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We only wrote about our friends at fellow UK Maker Belter Kiktronik recently, when they posted a behind-the-scenes tour, but we couldn't resist joining them in celebration of a wonderful hack developed for their Electro-Fashion conductive thread. We design and build a lot of our own handy-dandy tools using the equipment we have at hand, from laser-cut MDF to Arduinos, and it's always wonderful to see the can-do spirit that pervades maker culture in action elsewhere.Take an old and used thread winding machine, an Arduino Uno, our Relay Board Kit, an LCD Screen, a few switches, a 5V Power Supply...

Tom Scott, one of the most fascinating people to ever appear on YouTube, has posted a video best described as a love letter to the great British mains plug. Even if you think you know everything there is to know about good ol' British Standard 1363, you're almost guaranteed to learn something from his demonstrations - including how the standard was influenced by post-WW2 copper shortages and its ongoing impact on safety.I get a little bit patriotic sometimes, and sometimes that's for comedy purposes and sometimes it's genuine, and this is genuine, because I really do believe that the British...

Kitronik is a fellow hobbyist electronics company based right here in the UK Maker Belt, an area currently defined as a box drawn from Hull, through the canal to Nottingham, then the canal back up to Liverpool, which is home to a surprising concentration of exciting maker-themed businesses (ourselves included, of course.) The team at Kitronik has recently posted a behind-the-scenes tour which offers a detailed insight into its founders, workers and facilities, as well as its cultural ethos.Founded in 2005, the same year that Make Magazine first provided the catalyst for the Maker Movement, it is not surprising that...

Simon Ludborzs has posted an interesting look at a project from 10 years ago: a pair of LED lamps he created for his father-in-law's trailer. As well as having created a long-lasting and useful end-product - having survived a decade of use, until the plastic lenses became opaque from weathering - Simon's project offers a fascinating glimpse at changes in design and manufacturing techniques available to makers over the years, including the shift away from hot-air surface levelling (HASL) to immersion silver or tin and electroless nickel immersion gold (ENIG) to meet lead-free PCB requirements and the ever-dropping cost of...

Chinese companies often get a bad rep in open hardware circles, largely thanks to the undeniable product cloning that runs rampant in the region. Not all companies should be tarred with the same brush, however, and ElecFreaks is definitely one of the good guys. This is demonstrated admirably by the company's latest clever creation: a light-pen input device coupled with an LED matrix display to create a low-resolution notepad. In the current market where capacitive touch screens, resistive touch screens, TFT displays are flooding [the market], DIY enthusiasts have rarely used dot matrix screens. Here we use a 5mm 8...