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January 5, 2009

Secret Make Controller project

My friend Usman Muzaffar and I are going to collaborate on a project using the Make Controller (MC). We decided to set a few constraints at the outset and then create something within those constraints.

the controller be hidden inside a hollowed out book.
take advantage of enough of the MC's features so as to differentiate it from an Arduino project. No sense building on a $109 platform that which you can build on a $35 one.
keep it untethered from a computer (no USB or Ethernet cables plugged in). If we want data I/O we'll have to use a wireless component like a ZigBee Xbee.

I brought this to the 2008 Bay Area Maker Faire and solicited project ideas from a bunch of people who came by the Make: magazine booth. From this feedback and some brainstorming with Usman, we are homing in on an idea: The book will sit on your coffee table watching you watching TV. It will sense your IR remote and somehow battle you for control over the TV, perhaps providing you with literary quotes on a display embedded in the book. I'd love to have it open with servos. If we can find the time, we'll try to build this before the 2009 Maker Faire.

Posted by John Park | Jan 5, 2009 05:00 PM
Electronics | Permalink | Comments (0) | Suggest a Site

Scavenging motors from washing machines

Here's a useful tutorial on how to harvest a motor from a waching machine, including a section on how to use bridge rectifiers to produce DC from an AC motor. Supposedly these are ideal for driving wind generators, so check out your wind exposure, make an inexpensive generator, and start charging some batteries!
(via hack a day)

Handmade lens cap

Diylenscap
From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Instead of tracking down and buying a lens cap for that unprotected cam, consider the incredibly affordable DIY alternative - and enjoy the simple pleasure using what you've made. Flickr member safoocat did so, following instructions she found here

Next Dorkbot SoCal, Jan 10

My friend Thomas Edwards, Dorkbot DC founder and former Overlord (now living in LA), wrote to tell us about the next Dorkbot SoCal meeting on January 10, featuring three bio-inspired artists.

Deborah Aschheim (above) creates works that blur biology and technology, exploring concepts of memory, architecture, and neural networks through drawings, sculpture, writing, installation and sounds.

Brian Evans explores the intersection between reductivist sculptural form and the aesthetics of behavior, where structure and thought are fused. He creates simple moving objects with seemingly life-like qualities- electromechanical life forms with motivations only just beyond our understanding.

David Guttman (above) creates interactive works that generate unique colors and shapes from sound and EEG.

More details at:
http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotsocal

Light to sound converter circuit

Lighttosoundconverter
From the MAKE: Flickr pool

5Volt shares info, schematic and video on this simple yet fun/interesting project -

This is my simple light to sound converter. It simply converts light variations into sound. Listen to remote controls, TVs, burning flames, light bulbs and anything that emits either visible or infrared light.

Get more details on how to build your own from his blog - Light to sound converter

DIY gadget makeover

Redesigned Gadget
From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Pauric shares techniques for redesigning/improving consumer devices in need of a makeover. His example project, a 'sunrise alarm clock' -

One of the first things I do with device I buy is take it apart to see how it works, see if there's anything interesting going on inside. There's a lot to learn from doing this and as the Maker Mantra goes - if you cant open it you dont really own it.

Inside this alarm are all the standard parts you get in any $10-$20 alarm clock so I was a little peeved to realize I paid 4 times that for an alarm clock WITH a light bulb that wouldnt look out of place on a Christmas tree. Now I'm super motivated to remake it.

He also includes a nice video rundown of the power tools used in the process - Turn a generic plastic gadget in to something a little more beautiful

Reprogramming pinball machines

MAKE Projects Editor, Paul Spinrad, sent me a link to this project and the following message:

Some CS / Game Development students hacked a Lord Of The Rings pinball machine, taking full control of its sensors, actuators, and display, and reprogrammed it to play Pinhorse -- like the basketball game, but you try to match your opponent's pinball shots in a certain amount of time, guided by the playfield lights and display. Control comes from a Linux PC and a Parallax microcontroller. Here's the project page with a video and academic paper. Naturally, they had to do some heavy-duty reverse-engineering.

The video narrative is a little hard to follow, but it does look like an interesting, challenging project.

Project "Programming Pinball Machines" [Thanks, Paul!]

BaR2D2 - mobile droid bartender

After a long day on Tatooine fighting off Sandpeople and haggling over the price of power converters, Obi-Wan and Luke Skywalker walk into a droid...

BaR2D2 is a radio-controlled, mobile bar that features a motorized beer elevator, motorized ice/mixer drawer, six-bottle shot dispenser, and sound activated neon lighting. The robot is driveable so you can take the party on the road! It was created in my garage using standard hand/power tools and readily available parts and materials.

BaR2D2's creator, Jamie Price, sent us a link that includes all the construction details, as well as a few photos of the droid with C3PO, R2, Vader, and some Stormtroopers at the Dragon*con convention.

Build A Mobile Bar - BaR2D2

Middle-eastern patterned CNC-cut papercraft

Zillij by Chris K Palmer, (modified from a traditional design by his student Elizabeth Ager), 2009, 12" diameter. Cut on the Craft ROBO Pro and assembled by Jeffrey Rutzky.

While teaching architecture at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Chris K Palmer developed Rhinoscripts to calculate intersecting ribs. Using several variables, such as material thicknesses, the script automatically generates vector-based files that, in turn, are used to drive CNC machines (laser and Craft ROBO cutters, 3-axis routers). Not only has Palmer expressed his favorite traditional Middle Eastern patterns, but he also has built, with his students, life-sized domed structures. All models assemble without external fasteners or adhesives, and use only the flat parts themselves, much like sliceforms.

Creating forms using the box slot connection began with work by Akio Hizume, who wrote custom software to calculate patterns, as well as scale and life-sized towers.

[via Bre Pettis' I Make Things]

Natural alternatives to on-demand lighting

Here's a brief overview of non-oil light-producing options from the authors of The Carbon-Free Home. In part:

Increasing the natural daylight in your home is something to take into consideration if you find from your energy diary that you need to turn lights on during the daytime. We are fortunate that our house, designed in the 1930s, has no issues with dark rooms. Every bathroom has a window and every hall has natural light. But some condominiums, apartments, and splitlevel or ranch houses we've seen have a serious lack of daylight.

Sunlight pipes (also called tubular daylighting devices) are low-tech devices that work wonders in dark hallways or bathrooms that have an accessible roof to penetrate. Be careful: every time you make a hole in the roof there is a chance for water penetration and damage. Solar tubes must be carefully installed and the flashing and caulking checked regularly.

(via Chelsea Green)

From one of the manufacturers, here's a diagram of one such solar tube:

(Image via Sunpipe)

And, here's an article on installing solar tubes.

Has anyone created their own version of a solar tube? Other than finding a high-quality plastic dome, reflective film for the interior (mylar?), and making sure you don't create a nice water inlet along with your light tube, is there any reason not to try and homebrew this?

FIRST Robotics competition announced

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FIRST Robotics competition announced... via /.

"FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) has officially announced the 2009 FIRST Robotics Competition. This competition, started by inventor Dean Kamen, encourages high-school students to design and build robots to compete with and against other FRC teams. The competition overview video is available from NASA. This year's competition is called 'Lunacy.' The game consists of a series of 135-second face-offs during which the student-designed robots must pick up 9-inch game balls and deposit them in trailers hitched to the opposing teams' robots. The game field is coated with regolith, a slick polymer material, and special wheels are used to create a low-traction interaction with the crater's surface. Together, these combine to simulate the one-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon. For any readers who are interested in participating, FRC teams can always use more adult mentors."

Benheck's PC Mod Pick of the Day - Atari 800 ITX

My pick for today's PC Mod is the Atari 800 ITX, built by Andy Huston. There is a lot of bias at work here as the Atari 800 was my first computer / gaming system, and I actually still have it sitting on my desk.

Though it is sad to see it with the beloved ANTIC/POKEY chips and other vintage 70's electronics, it's still cool to see a classic computer used in the manner.

For more info and commentary check the rest of the story...

Read full story

The Secret Life of Death Clouds

MOE_clouds
Matt Jones contemplates life by building moving sculptures that fail to replicate it. A graduate student in art at Stanford University, his investigations have led him, among other things, to use an air compressor to animate a respiratory system fashioned from old bicycle inner tubes, and to motorize a carpet of zip ties laced with LEDs to approximate a pulsing, gently respiring, furry hide. His goal: to tease out the vital essence that makes the living live.

It took a giant garbage bag full of hot air to teach him to appreciate the life coursing through his creations. To create the grandiose piece Black Cloud for a death-themed Land Art show in the cactus-studded desert of central New Mexico, Jones needed little more than a pair of scissors and a lot of tape.

He cut out black garbage bags, sealed their edges to each other, and then rigged a squirrel cage fan with ducting to fill the vessel with sun-heated air, floating it several feet above the ground. Once aloft, the Suburban-sized balloon seemed to find a mind of its own in even the gentlest breeze. Trying to steer the cloud with fishing line before a crowd of spectators, says Jones, was "like trying to drag in an orca -- an orca that insists on jumping into cacti." Long patching sessions followed each brief and otherworldly flight.

Despite the difficulties and constraints inherent in making kinetic sculpture (it has to work, after all), Jones says it pleases him more than traditional media. "Besides color, line, and solid shapes," he explains, "there are entire regions [of the brain] devoted to detection of movement, areas untouched by static art."

Certainly, Jones' kinetic works breathe life into many regions of the mind -- especially when they're cooperating. "After the showdown in the desert," he says, "I came to cherish those moments when my work wasn't broken."

>> Matt Jones' website: ojdingo.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 8, page 23 - Eric Smillie.

DSLR camera shutter in action

P^2 captured this very awesome video of a DSLR's exposure process -

First attempt at capturing high-speed motion. This is a Pentax K200D shutter, as seen by a K100D and a high-speed strobe. Timing is provided by a few lines of C bitbanging a PC parallel port (in DOS, with interrupts disabled, natch).

Stop action and rapid recycle provided by the "winder mode" on a Metz 45-CT5, with its 90 microsecond flash duration, and <0.5s recycle time for the hundred shots it took to do this. Acquired shot-to-shot "frame period" is about 1 ms, and this is playing back at about 100x slower than realtime. The K200D shutter speed here is 1/180s.

- K200D shutter video

Penny postcards

USGenWeb, a genealogy site, has a really cool collection of penny postcards, organized by state. I love looking at the old structures - can you imagine driving on this bridge?

Best of CRAFT

Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

Host a MAKE: television screening event!

Build your own Burrito Blaster

We hope this series inspires people all over the country to tinker, build, repair, or invent. To help make that happen, Make: television is happy to provide DVDs for those willing to screen episodes in a meet up or classroom of their own!

We'll send you a DVD with the first 5 episodes to host a screening in your own local robotics, DIY, or school group. Watch an episode (or 5!) with your group and then roll up your sleeves and get down to building. We have detailed PDFs for the projects seen on Make:, just visit www.makezine.tv, or let the show inspire you to build a project of your own.

To host a screening event, email the MAKE: television Outreach Coordinator, Nick Watts, at maketelevision@makezine.com with a brief description of the event.

VV-FlamingLotusGirls(HD)-Vimeo_HDweb.jpg

Watch the Flaming Lotus Girls construct amazing sculptures

Update on the Twittering power usage project

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A lot of folks emailed me about our "Not New Year's resolutions - What are you going to MAKE? What we are making..." How many startups and projects are going to be doing power usage and metering in 2009? TONS - and now many of them seem to be looking at Twitter to pass the information along too.

Here's the latest, we're using a supercap, the Xbee is still parasitic (getting its power from the Kill-a-Watt). This is the one time that a supercap is actually reasonable for use in a project, a rare & very short burst of activity followed by long sleep delays. A supercap is like something between capacitors and batteries.

Oh, here's the outline of the project...

Sany1340

Twittering power usage device

Limor Fried and I are working on a cool project that should be done in early 2009, you take an off the shelf power usage device like the Kill-a-Watt and add an Xbee wireless module - once tapped in to the Kill-a-Watt you transmit the power usage to a local computer and that computer publishes how many watts per day you're using to your twitter account and will also add something like #mywatts so everyone can compare what they use. You could also use an Arduino with ethernet or wireless and eliminate the computer completely. The project will be open source of course and we expect someone will see it and do a commercial product.

Robot kit spins around uncontrollably

This remote controlled robot kit called "Tornader" spins around in every direction and seems like a pretty successful way to make your pets go crazy. Best of all it comes in a kit that you can put together in less than an hour.

Elekit Kit via DVICE

Plantable/reusable calendars

(Via Ecofriend)

Cool: a company selling a calendar with pages that you plant to grow wildflowers.

Cooler: This abstract perpetual calendar:

Or, at the opposite extreme, the Martha Stewart take on a monthly tile calendar.

Coolest: a Maker creating a gift calendar with weekly seed packets that can be grown into food at that time of the year in recipient's climate. For even more eco-factor, actually recycle a 2008 calendar by marking in the holiday / date changes you care about. The days of the week for January 2008 match those for January 2009 if you move the day headers over by 2 (1/1/08 = Tuesday, 1/1/09 = Thursday),and you can embrace the hack to make a calendar that looks like a ransom note:)

If you have any Maker-friendly ways of sustainably ringing in the New Year and maintaining a semblance of knowing what day it is, please comment below!

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Void your warranty, violate a user agreement, fry a circuit, blow a fuse, poke an eye out... Welcome to the Make Blog!

The online premiere of Make: television is January 3rd 2009, visit makezine.tv or iTunes to see the entire first episode! The broadcast premiere will follow shortly after depending on when your local Public Television station airs it.

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WOW! Thanks to everyone involved with Maker Faire Bay Area and Maker Faire Austin in 2008: attendees, makers, exhibitors, sponsors, volunteers, and crew...it was an AMAZING year! Over 1,000 Makers and 87,000+ attendees total! Be sure to check out the photos @ Flickr, and our Maker Faire posts for all the action! Check back for dates for 2009 soon!