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Anyone who works with technology will be familiar with the term 'planned obsolescence,' a revenue-driving technique whereby successive generations of a product lose compatibility with their previous generation counterparts - and, in extreme cases, are built with a definite life-span in mind by, for example, swapping out hard-wearing components for parts which will fail sooner. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of video games, where buying a new console typically requires the user to buy entirely new peripherals as well. Hacker Mathieu Laurendeau isn't happy with the status quo, though, and his answer is to turn to...

If you're at all involved in the maker movement, you're doubtless aware of makerspaces and hackspaces - and you likely imagine them as industrial premises filled with an assortment of tools and components. You may not immediately picture a hospital, but that could all change thanks to an initiative dubbed MakerNurse which recently opened its first makerspace within a Texas hospital, with the aim of supporting medical staff in improving health care through hacking and tinkering."Health making takes the art of nursing to the next level," explains Jose Gomez-Marquez, co-founder of MakerNurse, of the concept behind the project. "With the...

We've mentioned before that we love to see the maker community using their know-how to improve people's lives, and that's certainly the case with Indian student Pranav Nandankar: his Electrovision prototype shows how low-cost and beginner-friendly parts can be used to create something of use to people with visual impairments. Interviewed by local news site iamin following a demonstration of his Electrovision cap at the RAIT Technology Festival earlier this month, Pranav explained that he has long been interested in technology. "I have always been very curious about electronic gadgets," he told reporter Deepak Singh. "My first ever electronics project...

As the mainstream media focuses its attention on maker culture, there's an undeniable bias towards big-name companies producing ready-to-rock devices like 3D printers. Even as their prices continue to drop, though, they're hardly impulse buys - but they're not the only way to bring industrial manufacturing methods into the home, and we have been particularly impressed with reddit user Morgan Gillespie's surprisingly simple vacuum-forming table as an impressive demonstration of the alternatives. Vacuum-forming is a tried-and-tested means of moulding plastic without the expense of injection moulding systems. It works in much the same way as shrink-wrapping, but with thicker plastic: place an object on...

Intel and Arduino.cc have announced the first maker-oriented development board to feature the chip-maker's Curie, a microprocessor designed for ultra-low power draw in embedded and wearable projects: the Genuino 101. Regular readers will remember Arduino.cc's announcement of the Genuino branding, the result of a trademark infringement complaint between the original co-founders of the project and the company responsible for manufacturing Arduino hardware. While the initial Genuino products were simple re-spins of existing Arduino designs, manufactured by our friends over at Adafruit, the Genuino 101 is an entirely new beast, and Arduino.cc has partnered with one of the biggest names in...