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MAKE
Stunning Sand Paintings by Joe Mangrum
Using nothing but colored sand, his bare hands, and much patience, New York artist Joe Mangrum creates beautifully vibrant large “paintings” that are here today, gone tomorrow. Mangrum is drawn to the ephemeral nature of sand and how he can make an aesthetically pleasing work that is enjoyed by many people throughout a day and swept up in the end. For those in New York, Mangrum will be at the SOFA Art Expo this weekend. Story Eyed Media did a great, short video profile of Mangrum, where you can see how he creates his pieces:
             For Those About To Launch, We Salute You
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         Matthias Wandel’s Carving Machine
 Matthias Wandel’s Woodgears.ca may be my favorite personal maker website. It’s clean, well organized, packed with resources, and every click brings new inspiration. I can get stuck there for hours, so be careful when you click through. This time it’s Matthias’s homemade 3D pantograph carving machine / pattern duplicator that I’m fixated on. Mechanical pattern-copying machines like this, of course, are not new. They’re often used in restoration work, for instance, to replace a damaged architectural detail by directly copying a surviving original. There are commercial versions, but it’s also pretty common for shops to build their own, and Matthias’s is one of the best looking DIY versions I’ve ever seen. Plus, the build is documented with his characteristic attention to detail. In the embedded video, above, Matthias is using it to cut patterns of pips in giant wooden dice. More:
         Bronze-Casting Timelapse
French artist René Zaki shot this great time-lapse video showing the process of creating a bronze bust from a lump of clay to the finishing touches. The actual build time is shorted from 4 days to 10 minutes!          Young Kenyan Maker Develops Lion-B-Gone
For people who raise livestock near Nairobi National Park, lions are a major-scale pest. Two years ago, Richard Turere, who was responsible for herding his family’s flock, noticed that lions never struck ranches where people were walking around with flashlights. So the self-taught maker, who is now 13, rigged up a system of flashing LED torches around his family’s stockade, drawing electricity from the solar panel and battery circuit that powered their TV. Since installing the system, they have suffered zero lion attacks, unlike 5 of their neighbors. Richard was recently awarded a scholarship to the Brookhouse School in Nairobi, where he plans to study engineering. From AfriGadget          Ask MAKE: DIY Algae Biofuel
Phil asks:
 Hi Phil,
If you’d still like to explore your own algae bioreactor for either solid fuel or food (spirulina), there are a couple of ways to go. Michael Fischer, the Stanford student from the video you sent, shows how to create his setup on an Instructables page. Also, algal fuel guru Aaron Baum sells starter kits through his site Algae Lab. If you want a professional consultant for a larger system, I’d recommend contacting him. If anyone has experience with algae bioreactors or has more information, please post in the comments. More:
         Concrete Canvas Furniture
Here designer Florian Schmid has wrapped the dry material around a demountable wooden form, sewn it at the edges with what looks like Paracord, applied water, and then removed the form after the cement has set. His website, linked below, shows off a chair, a bench, and three different stools made with the same method. Concrete Canvas is manufactured in the UK, and it looks like they are willing to supply small “man-portable” quantities. Florian Schmid – Stitching Concrete More:          Where’s The Logic In That?
There are several ways to visualize – to aid in understanding – logic gates. These can include truth tables (the OR truth table is shown here), Venn diagrams (see Wikipedia’s entry on logic gates), or my favorite the “mechanical comparison” which Platt makes on pages 187-189 of his book, visualizing the notion of logic gates with physical sliding plates on a bubblegum machine. There are also several ways to visualize the pin order of gates. Sometimes these are shown as lines from left to right through the IC, with inputs on the left and outputs on the right. But the most common, and by far the most helpful, is the technique shown above, which imposes the gates on a diagram of the IC, with inputs and outputs shown as line traces, and symbols corresponding to the type of gate. We’ll explore one other type of logic gate in a future installment of Weekend Projects, but be sure to pick up the Make: Electronics books for further reading on logic gates, as well as several breadboard experiments that put these theories to use! Sign up below for the Weekend Projects Newsletter to receive the projects before anybody else does, get tips, see other makers’ builds, and more. More:
         One-Pallet Park Bench
Julien Deswaef of Brussels, Belgium, designed this bench built from a shipping pallet.
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This project will also introduce some new components to our arsenal of 
