How To Make Your Own High-Tech Xmas Presents

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OH, THE heady days of 2007! The economy was booming, we were living it up on credit and grabbing the latest gadgets. What a difference a year makes. With the credit crunch biting, jobs vanishing and recession looming worldwide, this Christmas is looking a rather bleak affair.

Consumers said they would be spending 7 per cent less on presents this year, according to a survey at the end of October by business consultants Deloitte. That doesn't mean you have to act like Ebeneezer Scrooge, though. Why not put your technology skills to good use and build some home-made versions of the presents you want to give but can no longer afford?

It's easier than you might think. The web has a swarm of sites that show you how to make this year's must-have gadgets from heaps of electronic components and old junk. So there is no excuse not to give your mum that digital photo frame she wants or your nephew a dancing teddy. Not only might you save money and keep tech junk from the dump, your friends and family are more likely to cherish a home-made present than something acquired with a wave of a bank card. At least, so says Eric Wilhelm, who has created Instructables.com, a website forum for people to share their home-made projects.

While studying for a PhD in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wilhelm took up kite surfing. It was an expensive hobby, though, and Wilhelm couldn't afford to buy his own gear. So he began designing his own, hand-sewing the kites and building the surfboards. "Half of the equipment performed beautifully, half failed spectacularly," recalls Wilhelm, who began documenting his designs on his own website.

Soon Wilhelm was inundated with notes from kite-surf dudes asking for advice, sharing their ideas and swapping photographs. Dealing with all the correspondence was time-consuming, and he realised that people like him needed a better way to share their projects online: Instructables was born.

Today the site has step-by-step instructions for 17,000 projects, with as many as 20 new ones added each day. Here you can find out how to make a robot like the one in the movie Wall-E, a flashlight from a Chapstick and an iPod speaker from a tin of mints. More than 350,000 fans rate other people's projects, suggest improvements and add their own photographs and videos. The most popular projects have been compiled in a book, The Best of Instructables.

Of course, people have been "hacking" and modifying - "modding" - gadgets for years. "I've always been taking things apart," says Ilya Eigenbrot, a school principal in Montreux, Switzerland. "I want to find how things work."

Eigenbrot began when he was a student in the 1980s by fixing bits of old equipment and putting together simple computers for friends. Soon he was cannibalising all types of gadgets, including an old boom box that he turned into an in-car CD player. He began by prising the CD player from its plastic casing, then connected it to the car's 12-volt battery via a voltage regulator and glued the whole thing to the dashboard. Magnets placed on top of the disc held it in place as it spun. "It would skip tracks as I drove," Eigenbrot admits, "but at least you could change the disc very easily."

He recommends scouring eBay for broken equipment. Then it's just a matter of waiting until the replacement part you need to fix it comes up for sale. Alternatively, if you're after a common gadget like a laptop, you'll find eBay is awash with machines with cracked screens, faulty hard drives and missing keys. Buy three with different faults, strip them down, reassemble the working parts and you can have a perfect laptop for less than £20.

You don't even have to be handy with a soldering iron to make techie gifts. With pliers, a penknife and some silicone sealant you can transform a Lego brick into a trendy USB flash memory stick. Similar designs cost a small fortune from gift catalogues, yet many companies now give away the central component - a USB stick - for free, says Ian Hampton from Oxford, UK, whose instructions are published on Instructables.

Eigenbrot worries that the popularity of websites such as Instructables will lead to a run on components. "Supplies have dwindled in the past couple of years," he laments. "People know what they are looking for, so it's getting harder to pick up a bargain."

For most modders and hackers, though, saving money isn't the point. "People make things to express themselves," says Wilhelm. "It's a backlash against mass consumerism. When you make something, you value it more and have a deeper connection with it." Better still, your loved ones will appreciate the time and effort you have put into their gifts.

Perhaps that's just as well, because home-made isn't always cheaper. As anyone who bakes can testify, a shop-bought cake is usually cheaper than the individual ingredients. Technology is no exception.

Be inventive, though, and your home-made presents could even earn you money. Two years ago Joe Langevin, an electronics graduate from Seattle, launched the website Hack N Mod (Hack N Mod - Amazingly Cool Hacks, Mods, and DIY Projects) for people to share their hacked and modified gadgets. He pays $40 to anyone who submits an original project that he features on his website. Who knows, you could be one of the few making a profit this credit-crunch Christmas.

Source New Scientist