Keep your gadgets powered even when you’re off the grid.
MATERIALSPlywood
Jigsaw
Drill
Nails
Hammer
Two 1-inch (2.5 cm) wood slats
5-watt, 12-volt solar panel
Hinge
Soldering iron and solder ¼-inch (6.35-mm) plastic mono plug
Cigarette-lighter Y adapter
12-volt 12AH rechargeable battery
Solar DC charger controller
4 feet (1.2 m) of 18-gauge wire
15-amp DC panel meter
Two female terminal disconnects
STEP 1
Check online to discover your home’s latitude. This is the angle at which you’ll mount your solar panel.
STEP 2
Cut six pieces of plywood for the box. The lid should be slightly larger than the solar panel. Trim the top edges of the side, front, and back pieces
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In honor of National Pie Day, why don't you try one of these fun crafts from the Popular Science archives? Use a pie tin to make a jet engine, a telescope, or a lovely chandelier.
Today is National Pie Day (the less-cool cousin of March 14's Pi Day) and, to celebrate, we've compiled 10 fun and easy pie-tin crafts from the Popular Science archives.What do a hipster chandelier, an amateur telescope, and a living-room jet engine have in common? You can make each one with an ordinary pie tin!
Click here to enter the gallery
Cast your own bogus bullion.
Last September, a New York City gold dealer spent $72,000 on his worst nightmare: fake gold bars. The four 10-ounce counterfeits came with all the features of authentic ingots, including serial numbers. That’s pretty scary when you consider how many people own gold—or think they do.I’ve been a fake-gold fan ever since author Damien Lewis wrote me into his 2007 spy thriller, Cobra Gold. My supposed experience making fake gold was pure fiction, yet I’m still treated as a source on the matter. I decided it’s time to call my own bluff and make some real bogus bullion.
Instead of a 10-ounce ingot, I cast a two-kilogram (4.4-pound) fake the size of a Twinkie cake.
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A simple surveillance rig that e-mails photos of visitors.
The mother of invention may be necessity, but French telecom engineer Clément Storck learned his father can play that role too. To remind his forgetful dad to close the garage door, Storck rigged it with a switch that triggers an iPhone alert—a home-automation hack that joined his repertoire of self-closing shutters and a tweeting cat door (see @PepitoTheCat). But Storck’s greatest hack yet is a webcam that e-mails a photo of anyone who rings the doorbell. Follow these steps to build your own—and end speculation over whether it’s UPS at the door or a prankster with a flaming paper bag.Time: 1 hour
Cost: $100 or less
Difficulty: 2 out of 5
1) Set Up A Webcam
Aim a webcam at the welcome
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An open-source, lightweight, personalized prosthetic hand
With 10,000 miles separating them, two makers designed and built a customizable 3-D-printed prosthetic hand for a 5-year old boy named Liam in South Africa for $150 in parts. No power necessary.The idea for Liam's hand started out as Rich Van As's nightmare accident. When Van As, an artisan carpenter, chopped off four of his fingers with a table saw, he vowed to get mechanical replacements. So Van As, in South Africa, researched for months. But only found the X-finger, which costs thousands of dollars. That's when Van As stumbled on a YouTube video of a velociraptor-like claw made by Ivan Owen, a mechanical special
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