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Maker Faire Shenzhen 2016, preparations for which we covered earlier this year, has been delayed for an entirely unforeseen reason: the untimely appearance of Typhoon Haima. Taking place at the heart of the electronics world, Maker Fair Shenzhen has long been a jewel in the crown of the maker event calendar. This year's event promises to be an improvement on the last thanks to a new, more accessible location, but where last year's weather was a little too hot for comfort the shift to October - chosen for, as we wrote at the time, Shenzhen suposedly being "at its most...

If you're going to be in or around Manchester in November, we've got a date to stick in your diary: Maker Assembly is heading to Manchester's MadLab on the 12th of November, and it promises to be another unmissable gathering of the maker scene's best and brightest. We wrote about the first Maker Assembly to hit the UK Maker Belt earlier this year, ahead of Maker Assembly Sheffield at the end of August. Created in partnership with the V&A Digital Programmes initiative and the Lighthouse arts and culture agency, Maker Assembly aims to foster discussion within the realm of maker...

We love building things that make our lives easier, from the RECO resistor cutting robot that measures out and slices ribbons of resistors to the ICSQ Integrated Circuit Squisher, if we can put something together that shaves a few minutes off our day we'll gladly spend weeks perfecting it. We're not alone, of course, and Instructable user Caspar has uploaded a neat trick for recycling an old or worn 12-inch ruler: building a drill bit gauge. Designed to help you quickly distinguish a 1.5mm drill bit from a 1.6mm drill bit, or any other sizes, a traditional drill bit gauge...

Makers love making things - that's where the word comes from, of course - but most also love remaking things, reusing existing components or re-purposing something outside its original designer's intentions to create something new and exciting. Something like a door lock powered by an electric pepper mill, perhaps. Mario Mueller's latest project is exactly that: an electronic door lock capable of recognising gestures, powered by an Arduino microcontroller. The pepper mill comes in because Mario didn't want to take the approach of many electronic door lock projects and replace the existing lock or add a second, but rather wanted...

We've talked before about the gulf that traditionally exists between hobbyist and commercial electronics, and how rapid prototyping and small-scale manufacturing technology is shrinking that gulf every day. Reading about such things is one thing, though, but hearing about it from someone who is living the life is something entirely different. Enter Ronald Sousa. Based in Leeds, at the heart of the UK Maker Belt, engineer Ronald has started a fascinating podcast about his experience running the electronics contracting business Hash Define Electronics (styled as #Define Electronics, because hashtags are #hip). Whether you have a dream of getting into the...