stanley could use it free if he ever wanted to build another submarine. Stanley took him up on his offer and spent a year and a half there building a new sub that could carry three people instead of two. It cost him less than $200,000. In gratitude, he dubbed his new vessel Idabel.

Even when carrying one extra paying passenger, Stanley is hardly making a killing. He charges $1,500 per person for a shark dive, which can take more than five hours - not including the time it takes to prep the sub or haul a horse ahead as bait. Stanley conducts about 100 dives a year and posts annual revenues of slightly more than $100,000. He has only a single part-time employee.

To keep himself afloat, Stanley says, "I've had to exploit numerous niches." One is collecting a rare type of mollusk called a slit shell, or Pleurotomariidae, which lives below 300 feet. Stanley figured out how to rig a net on the end of a pole and snag the creatures, earning him up to $3,000 each. "Without them," he says, "I wouldn't have been able to stay in business." Pleurotomariidae are not on any conservationist's list of endangered species - yet.

Featuring stories of accomplished Makers and their amazing projects, accompanied by how-to guides that will inspire the Maker in all of us, Make: will draw viewers to delightful examples of American ingenuity and inspire them to make their own projects.

Stay tuned to this website for regular updates. And be sure to visit www.makerchannel.org for a chance to have your video featured in the show — you provide the content, we'll provide the airwaves!

I really like this one as it could be part of a whole circus from hell type of theme. Every good circus needs a human cannon ball and a knife throwing wheel. The cannon ball is up to you but here is the wheel o death for your knife throwing.

My T-Mobile G1 phone based on Google's Android platform arrived on Monday. It was a big change for me because I've been using Windows Mobile based smartphones since 2002 when I started with the very first T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition. Since Android phones sync directly with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts, this also meant switching away from Microsoft Outlook on my old Windows XP PC. Given this big change, I thought it might be interesting to see if I could sync Contacts and Calendar with my Mac. One of my goals was to only use tools provided by Apple or Google. I wanted to avoid trust issues involved with using third party web services that worked as an intemediatry between the Google web services and my Mac.

Toyota recently unveiled this jazzy-looking station wagon at the New York auto show. The station wagon (bottom photo) opens into a roomy camper (top). Toyota calls this 186-inch-long car the RV-2. It seats four, and stores in any garage. But the clamshell canopy can be unfolded anytime you’re parked, and there’s enough room for the passengers to eat and sleep inside. Beds, table, and chairs store neatly inside when not in use. Unfortunately, there are no definite plans to produce this unique RV, but it’s interesting to see auto manufacturers cooking up some attractive new ideas.