Hasta La Gadget!

This is adorable: a tiny charcoal BBQ grill using an Altoids Sours tin, two metal computer fan guards, and some sheet metal screws for legs. It looks like it fits one regular-sized briquette. As one of the commentors notes, this is great for marshmallows, but you could also cook a shrimp at a time.

Making it doesn’t require tools more sophisticated than a Dremel – no soldering, no nothing. Release the GeekDads. You could probably bang this thing out and be eating S’Mores before your neighbor’s charcoal grill is hot enough to cook.

Instructables user Vmspionage’s mini-grill was inspired by the earlier eBQ, which uses a full-sized Altoids tin. He also writes that “the propane version is coming soon! ” Now we just need someone to make a MintyBoost-powered electric starter, and we’ll really have something cooking.

Altoids Sours BBQ Grill [Instructables] via Makezine.

See Also:

• DIY Friday: Charge Your iPhone With AAs or Solar Power
• 100 Essential Skills for Geeks (GeekDad Wayback Machine)
• Fire Up The Grill: GeekDad Field Tests A Trio Of Portables …

If you have kids, you’re going to love the Squishy Circuits Project: it involves cooking and electronics, although not at the same time.

Squishy Circuits is a great sets of recipes from Samuel Johnson and Dr. AnnMarie Thomas at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Essentially you will make two batches of Play-Doh, one conductive and one non-conductive, and preferably different colors. The dough can then be formed into any kind of circuit and, with the addition of some wires poking into the dough and some batteries, motors and light-bulbs, you can have yourself some sticky, squishy, educational fun.

The recipes are almost exactly the same, both based on flour, water and oil. The insulating dough has added sugar and granulated alum in the mix to keep the electrons from flowing through, and its water must be distilled. Otherwise, you already have everything you need in the pantry.

I wonder just how complex the circuits can be? My first experiment, after testing the properties of the two batches of dough, would be a swiss-roll capacitor. Imagine how useful that would be: if your phone runs out of energy, you could recharge it. If you run out of energy, you could just eat it. Yummy. I’d better just check on the toxicity of that alum first, though. I remember something about that from crystal-growing back when I was a kid…

OK, I checked, and we’re good to go: Alum is only toxic to humans in doses of around an ounce. This recipe uses a teaspoon, or just 0.167 fluid-ounces. Now we just need some non-conductive cocoa-powder for some really tasty science.

Squishy Circuits Project Page [University of St. Thomas via OhGizmo]

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Limor Fried’s MintyBoost project is a great example of DIY and commercial tech working together. Take an Altoids tin, a couple of AA batteries, and some very smart hackery, and you’ve got a lightweight USB charger that you can use to charge/run your handheld iWhatever, or almost any other phone, camera, or small device that can take a charge off USB power. About a month ago, she released this video outlining the Apple hackery needed to make this work.

Reverse engineering Apple’s secret charging methods from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Clive Thompson profiled Fried and her company Adafruit Industries as part of a 2008 feature in Wired on “open source hardware.” The idea is that hackers like Fried can use what they find out about consumer devices to make and sell their own products, but also to produce DIY kits and share information with others who then build their own projects.

As a case study in the value of sharing this information, consider Rob Scott. Before he took his son on a week-long bike trip this summer, he used Fried’s schematic to hack together what turns out to be a really striking-looking solar charger for his son’s iPod.

It’s always nice to see what the maker community is doing to accessorize their retail gadgets; the results aren’t always super-polished, but they generally solve real problems in important use cases that don’t get addressed by manufacturers, either because they’re too unusual or they can’t be easily solved by more plugs, more peripherals, more complex devices that cost a lot of money. And in turn, we all find out a little bit more about how these magical devices get put together and how they work.

See Also:

• DIY Graphing Calculator Is Built From Open Source Hardware
• Beautifully Hypnotic Video Details Canon Macro Lens Hack
• Hacker Stuffs MiFi Inside iPad, Ruins it in the Process

If you love Nokia hardware but wish for a better operating system, consider what some enthusiastic developers have done.

As part of a project called NITDroid, the developers have created a compatible version of the Android operating system for Nokia’s internet tablets. The result is a device that has the body of Nokia and the brains of Android.

“Nokia’s hardware is fantastic but their software is suboptimal, slow, buggy and not always the best user experience,” says Terrence Eden, a U.K.-based mobile consultant who installed Android 1.6 “Donut” on his Nokia N810. “Android is a much better software environment for Nokia hardware than what Nokia provides.”

Eden’s Nokia-Android hybrid works well except for access to Google Market and apps, he says.

Meanwhile developers have created a stable version of Android 2.2 Froyo for the Nokia N900, which ships with Nokia’s Maemo operating system. They have been able to get calls, data and Google apps going on the hacked device. The only missing feature is camera support.

This is not the first time a phone has been hacked to run an entirely different kind of operating system. Eager to experience Android’s features, some intrepid smartphone users hacked their Windows Mobile phones to run Android.

With Android for Nokia phones, the NITdroid project has had varying degrees of success. So far, they have attempted to port Android for Nokia’s tablet range of devices — which means the Nokia N770, N800, N810 and N900.

“On the N810, everything is pretty much functional. It isn’t a phone so there’s no call functionality to deal with,” says Eden.

But with the N900, users have found themselves unable to use the Android-powered device to make calls on a 3G network or change the screen brightness.

Tweaking the Nokia phones to change its operating system to Android isn’t for everyone, says Eden.

“It’s not something anyone off the street can do,” he says. “It’s a bit like installing Linux on the PC that you bought off Best Buy.”

But for those who are willing to take the risk, Eden has written a step-by-step guide on his blog for getting Android on the N810. The NITDroid wiki also has an installation guide for other Nokia phones.

See Also:

• DIYers Hack Windows Mobile Phones to Run Android
• Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Social Networking Meets Apps in New Android App Store

Photo: Terence Eden

Gardening is about getting your hands dirty and back in touch with nature. But if you are a geek like Andrew Frueh, a graphic designer who lives in Philadelphia, the hobby can take on a high-tech twist.

For less than $200, Frueh has created a garden automation system called GardenBot that uses open source hardware (such as the Arduino) to monitor humidity, temperature and soil conditions. The data is then poured into charts so you can view the world as the plants see it, he says.

“It’s not terribly complicated,” says Frueh, who has put the system into his 120-square-foot backyard garden that has about 20 tomato plants, collard greens, kale and peppers. “The biggest hurdles would be understanding Arduino and having some soldering experience.”

High-tech farming using soil sensors and intelligent management of water resources has been growing among professional farmers. For home gardeners, there are products such as the $50 EasyBloom Plant Sensor that will measure sunlight, temperature, water drainage and fertilizer. But some of those features require subscription, and users can’t hack or tweak it.

Chart shows the conditions in Andrew Freuh's garden over three days.

The GardenBot’s brain is the Arduino board. The rest of the system has a garden station, which is a junction box for all the sensors and a place to secure the wiring.

The key modules for the system are soil moisture sensor, soil temperature sensor, light level and water value. Each of these modules can be built separately and integrated into GardenBot.

Once GardenBot is live, it can send data to a computer so that the information is plotted on a chart and updated every 15 minutes.

Frueh decided to use open source hardware because he was excited by the Arduino microcontroller and the potential to build a system that would be based on modules.

GardenBot has made his gardening experience better and easier, says Frueh.

“We ended up using much less water this year, which was nice,” he says. “It changed how I was thinking about watering the plants.”

Frueh’s GardenBot has been running for about two months with no downtime.

If you would like to build the GardenBot yourself, check out Freuh’s well illustrated and step-by-step instructions on his website.

See Also:

• NASA Scientists Suggest Planting a Lunar Garden
• Geek Gardening: A Wired Guide to Domestic Terraforming
• Passing it On: Sharing Geeky Gardening With Your Children
• Clive Thompson on Why Urban Farming Isn’t Just for Foodies

Photos: Andrew Frueh