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December 30, 2009

Turn your body into an instrument with the Stompolin

Mike Rotondo created an instrument using an Arduino, Max/MSP and some sensors for a Physical Interaction Design workshop at Stanford's CCRMA. As he puts it: "When the guitar is too sexy and the piano makes too much sense, it's time to stick a bunch of sensors to your body with electrical tape and plug it all into your computer!"

How it works:

There's a small electret microphone attached to my foot, and two bend sensors on my arm: one in my elbow, and one on my finger. The signals from each of these are routed through an Arduino microcontroller into a Max/MSP patch.
The microphone output is routed through a percussion follower, and impulses (like stomps) trigger the instrument's tone generation. The sound of the instrument is created by a a plucked string model and some ADSR'd harmonized sine waves. If the impulse picked up by the mic is heavy in high frequencies, the sound is captured and "granulated" around a bit at a random interval.

Stompolin

Posted by Gareth Branwyn | Dec 30, 2009 05:00 PM
Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Suggest a Site

China's DIY aviation community

From Wired's Autopia blog:

China is home to a widespread DIY culture fed by necessity (the mother of all invention) and innovation. These garage builders and innovators are, like their products, often called shanzhai. Literally translated, it means "mountain strongholds," but it has come to mean nonprofessional or clandestine manufacturers turning out products from the basic to the highly sophisticated. These shanzhai often take familiar products, concepts and marketing memes and remake them with peculiar but innovative twists.

Aviation is by no means an exception, and it has its share of shanzhai builders. But there is more to it than that. China's emerging aviator class is spreading its wings with a plethora of approaches, from the ramshackle to the sophisticated to the potentially revolutionary. They're using everything imaginable, from old motorcycle engines to electric motors to even their own legs, like Mao Yiqing and his human-powered airplane shown above. You could easily plot these adventurous innovators on a graph, with the X axis showing their skill and the Y axis their financial means.

The Sky's the Limit for China's DIY Aviators

DIY steadicam, version five

Back in July, I blogged about YB2Normal's inexpensive PVC gimbal for a home-made steadicam rig. Since that time, William has been steadily refining his design. Version five, pictured above, features a redesigned gimbal incorporating an off-the-shelf auto part. [via Hack A Day]

From the pages of MAKE:

Johnny Lee showed us how to build a $14 Video Camera Stabilizer way back in MAKE 01.

Amazing animated optical illusions

Youtube user Brusspup made these animated optical illusions by carefully combining slices of different drawings, then sliding an image of vertical lines over the top. That part is straightforward. The illusion comes in when your brain interprets the small white slits that it sees into larger shapes. He also has a nice tutorial on the technique:

I can understand doing this by hand to learn how this works, but it seems like the perfect kind of task to automate with a computer program. Anyone up to the challenge? [via laughing squid]

More:

Shuttle replica and supplies looking for a home

Make: Online's space correspondent, Rachel Hobson, points us to this article in Florida Today:

After months of searching for a new home for a full-scale model of the space shuttle's crew compartment, Chuck Ryan is beginning to accept the replica he spent almost 15 years building may soon be destroyed.

He is now trying to find takers for 1,000 toggle switches, 50 gallons of paint, 40 gallons of fiberglass resin, plywood, tools and other never-used materials.

"I'm still holding out a little bit of hope that someone wants the shuttle," said Ryan, who would like to donate the 33-foot long, 10-ton model and see it used as a monument or for a space camp.

How lumber is made

Ever wonder how you can get rectangular lumber from round trees? I figured that it involved a lot of sawing, but didn't realize how much handling was required. The video above is of the Jackson Lumber Harvester 3 Saw Vertical Edger. [via core77]

More:

Intern's Corner: DIY LED yo-yo side caps

MAKE: Intern's Corner
Every other week, MAKE's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.

By Eric Chu, engineering intern

There aren't many low-budget ways to customize one's yo-yo. The most common ones are either painting or dyeing, but they're limited: paint chips off with time, and dyeing is only for plastic yo-yos.

Being a yo-yo fanatic, I regularly visit the blog yoyoskills.com for yo-yo news. There I recently read a post about spin-activated LED side caps that fit into the side of yo-yos. They're low-cost ($6) and look very cool; a perfect customizing add-on for a yo-yo. Unfortunately, they only come in one size, thus only fitting a few yo-yos.

I thought it'd be a fun project to make my own set (and it was!). I used a One Drop Project yo-yo.

How It Works
Using the centrifugal force generated by the spinning of the yo-yo, the spring, acting as the switch, is pulled outward. It makes contact with the positive leads of the LEDs, thus completing the circuit, turning the LEDs on.

It looks great in action, day or night. Check out the video:

I'll be writing up the project as a DIY article soon. Look for it in MAKE Volume 22 this spring.

How-To: Build a vintage diving helmet prop

dark door prop diving helmet.JPG

Interesting tutorial over on Propnomicon, by Richard Bird, who built this vintage diving helmet replica prop for a recent LARP adventure for London's The Dark Door group.

Yours truly guest-blogs Make & Meaning

Make: Online guest contributor and all-around pal Paul Overton, of Dude Craft fame, has kindly solicited an article from me for his new creative-process blog Make & Meaning. My piece is called On The Care and Feeding of Ideas. Thanks, Paul!

How-To: Structured light 3D scanning

Wow, an incredible Instructable fromKyle McDonald:

The same technique used for Thom's face in the Radiohead "House of Cards" video. I'll walk you through setting up your projector and camera, and capturing images that can be decoded into a 3D point cloud using a Processing application. Most 3D scanning is based on triangulation (the exception being time-of-flight systems like Microsoft's "Natal "). Triangulation works on the basic trigonometric principle of taking three measurements of a triangle and using those to recover the remaining measurements

How-To: Using an accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller

Evil Mad Scientist Labs posted a thorough update to their accelerometer tutorial using ADXL335 breakout board, ATMega168 chip, and LEDs as indicators -

The big idea is that when there is no acceleration in (say) the X-axis direction, both X-axis LEDs are off. When it detects acceleration one way, the red LED lights up (and brighter, the higher the acceleration is) and it lights up blue for acceleration in the opposite direction. (Naturally, the other two axes work the same way.)

The full step-by-step + source code can be found on EMSL's site.

Arduino & XBee wireless accelerometer

Laser-cut Connect Four game looks mighty fine

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Mark Demers shows off the latest from Spikenzie Labs, Four in a line - a laser-cut Connect Four style game which looks a heckuva lot slicker than its retail counterpart.

I've always been a last minute Christmas shopper and it has usually worked out. This year I had a request to get a Connect Four game, but I couldn't find it in stock anywhere. So I decided to make my own version of it.

After working like one of Santa's Elfs for a few hours (minus the green tights) I had beautiful Connect Four style game.

The project's design files can be found over at Thingiverse

Use your N900 as a PS3 controller

Using BlueMaemo, the Bluetooth multi-tool for Maemo, you can turn your Nokia N900 into a PS3 controller. Install the latest alpha via the application manager with extras-devel enabled. The above video is in Italian. [via Maemo Central]

In the Maker Shed: Chumby Guts

MKCH1-2 2.jpg
We still have a few more Chumby guts ready for you to hack, modify, or you can just make a cool enclosure and enjoy. What's a Chumby? Glad you asked! It's an amazing little piece of technology that lets you get what's best on the web and delivers it right to you on it's 3.5" touch screen LCD. You can play games, check the weather, twitter, news, music, and even watch YouTube videos. All of this is done via you home's wireless Internet connection. Get 'em while you can, we have very limited stock!

Here's what comes in each kit:

3.5'' LCD (320hx240v 16bpp TFT) with Touch Screen
Texas Instruments TSC2100 Programmable Touchscreen Controller with Stereo DAC
Plastic Front Bezel
Gasket
Aluminum Frame
4 x Screws to attach Aluminum Frame to Front Bezel
350MHz Freescale iMX21 MC94MX21DVKN3 ARM9 controller Motherboard Circuit Card Assembly with Samsung 64MB SDRAM on 32-bit data path and Hynix HY27US 64MB NAND Flash ROM
Kionix KXP74-1050 3-axis accelerometer
Daughtercard Circuit Card Assembly
Three USB 2.0 full speed ports, one internal, two external
Chumbilical Flex Cable from Daughter card CCA to Motherboard CCA
Wifi Riser Circuit Card Assembly
USB Wifi Dongle based on the Xterasys 3135G 802.11g USB Wifi adapter (ralink chipset)
Flex Cable for Wifi Riser CCA to Motherboard CCA
3 x Screws for Wifi Riser CCA to Motherboard CCA
3 x Standoffs for screws for Wifi Riser CCA to Motherboard CCA
2 x 2W StereoSpeakers
4 x Screws for Speaker to Plastic Speaker Holder
Plastic Speaker Holder
Switch for Bend Sensor
Plastic Switch Holder
2 wire cable with 2 pin connector (from Daughterboard CCA to switch)
2 x Screws to Attach Switch to Plastic Switch Holder
12 V DC 1A Power Supply
Built-in microphone

(Note: actual parts may vary slightly due to manufacturing and availability)

Human-shaped bed

Humanbed
A maker sent me a photo of this amazing human-shaped bed (art) -- anyone know more about it?

Playing music using Dominoes

Here's a low-tech way to share some holiday joy. Jared Lyon used a bunch of dominoes and some strategically placed bells to play the song 'Carol of the Bells' as the dominoes fell down. Fun stuff! [via neatorama]

Favorite MAKE video series for 2009

What were your favorite videos that we did for 2009? There were too many to post each one, so please vote by the series and then tell us what your favorite episodes were in the comments.

How-To: Bass drum microphone shock mount

Instructables user brainparts built this acoustically-isolated microphone mounting ring for his kick drum using bungee cords and a short slice of 6" aluminum pipe, all for about $20. He says if he were to do it again, he'd just use PVC pipe for the ring.

Best projects of 2009, MAKE magazine

What were your favorite project in the magazine this past year? All of the major projects are listed below. Vote for your faves. And PLEASE tell us know in comments if you actually built any of projects and what your experience was, if you were happy with the results, etc.

Learn to write games using Python

Interested in learning how to program, or know someone who is? Then you might want to check out Al Sweigart's free book, Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python. Now in it's second edition, the Creative Commons-licensed book was written to help anyone, young or old, learn to program in the powerful Python language.

From the introduction:

Programming isn't hard. But it is hard to find learning materials that teach you to do interesting things with programming. Other computer books go over many topics that most newbie coders don't need. This book will teach you how to program your own computer games. You will learn a useful skill and have fun games to show for it!

This book is for:

Anyone who wants to teach themselves computer programming, even if they have no previous experience programming.

Kids and teenagers who want to learn computer programming by creating games. Kids as young as 9 or 10 years old should be able to follow along.

Adults and teachers who wish to teach others programming.

Anyone, young or old, who wants to learn how to program by learning a professional programming language.

It looks like it could be a great place for a budding programmer to start, and since it available online for free, why not check it out? [via O'Reilly Radar]