Over the holidays Jim Harriman decided to investigate the family tree of alcoholic drinks. To do this, he screen-scraped all the mixed drink recipes he could find online and crunched the recipe data with a program that generates phylogenetic trees, drawing relationships between drink species with matching ingredient genes.
Note that you can make out several different “kingdoms” of drinks after a close look at the tree. I can make out the Gin kingdom, the Orange Juice kingdom, and the Amaretto kingdom, for starters. Then we have the outliers, like a 110 in the Shade, which nobody in his right mind would drink. These are the platypuses and slime molds of the drink world.
I’d love to know how closely this resembles the actual heritage of the recipes in the list. In fact, it would be incredibly cool to do something similar with food recipes. If you processed the ingredient list and preparation details for the world’s apple pies, chicken soups and breads, what cultural information might that hold?
If you want to take a stab at something like this yourself, you can use a free package call PHYLIP to do the computation. It’s the same program used by Jim to create his drink family tree. If you discover anything, make sure to send us a link.
This week:
Ardunio-based Anime Sound Glove, World’s Smallest Flapping Wing Flyer?, Rubber Band Gatling Gun, IAMAS Gangu Project, A Picture That Changes Depending on the Source of Light, VR Panorama Shots of Make Tokyo Meeting 02, Arduino PS2 Command Sequencer, Arduino Wrist Watch, Carving a QR Code Into Stone, Art Made w/ 5-Yen Coins, After Hours Magazine’s Cross-Stitched Cover
Ardunio-based Anime Sound Glove
Here’s a video of a glove that a father made for his daughter’s birthday that lights up and makes different anime-inspired sounds according to its movement. It uses an Arduino, a WaveShield loaded with the sounds, and a Lilypad accelerometer. What a lovely present! [via]
World’s Smallest Flapping Wing Flyer?
With a wingspan of 8cm, total length of 8cm, and weighing in at just 1.52g, this RC X-wing type flyer whirs around this gymnasium like a dragonfly for a surprisingly lengthy amount of time, despite what must be a lilliputian battery. Inspiring work. (http://blog.goo.ne.jp/flappingwing/)
Rubber Band Gatling Gun
This rubber band Gatling fires at a speed of 1,000 rounds per minute. The gun uses a planetary gear mechanism for its 8 barrels made of chopsticks and is capable of loading 200 rubber bands at a time. Watch out!
IAMAS Gangu Project
This video demonstrates “Jamming Gear,” one of the projects demonstrated at the IAMAS Gangu Project, which ran in at the AXIS Gallery in Roppongi, Tokyo from Dec. 25th-27th.
Having started in 2005, the aim of the Gangu project was to establish a creative learning & rapid prototyping environment, where teachers & students working together could turn ideas into reality. In collaboration with T2lab co.,ltd (formerly, Takara index eR Lab), we have been developing new electronic toys that will encourage & challenge the children of today.
This exhibition entitled “IAMAS Gangu Project – Work In Progress” aims to illustrate just that. On display will be a number of toy concepts in all stages of their development, from idea sketches to standalone prototypes. We will additionally hold two physical computing workshops, so please join us in the play and discussion of new ideas.
The research progress of the “Ubicomp+Contents Project” will also be shown for the first time. This project focuses on the realization of ubiquitous environments utilising physical computing and wireless communications modules.
VR Panorama Shots of Make Tokyo Meeting 02
Here’s a link to some VR panoramic shots of Make: Tokyo Meeting 02 (Flash required). There’s a lot of detail to the photographs even at significant zoom, so it’s quite a bit of fun to see what you can find in these shots. [via]
Arduino PS2 Command Sequencer
Instead of pressing the buttons by hand, this hack uses an Arduino to manipulate the PlayStation 2 controller. By syncing up to the PS2′s vertical sync video output, it sends out sequence patterns back to the PS2. How about hooking up two Arduinos and have them go against each other, eh? (http://moyashi.air-nifty.com/hitori/)
Arduino Wrist Watch
This cutely assembled Arduino-based wrist watch uses an Arduino Pro Mini, a Nokia LCD, and a coin-sized lithium-ion battery. Is that a Tamagotchi living inside that watch?
Carving a QR Code Into Stone
From new back to old again:
Seal Cutting(篆刻) is a Chinese traditional art. You cut a stone block to make a stamp with, usually, Chinese letters like name, poet, etc.
Blogger Masayuki GT tried to combine this Song Dynasty originated stone art with the latest technology, QR Code, Japanese 2D barcode now widely used with cellphone camera to guide mobile website URL-s.
Art Made w/ 5-Yen Coins
Japan’s 5-yen coin has a hole in the middle, and it turns out this makes it great for crafts. In this video from the popular Tamori Club TV program, the action starts at 1:20, where we see all sorts of crafty 5-yen coin creations. The “5-yen coin idol” they introduce is Noriko Yamaguchi, and she continues to this day teaching craft seminars in Japan. [via]
AfterHours Cross-Stitched Cover by The Mint House After Hours is one of my favorite music magazines of all time, and I was delighted to see that their latest cover features the cross stitch work of Made in Japan fave The Mint House. The most current issue of After Hours comes with two CD’s and one DVD, and if the past is any indication, the included discs alone (plus the sweet cover!) are worth the price of the magazine, even if you can’t read the great Japanese articles inside.
Update for the power geeks – we have a cheap cap which works just as well as a supercap, we fixed a reset issue with slow power, and it’s all crammed in the kill-a-watt casing now, so it’s working – more soon!
This solar refrigerator, invented by Emily Cummins, is a brilliantly simple solution for keeping food cool in a hot, dry environment. It’s basically a metal cylinder surrounded by wet material, surrounded by a mesh sleeve to hold it all together.
Between the outer cylinder and the inner cylinder is an open compartment where any medium capable of holding water can be placed. The medium would usually be sand, wool or soil and is packed into the gap and then water is added.
When the fridge is placed in a warm environment, the sun’s energy causes the water to evaporate from the medium. As the water/medium mix is held against the inner cylinder, heat is removed in the form of energy. Due to heat transfer the inner cylinder becomes cooler. The reduced temperature and completely dry environment of the inner chamber makes it perfect for the storage of perishables as it will allow items to be kept fresh for longer.
It’s encouraging to think that important, real-world problems are still out there to be solved with a bit of ingenuity and the sort of materials that are taking up space in the corner of your garage.
Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.
This week I have 3 modifications of the Maker’s Notebook. I started out by adding a small pocket inside the book to keep a pen. Next, I added a snap closure to keep everything secure. Finally, I added a pocket to the back of the book for keeping acetate film to use as overlays for my sketches.
Since I did 3 mods to my Maker’s Notebook, I decided it would be cool to give away 3 Maker’s Notebooks. All you have to do is post your modified Maker’s Notebook in the MAKE Flickr photo pool and tag it “mymakersnotebook”. Next Tuesday I will ask everyone at Make to help me pick our favorite 3 modifications. The winners be announced next week and they will receive a new Maker’s Notebook to hack up all over again!
Good luck, and I’ll see you next week with the results!
In the Maker Shed:
Pick up The Maker’s Notebook ($19.99) for all your big ideas, diagrams, patterns, etc. Exclusive to the Maker Shed: Sticker sheets and a band closure to customize your book.
This “green” cellphone concept by Je-Hyun Kim takes the dilemma of getting a new phone every two years (which most of go through constantly) into account by integrating a biodegradeable body into the phone. Made to disintegrate when the two years are up, the phone will make you feel a bit better about wanting the newest gear.
Craving a toasted marshmallow but frustrated by lack of a proper campfire coupled with an annoying inability to rotate the marshmallow evenly? Henry has cooked up an Instructable for a lovely, single-serving Arduino automatic marshmallow roaster using a beeswax candle and a stepper motor from an old printer. Yum!
The fine folks over at Hackaday have a really nice build of a digital picture from scratch. They have gone through all the trouble of making a custom 2-sided PCB and everything else required for this amazing little piece of technology. Nicely done Ian!
there are a ton of digital picture frame tutorials out there. most are old laptops with crafty case reconfigurations that fit a photo frame profile.
we set out to build a 100% diy, scratch-built digital picture frame. our frame has a 12bit color lcd, gigabytes of storage on common, fat-formatted microsd cards, and you can build it at home. we’ve got the details below.
This DIY portable game console features a color screen, tilt sensors, and 4 games. Of course you can always program more games if you build one for yourself. Check out the link for pictures of the system stuffed inside a relatively small enclosure. This is a great electronics project that is very well documented.
By pulling together a handful of low-cost parts and building the system ourselves, we have demonstrated that a complete programmable portable console can be had for less than $70, even when purchasing the parts we sampled. Our implemenation runs on a single 9V battery and features tilt-based control, monophonic sound, and 3 playable games. We call it the Weeboy because it combines features of the Nintendo Gameboy Color and the Nintendo Wii.
The shape of sound is a few different experiments in circuit bending and creating simple laser pointer light shows. There are some interesting sounds generated from the hacked toy sword. Also, I like the effect of bouncing the laser beam off of tin foil as opposed to a mirror.
