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The big buzz in miniature manufacturing these days is all about the 3D printer, but for our money you can't beat the speed and flexibility of a good laser cutter. Affordable beginners' laser cutters, however, are admittedly hard to come by, which is why we're fascinated by Derby-based Gregory Holloway's MicroSlice. While it's no competition for a full-size laser cutter, Gregory's Arduino-based open-hardware project has captured considerable interest on Kickstarter and Instructables for its ability to cut paper, engrave plastic and wood and even - with a recently-developed higher-powered laser diode and driver - make simple single-layer printed circuit boards....

For many makers, there's a point where an experiment bears surprising fruit and a potential real-world product emerges. For Charles Pax, of the NYC Resistor hackspace, that point was reached recently with the creation of the Pax Instruments T400 datalogger. Based on the Arduino Leonardo platform, the T400 offers four-channel temperature logging to a micro-SD card and a real-time graph on a liquid-crystal display using industry-standard K-type probes at a fraction of the cost of existing lab-grade hardware. Better still, the hardware and software design files are released under a permissive licence for reuse and modification. The T400 is a...

If you've been playing with electronics for a while you may find your projects reaching a level of complexity that requires surface-mount technology (SMT), and that's when things can begin to get expensive. Sky Labs Electronics' Matt Coates found himself in need of a reflow oven for SMT soldering and did what any good maker should at least consider: hacked one together using a cheap off-the-shelf toaster oven, an Arduino, a thermocouple and a relay, all housed in a neatly laser-cut box. It's a great project, but always bear in mind when working with mains voltages that they can easily...

Here at oomlout we’re massive fans of building, rather than buying, tools and equipment. A lot of the devices we use on a daily basis we’ve designed ourselves and shared on Thingiverse, and we keep an eye out for others who have done the same - like Botmaster, who has shared a handy-dandy razor guillotine which is designed for safely cutting heat-shrink and similar tubing to a user-defined length. While our weapon of choice is a laser cutter, Botmaster uses a 3D printer - and if you don’t have one lying around your work area, get in touch with your...

There’s been an explosion of interest in conductive ink from hobbyists, and with good reason: the ability to literally draw a working circuit on a piece of card is great for education. When it comes to attaching components to said circuits, however, things get tricky - a problem Allen Pan believes he has solved with Conductak, an adhesive putty that conducts electricity. Allen is still working on the formulation, in particular on getting the resistance down to acceptable levels, and is seeking a modest $2,250 on crowd-funding site Kickstarter to experiment with new formulations. Allen has also demonstrated Conductak working...