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Noted hacker Andrew 'bunie' Huang first announced he was to produce a sourcing tool for Shenzhen visitors back in February, and we were naturally intrigued. Now, just four months later, we've got our copy in-hand - and it's everything we could have dreamed. For those unfamiliar, Shenzhen - in particular the Hua Qian Bei area - is something of a holy land to electronics hobbyists. You can find everything there from cutting-edge smartphones to long-obsolete components, but there's an obvious catch: many makers don't speak Mandarin, and many Shenzhen natives don't speak anything but. The traditional, and undeniably best, solution...

The MadLab Arts+Tech accelerator, which we wrote about late last year, has been running for a while now - meaning it's a great time to find out what the twelve lucky makers who successfully applied to the programme have been up to, courtesy a MadLab open studio event. Makers and artists who placed in the accelerator were given funding - up to £10,000, provided by Arts Council England and Innovate UK - along with support from MadLab itself including mentorship, workshops, and practical guidance to help bring ideas to reality. The results, it must be said, are impressive: we've covered...

Accelerometers, which track movement through three-dimensional space, are incredibly handy devices: we've seen them used for everything from alarm-centric Arduino boards to skateboard controllers for virtual reality, and Intel even embedded one directly into the Curie module which powers the new Genuino 101 board. Knowing what it does and knowing how to interpret the data it gives you, though, are two different things - which is why we're thrilled to see Chris Holden's latest experiments over at Nerd Club. During experiments into using physical objects to control electronic systems - "rotating a mug on a coaster as a crude volume...

When we need something, we like to build it - but the idea of building a battery from scratch had never entered our heads, until now. Reddit user 'bigattichouse' is seeking volunteers to build a community around his open-source rechargeable battery design, currently in the prototype stage. Based on iron-air technology, the prototype battery is admittedly low capacity for its size: providing 1.28V open-circuit, the existing prototype - which is undergoing a conditioning process designed to increase its capacity - stores around 100mAh of energy, though based on previous experiments its creator expects it to settle at between 500mAh and...

Anyone who has experimented with an Arduino or similar microcontroller will have come across the phenomenon of a 'floating input': without a pull-up or pull-down resistor pins float somewhere between high and low values, a source of some consternation when you make a typo in your sketch and start looking for button presses on a disconnected pin. Sometimes, though, a floating pin can be used for good - as with Connor Nishijima's latest project, the Anti-GPS. Following his work on the Miduino MIDI playback software and impressive capacitive turbulence sensing, Connor's latest project is amusingly described as his most useless...