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September 9, 2010

World Maker Faire NY: DIYbio on the BioBus interview

World Maker Faire NY is taking place on September 25 and 26 at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. We're really excited to be hosting our first-ever large-scale East Coast Faire and as part of the countdown, we're showcasing some of the amazing makers who will be present. Today, we chat with Dr. Ben Dubin-Thaler, founder of the BioBus project, a high-tech science lab on wheels that brings hands-on science education to schools. The bus itself is a modded 1974 San Francisco transit bus that is now almost completely carbon-neutral.

1. Tell us about the project(s) you're bringing to Maker Faire.
The BioBus, in collaboration with DIYbio, will be showing people that you can do hardcore science and be green at the same time! Outside the bus we'll be showing off our new green roof and other green tech and making a new waste grease collection system, while inside the bus you'll get to make pictures and videos of cells on our research microscopes, as well as isolate DNA.

Detroit Lives documentary

Detroit Lives is a documentary about Detroit and the renaissance of art, culture, and outside-the-box re-development that's happening there. The film was done by Palladium Boots, the footwear company, and stars "Jackass" Johnny Knoxville. The cursing and rock n' roll posing may be annoying to some, but I think the film does a good job of surveying some of the more exciting and innovative things that are happening in the Po-Motor City. Nice to see Bethany Shorb, of Cyberoptix TieLab and OmniCorp Detroit, and some of our other Detroit maker pals in it.

Detroit Lives

More:

• Read some of our own Making Detroit stories
• See highlights from Maker Faire Detroit

MAKE 23: How to shoot mosquitoes with lasers

Huge problem: Malaria kills millions, but you can't just spray DDT anymore to wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes (DDT also wipes out, oh, majestic bald eagles). What do do?

You could search for another toxin to spray. Or, if you're 3ric Johanson at Intellectual Ventures Laboratory, you could invent a new gadget. A gadget that tracks mosquitoes and blasts them out of the air with lasers.

IVL's Photonic Fence is audacious making, and only MAKE Volume 23 shows you exactly how they did it. In "Beam Weapon for Bad Bugs," Johanson takes you inside IVL and explains their technology and how his team solved four key problems to make it work: spot the bugs, target 'em, identify 'em (only females mosquitos bite -- you knew that), and then blast 'em in milliseconds.

Along the way you'll learn about computer vision software, mirror galvanometers, mosquito wing-beat frequency, and how to make what can't be made, when you want to do what can't be done.

Bonus: Make: Online has an behind-the-scenes tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab and their ultimate maker workshop for electronics, photonics, machining, culinary arts, and more, at makezine.com/23/mosquito.

From the pages of MAKE Volume 23:

MAKE Volume 23, Gadgets

This special issue is devoted to machines that do delightful and surprising things. In it, we show you how to make a miniature electronic Whac-a-Mole arcade game, a tiny but mighty see-through audio amp, a magic mirror that contains an animated soothsayer, a self-balancing one-wheeled Gyrocar, and the Most Useless Machine (as seen on The Colbert Report!). Plus we go behind the scenes and show you how Intellectual Ventures made their incredible laser targeting mosquito zapper -- yes, it's real, and you wish you had one for your patio barbecue. All this and much, much more.

EMSL Egg-Bot kit drops this month

I'm generally not much of a kit-buyer, but it seems like each one Windell and Lenore release is better than the last. They almost had me with the Bulbdial clock; I will probably not be able to resist the new Egg-Bot kit. They're taking preorders now, and the first kits are supposed to ship at the end of this month. Looks like new orders are already backed up into October.

More:

• EMSL's interactive Conway's Game of Life exhibit
• Bare-bones evil from EMSL
• Deluxe LED Menorah Kit from EMSL

This week in Maker Events

Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calendar. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calendar!

Coming up this week:
Open Lab Hack Night @757 Labs
Hampton Roads, VA
Friday, Sep 10, 2010, 8pm +

TCP Hack Foo: NetCat and Nmap Too @Hackpittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Sep 10, 2010, 7pm - 9pm

Pirate Party @Pumping Station: One
Chicago, IL
Saturday, Sep 11, 2010, 9pm +

GET LAMP screening @i3 Detroit
Ferndale, MI
Saturday, Sep 11, 2010, 3pm - 7pm

Baltimore/DC Area RepRap Users Group Meetup @Baltimore Node
Baltimore, MD
Sunday, Sep 12, 2010, 2pm - 4pm

Electronics & Hardware Hacking @Arch Reactor
St Louis, MO
Sunday, Sep 12, 2010, 6pm - 9pm

Simon Kit Build Night @Crash Space
Culver City, CA
Wednesday, Sep 15, 2010, 8pm+

Make:SLC
Salt Lake City, UT
Wednesday, Sep 15, 2010, 7pm - 9pm

Start planning for:

FIRST Lego League Poker Night @Heatsync Labs
Chandler, AZ
Thursday, Sep 16, 2010

Grand Opening @QC Co-Lab
Davenport, IA
Friday, Sep 17, 2010 - Sunday, Sep 19 (all day)

Turn Your Arduino into a Web Server! @NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Sep 18, 2010, 1pm - 3pm

Electronica Fest
Linthicum, MD
Saturday, Sep 18, 2010, 10am - 8:45pm

World Maker Faire
Queens, NY
Saturday, Sep 25, 2010 - Sunday, Sep 26, 2010, 10am - 7pm

Documentary highlights Cuban makers' ingenuity

I'm liking Motherboard TV's videos, which focus on cool technological and sociological phenomena that I suspect may appeal to many makers. A couple of readers sent in this one.

In 1991, Cuba's economy began to implode. "The Special Period in the Time of Peace" was the government's euphemism for what was a culmination of 30 years worth of isolation. It began in the 60s, with engineers leaving Cuba for the Unites States, and continues in part today, under the longest trade embargo in modern history.

When Ernesto Oroza, a Cuban-American designer and artist, began studying the technological innovations that have been made during this period, he uncovered a trove of homespun, Frankenstein-like machines that ordinary citizens made for their survival, out of day to day objects. In this episode of Motherboard, we visit Ernesto in Miami to talk about his work and the amazing creations of Cuba's enterprising DIY inventors.

In the 1970s, a group of scientists and mechanics inspired by Che Guevara formed the National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers (ANIR) as a way of organizing and strengthening this homebrew culture, uniting the ethos of the hacker with the needs of an isolated economy and the call of a socialist revolution. Oroza showed us his meticulous collection of these machines, which he has contextualized as art pieces in a movement he calls "Technological Disobedience."

Building-top monster: Brooklyn Griffin

From NYTimes.com:

Perched high above an industrial stretch of East Williamsburg, a menacing robot nine feet high and seven feet wide surveys the street below, watching cars steal past graffitied factory buildings as if they were prey. Its fierce head sways and dips when a wooden rudder protruding from the back of its neck catches the breeze.

This is the Brooklyn Griffin. It almost never was. An earlier edition was destroyed on orders from an unsympathetic building manager.

“We managed to salvage a whole hand and two thumbs,” said one of the two visiting British artists who built the griffin. The rest was relegated to the trash.

The two men, who make art under the names of Jimmy Bumble and Leonard White, traveled to the United States from London as part an art collective called Giant Robots that constructs walking, talking robots made almost entirely from found objects.

[via Core77]

The Elements, as seen by the Internet

Here's a neat video rendition of Tom Lehrer's Elements Song, done by Joe Sabia. [via boingboing]

MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v3.0 works with the new Apple iPod nano mult-touch (and makes a nice wristwatch)

The new MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v3.0 in the Maker Shed works with the new Apple iPod nano mult-touch (and makes a nice wristwatch).

Minimalist cell phones

It has no display, and that's not a stylus—it's a pen. So you can write important numbers on the paper card pictured, left, and snap it into the clear display pocket on the phone's back. Available in five subdued colors from John's Phone, of the Netherlands. I'm tempted. [via Boing Boing]

More:

• Minimalist nativity set
• Minimalist tilt-activated lamp
• "Retro-minimalist homebrew game console"
• HOW TO - Make a minimalist (and cheap) laptop case

STM32 microcontroller thin client

MIT Media Labber David Cranor writes:

For the FAB6 conference this year, Max Lobovsky and I made a microcontroller-based thin client which uses a NTSC TV as its output device.

It does the NTSC video generation totally in hardware, has a full 480x240 framebuffer, and the code is written all in in c. Additionally, the code is written in such a way to make it easy for applications to draw arbitrary bitmapped graphics to the framebuffer, as well as access the serial receive buffer and keyboard character buffer.

This is my first STM32 project, so it was a fun exercise to make something which uses so many of the chip's peripherals. Doing color is next on the agenda; the only reason this iteration is black and white is that we only had a week from "here's the datasheet, cortex-M-what?" to finished project.

The STM32 used in this project runs at 80 MHz, has awesome peripherals, a DMA, tons of RAM/flash, a built in serial bootloader, and costs about $6 - I'm probably never going to use an atmega for anything again!

Source and board files included!

Outbound calling with Arduino + Asterisk

Dan Wagoner is playing around with connecting an Arduino to his Asterisk system.

I've been able to get Asterisk grab info about sensors connected to an ethernet-enabled Arduino, but how about the other way around? What if you could allow your Arduino to make outbound calls through your Asterisk system to make a make-shift alarm system, or over-powered doorbell? Well, wait no longer! Here's how it works:

Asterisk: A php script lives on your Asterisk server (hosted up by apache) that, when it's accessed, checks to make sure the client accessing it matches a pre-defined IP of your Arduino. If so, it creates a call file with the criteria that you configure to call a number of your choice and drops it in the Asterisk outgoing queue directory, triggering Asterisk to make a call.

How-To: Make a WiFi radio in a pinch

If you've got an extra WiFi access point laying around and would like to stream audio to your stereo from sites like Pandora, last.fm, and Slacker Radio, then you'll appreciate this informative how-to video from Tinkernut. Based on work available at MightOhm, this segment will get you up to speed with installing firmware, adding USB audio, and general configuration. Note: If you don't have an extra AP, you can always just use a bluetooth audio adaptor and stream directly from your smartphone to your stereo for about the same cost. (via LifeHacker)

Darwin prints own head, then a Mendel

I haven't seen this guy, Gavilan Steinman's, work before. I like the clear, straightforward way that he explains how he used his Darwin RepRap machine to fabricate a better extruder head for it, and then, used the improved Darwin to fabricate a Mendel (the next-gen RepRap model).

Looking forward to seeing what else Gavilan does. There are more details on his RepRap builds on his blog (below).

OnShoulders

More:
Browse our 3D printing archives

Floppy disc lunch boxes (and more floppy projects)

Floppy disc lunch boxes.


Floppy disk ceramic tiles

HOW TO - Make a floppy disk bag


HOW TO - Reusing a floppy stepper motor

Floppy disk greeting cards

World Maker Faire NY: RuBot II interview

With just over two weeks left to World Maker Faire New York, the countdown is on! Our first full-scale East Coast Faire will take place on September 25 and 26 at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, which was originally built as a pavilion for the 1964 World's Fair, the perfect location to showcase the newest maker-made art and tech. In the lead-in to the Faire, we want to showcase the Maker Faire's most important collaborators: the makers themselves. Today we chat with RuBot creator and Mechatrons director, Pete Redmond.

1. Tell us about the project you're bringing to Maker Faire.
RuBot II is the worlds fastest Rubik's Cube-solving robot, certified by the Guinness World Records and appearing in the 2010 edition of the Guinness Book of Records. It is a humanoid robot that solves a cube in about 25 seconds. I built RuBot to demonstrate a machine doing something regarded as clever when done by humans. RuBot is completely open so all the circuits and mechanisms can be seen working.

iPod Touch 4th generation teardown

The iFixit folks grabbed their tools and went bananas on a new 4th gen iPod Touch. Here are some of the highlights of what they found inside:

* This is the easiest iPod Touch we've ever cracked open -- a bit of glue and two tabs hold the front panel in place. We hoped that the insides would continue to be repair-friendly, but then found that the front glass and LCD panel were permanently fused together. This will prevent dust from getting beneath the glass, but unfortunately will also make repair more expensive.

* Like all other revisions of the iPod Touch, the battery is soldered to the logic board. This isn't a surprise given the slim form factor of the iPod, but we wish Apple would make battery replacement easier, especially on a Touch that is now easier to open.

* Apple did add more space between the battery's three solder points compared to the 3rd Gen Touch. This should make the soldering job a little easier when replacing the battery, as there's less chance of accidentally bridging the contacts.

* The EMI shield is surprisingly heavy, weighing in at 11 grams. The entire iPod Touch is only 101 grams, meaning Apple has devoted more than 10% of the iPod's weight to this metal EMI shield.

* Unfortunately, the rear-facing camera is only 960x720 resolution. That's only about .7 megapixels, compared to 5 megapixels on the iPhone 4. Apple was forced to sacrifice still photo resolution in order to squeeze the camera into the Touch's slim package. Going forward, we expect Apple to adopt improved micro camera technology as better cameras come to market.

* For those of you who are wondering, there's no way the iPhone 4's rear camera can be installed in the Touch.

* In a first for the iPod Touch line, the headphone jack is not soldered to the logic board. There's also a liquid damage indicator on the bottom of the headphone jack, so don't use your Touch to stir the coffee.

* This primary antenna is situated near the front glass panel. Its new location eliminates the need for the plastic "window" found on the 3rd generation Touch. There also appears to be a secondary antenna located on the headphone jack.

* Contrary to Apple's initial claims on their FaceTime marketing page, the iPod Touch does not have a vibrator. Apple's website has been updated to remove this claim.

Don't forget, we're running our own Family Challenge Technojunk Teardown. Above is a nice model for the kinds of observations you can make about the tech you take apart. You can see more of iFixit's Touch analysis on the link below.

iPod Touch 4th Generation Teardown

Commercial 3D printers will one day undersell the Makerbot. But does it matter?

The MakerBot CupCake is a thing of beauty, an open-source 3D printer whose $750 price undersells the commercial alternatives by a ton. Plus, you get a fanatical group of users who'll help you debug any problem. Yes, the Dimension uPrint can make tighter models and outputs them quicker, but $20,000 excludes most amateurs. Then there's the new UP! PP3DP, which costs a mere $1,500 and features a quality that seems on par with the MakerBot -- still not a threat. But if 3D printers go mainstream and the price drops to an inkjet price point (say, $99) how can MakerBot compete? Anything made out of electronics can be made more efficiently and cheaply in a sweatshop than a Brooklyn warehouse. At some point, a commercial 3D printer will undersell the MakerBot. What then?

In my previous post about the UP!, MakerBot user Dominic Muren weighed in with this excellent comment:

Beautiful solar system mobile from really cheap stuff

If you'd told me yesterday that it was possible to make a solar system mobile from nothing but yarn and styrofoam craft balls that I'd be proud to hang in my living room, let alone give to a child, I would not have believed you. You win this round, Instructables user yosyam!

More:

• Solar system necklace - "Each bead represents 20 million miles"
• Our Solar System -- An experiment with CSS3 border-radius, transforms & animations

DIY Laser cutter upgraded to support 3d printing

There is so much awesome here, I'm not sure where to begin. A while ago, Bart Dring designed and built a DIY 40W laser cutter, and also set up a community to go along with it. Next thing we know, the laser cutter has been upgraded to include a Makerbot 3d printhead, parts kits for the laser cutter are made available, and someone else is printing a laser cutter on a 3d printer. Excellent work!

Ok, now I'm really ashamed of the fact that I haven't gotten my Reprap printer working yet. Back to the lab!

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