DARPA is funding the creation of 1,000 Makerspaces in high schools across the country to get American kids interested in making things again.
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Kickstarter is popular, successful, and is basically a name brand in DIY project funding. But the market is big, and the alternatives meaningful. Here's the shortlist you should know.
1 // MakerBot's Thing-O-Matic is
a user-friendly descendant of the rapid-prototyping machines utilized by industrial designers for years. Such machines can produce
three-dimensional "rough drafts"
of products prior to their mass-manufacture. The Thing-O-Matic
is smaller (and cheaper) than
industrial-grade machines. It
stands 16 inches high and has an area of 1 square foot.
Search the web for home wine-making supplies, and you’ll be greeted by so many plastic buckets and airlocks and hoses, you’ll feel like you just stumbled onto a construction site. DIY vinification is a complex (and unsightly) affair. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as Dutch design student Sabine Marcelis shows.
He last turned heads by funding budding entrepreneurs who quit college to start businesses. Now Thiel's Breakout Labs is doing the same for scientists, granting $50,000 to $350,000 to entrepreneurial-minded free radicals.
From a first-grader curious about how a clock works, to a designer who needs to make a quick-and-dirty mockup of an in-development gadget, we could all use a little help when it comes to understanding and manipulating our interactive world. Two designers at Seattle-based Teague, Matt Wolfe and Adam Kumpf, think their open-source electronics kit called Teagueduino can go one step further--turning anyone into a machine-creating, robot-making, game-designing whiz.
