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November 5, 2009

Double pendulum really swings!

Flickr member yamamo2 and his dad built this high performance double pendulum (aka chaos machine) and dang - can this thing get down or what? Instant physics party anytime! unless of course you happen to close and catch a stray pendulum to the noggin … physics party foul, indeed :(

Posted by Collin Cunningham | Nov 5, 2009 05:30 AM
DIY Projects, Science | Permalink | Comments (5) | Suggest a Site

R1 tactile radio prototype

The user interface to the R1 radio is both familiar and unique. Roll up and down for volume or scroll left to right to tune. It's brilliant in its simplicity and rather stylish in a contoured minimalist design. [via GeekyGadgets]

An analog radio is one of most important product for a blind people. In the using a behavior of how people manipulated rather than burying all of interaction in to the product. So adjusting radio to the right station would require a new kind of manipulation rather than simply tuning a knob. 'R1' has designed for them to control the radio more intuitively. By using a wheel structure user can control the radio by physical movement. The 'R1' allowed users to turn gadget on or off and to control volume and tuning simply by physically rolling the radio forward, backward and sideways.

Adorable stoplight costume

David King built this stoplight costume for his oldest daughter. It's his first Arduino project. Besides flashing the expected red, green, and yellow lights, it incorporates an Adafruit WaveShield to play music. [Thanks, David!]

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino WaveShield Kit

In the Maker Shed: Welcome to MAKE bundle

The Welcome to MAKE bundle is perfect for any of our online readers that haven't subscribed to the print edition of MAKE Magazine. For a limited time we are offering the Welcome to MAKE bundle at an amazing discount of $48. That's 46% off the price if you purchased these items individually.

The Welcome to MAKE bundle includes:

A Year subscription to MAKE Magazine $34.95 value
The Best of MAKE $34.99 value
A Maker's Notebook $19.99 value

Kid robot

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Amazing robot costume with an Arduino, MAKE Game of life kit and WaveShield! jerrya writes...

My wife and I are making a robot Halloween costume and I just finished the electronics design prototype. I wanted to wait until the costume was finished before revealing it but I'm too excited that I finished my circuit and coding. That's a video of it, and I want to describe it a little. It uses an Adafruit Wave Shield for the sounds, and an antique analog gauge I found at Gateway Electronics here in St. Louis. There's an infrared beam pair from Sparkfun, which will be watching the "candy input slot" on the robot's chest. The gauge displays the count, until too much candy is inserted and it goes crazy. Then after 20 seconds of no more candy, the candy count gets reset, to be ready to do it all over again at the next house. In the sketch, I used these AlphaBeta libraries: LED, button, TimedAction, and Scheduler. These made coding this sketch very easy. He even updated Scheduler with a clear() for me. Thanks again for that! The hardest part was getting it all to work together. I had been trying to use pin 9 for the gauge, and it crashed the sketch. I did more reading and found out you can't do PWM on 9 with the Wave libraries because of the timer. Pin 6 works fine though. The beep sound loop I found on my mac, I think it came from iMovie. The speech is recorded synthesis also from my mac, made like this from a terminal: say -o outputfile.aiff "thing to say" This makes an aiff file. Then I used iTunes to convert all the sound files to WAV with the right settings for the Wave Shield. The chaser LEDs are going to surround the Arduino in a shadow box sort of thing, so people can see the controller, and to punch it up so it isn't so boring. ;D

Detail shots of the electronic components in the robot costume my wife and I built. She did all the painting and papercraft, and I did the electronics. Systems include an Arduino with Adafruit Wave Shield for sound effects, and a proto shield that you see with all the wires and resistors. They are wired to the antique analog gauge on the front panel, which reacts to the IR pair from SparkFun in the Input slot. The speech is recorded synthesis from my Mac. Sayings are: "Candy, my favorite fuel," "Yum yum yum...," "You will be spared from the robot uprising, thank you human," and "Warning! Candy overload!" And on the front panel just for eye candy is a Game of Life kit from the Maker Shed/Adafruit.

Flashback: Disappearing Apple

I love electronic music, but lately looking up on stage at shows seems more and more like a perfect photo op for an Apple ad. I also love my Mac, but in a dark, nightclub setting, that glowing Apple elevated on stage is a distraction. It reminds me of an article in MAKE Volume 09 by Tom Owad where he shared his process for removing the Apple from an iBook. Owad took it a step further and not only got rid of the Apple on the lid, but also used some open source tools to remove the Apples from the operating system. Bear in mind that this article ran in March of 2007; he was working with Mac OS X 10.3 and a couple of the tools no longer seem to be up and running, but I think it's still a good read nonetheless and maybe some folks out there know of current alternatives they can share in the comments below. Now I need to print it out and distribute to some musicians I know. Enjoy.

Disappearing Apple
Removing the logo from an iBook.
By Tom Owad

I am writing a book/TV documentary for Canongate and the BBC called Bonfire of the Brands. The short story is that I am attempting to overcome my addiction to brands by burning all my branded stuff on a great bonfire on 17th September 2006. Afterwards, I will be attempting to live a life brand-free."

This was the introduction to an email I received from Neil Boorman last August. It continued, "I have allowed myself one luxury which will be spared from the fire, which is my iBook. But to keep it, I must de-brand the thing, which is why I'm contacting you."

There's a particular problem with removing the iBook's Apple logo: it leaves an Apple-shaped hole. To circumvent this problem, I considered a number of techniques, from molding an entirely new lid, to simply covering the Apple with a big white sticker. Ultimately, I decided the best way was to cut out the logo on a milling machine, then mill a replacement piece out of another lid. I called PreOwned Electronics and ordered a stack of grade B iBook lids to experiment on, then headed down to the garage.

Read full story

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:

Electromechanics for Everything
Oakland, CA
Wednesdays, Nov 4 to Dec 2, 2009, 6pm - 9pm

SOFAlab: Scientists Visualize / Artists Experiment
Washington, DC
Thursday, Nov 5, 2009, 6pm+

Alpha One Labs Grand Opening - "Light Up The Night" - Fund-Raising Party
Brooklyn, NY
Friday, Nov 6, 2009 8pm - 12am

Mobile Art && Code
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Nov 6 to Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, all weekend

World Championship Punkin Chunkin
Sussex County, DE
Friday, Nov 6 to Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, all weekend

PCB Design Using Eagle @ NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Nov 7, 2009, 2pm - 5pm

Data carving with Danja Vasiliev and Gordan Savicic
Berlin, Germany
Saturday, Nov 7, 2009, 2pm - 8pm

Intro to MIG Welding
Somerville, MA
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, 9:30am - 12:30pm

CPUs 0b1100101: Intro to computer processors @ NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, 1pm - 3pm

Introduction to Electronics @ NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, 3:30pm - 6:30pm

Drop-in Arduino and Electronics classes
Berkeley, CA
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009, 7pm - 9pm

GO-Tech November Meeting
Ann Arbor, MI
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009, 7pm - 11pm

Make Louisville inaugural meeting
Louisville, KY
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009, 8pm

Stop Motion Animation Workshop
Milwaukee, WI
Wednesday, Nov 11, 2009, 6pm - 9pm

Start planning for:

ioBridge @ HackPGH
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Nov 13, 2009, 7pm - 8pm

Intro to Soft Circuits @ HackPGH
Pittsburgh, PA
Saturday, Nov 14, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

Build Your Own Retro Computer @ NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Nov 14, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

Visit PIXAR with the Cartoon Art Museum
Emeryville, CA
Saturday, Nov 14, 2009, 11am - 4pm

DIY Vacuum Form @ NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, Nov 15, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

22nd Annual Faraday Lecture (FREE Science Demo)
Pittsburgh, PA
Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009, 7:30pm +

Sarriugarte and Mate's electric trilobite

"Oilpunks" and MAKE pals Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate have struck (hammer to anvil) again and come up with the Electrobyte, a cross between an extinct marine arthropod and a wheel chair. Flush from the success of their amazing Golden Mean snail car, they decided to do a sort of mini-me companion vehicle. They took the power and drive systems from an old electric wheelchair and created a hand-tooled trilobite body to go on top of it. The result is this sweet little ride.

Test-driving the Electrobite, a trilobite-shaped DIY vehicle

More:
Make your own snail art car
Snail car

Turning an "iLamp" into a lamp-lamp

I love this reuse of an first-gen "sunflower" G4 iMac (aka the "Luxo"). It was also nicknamed the iLamp (due to its flexible desk lamp-like arm), so this builder went ahead and turned his into an actual lamp.

How to Recycle an iMac Luxo

Beached submarine home theater

nautilus_living_room_03 copy.jpg

Kiwi businessman Wayne Eyre dropped a pretty penny on this fantasy home theater build, but the results are impressive. Many have suggested that it's supposed to be Captain Nemo's Nautilus, but there's no mention of deliberate Verne overtones in the original article. The last photograph above, for instance, shows leaking "plutonium torpedoes" in part of the installation, but plutonium wasn't even discovered until 50 years after 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was published. [via Dude Craft]

Exploding capacitors in high speed

Need a reminder to hook your capacitors up correctly? Try watching this video by Dave of EEVblog, exploding capacitors in high speed. Taking advantage of his new high speed camera, he filmed the thermal breakdown caused by reverse biasing on a number of different types of polarized capacitors. Neat effect,, but certainly not something I would want to happen next to a freshly designed circuit board.

WoW spellcaster costume with health and mana bars

Eric Lowry built this sweet WoW magic-user costume for his son. It has LED health and mana bars, LED magic power in the gloves, and an LED, er, "touch-sensitive fairy companion." There's one Arduino for the gloves and status bars, and another for the companion.

Ikea hack bookshelf bench

Randy Sarafan writes:

The nice thing about IKEA furniture is that it is cheap and easy to hack. In other words, lets say that you were to buy two cheap $30 Gorm shelving units and assembled them to discover them that one was crooked. Well then, it would be really easy to spend an afternoon converting the crooked one into a solid, stylish and symmetric bookshelf bench. As you probably just guessed, this Instructable will show you how to convert a Gorm shelving unit into a bookshelf bench. With a few extra peices of hardware and a couple of basic power tools, you could be on your way to relaxation and organization all at the same time.

Paper chair, a chair carved from paper

Here's a neat idea from designers razy2. Instead of casting a chair out of foam or silicone, they decided to build one up layer by layer out of what looks like a giant Post-It pad. Because the paper is only attached on one side, you can scribble on the top layer and then just pull it off to clean up, or stick things between the layers. Sounds fun, but I would be pretty scared that I would spill something on it. [via core77]

Intern's Corner: Making Makey's "stretchy" body in Inventor

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 Kris Magri, engineering intern

How I designed Makey, Part II: Creating the "stretchy" robot body in Inventor

When designing Makey the Robot for MAKE, Volume 19, I ran into a problem that plagues all kinds of designers -- how to continually redesign a body to accommodate changes in whatever's crammed inside it?

Once I'd sketched out Makey's configuration and modeled the major parts in Autodesk Inventor 3D modeling software, I really got into some of Inventor's awesome features. Inventor has three basic design types you work with: sketches, parts, and assemblies. Up to this point I had designed each individual component, including Makey's robot body, as a part, as shown in Figure A.

Fig. A: Makey's sheet metal body, near-final version, shown as a single part in Autodesk Inventor. Because I designed it as a component of an assembly, all the mounting holes and dropouts are perfectly aligned to internal robot components; if I move the components, Inventor automatically moves the holes.

Once I had these parts modeled, I placed them together into an assembly, as in Figure B. Then, I attempted to stretch the robot body as needed by making that part "Adaptive" inside the assembly. (That's what Inventor calls "stretchy" parts, and it's a powerful feature.)

Fig. B: Makey's body shown as part of an assembly in Inventor, constrained to the edges of the motors (at bottom, in blue). If I move the motors, the body automatically stretches to accommodate the new motor positions. Similarly, I constrained the battery boxes (at top, in tan) to the body, so wherever the body stretches, the battery boxes follow automatically. Nice!

Also, I cut holes into the body where I needed them for mounting the motors. This was the wrong approach! It seemed to work, but when I looked at the robot body as a part, outside of the assembly, the holes I had made weren't shown. They had simply vanished.

The reason for this is that Inventor can't know ahead of time how you're going to use a part. You could design one part that could be used in multiple assemblies, so if you alter the base part in any way inside one particular assembly, the alteration exists only in the assembly, but the base part is unchanged. Thus, my changes didn't "take hold."

The key was to create the robot body from inside the assembly. You can actually be inside an assembly and make a brand-new part. To do this, in the Assembly Panel area, instead of selecting Place Component, choose Create Component.

I ended up first creating what I called a "base plate," which existed solely to help me anchor all the parts, including the robot body. It would not be a part I would actually fabricate. I then placed the base plate, the motors, the Arduino, and the batteries into an assembly, using Place Component, and assembled it all by anchoring everything to the base plate (using constraints). This was pretty much what I had been doing before.

Now, still inside the assembly, I created a new part, via Create Component, which would become the robot body. I selected the material type Sheet Metal.ipt, since it's a sheet metal part, and created each bend and flange step by step, inside the assembly. This robot body now "belonged" to the assembly, and was adaptive inside the assembly. Any editing of it, from that point on, was always initiated from within the assembly.

Instead of making the body a specific width, I just made everything extra large with no dimensions. Once the body was formed, I finished editing, and now I was back inside the assembly with my new robot body. I then constrained the side of the body to an existing "edge" from another part, for instance, the sides of the motors (Figure B). When the constraint went into effect, the sides of the body "snapped" into place next to the motors. To make holes, I projected the motor mount holes onto the robot body, again edited the robot body part (from within the assembly), cut holes there, and then the holes "stayed put," so to speak.

Success at last -- I had modeled a fully adaptive robot body that I could easily modify to accommodate all the robot components I would be cramming inside it.

Next up: The battle to fit the brains inside.

More: How I designed Makey the robot, Part I: The first design

Frostruder MK2

Zach Hoeken wrote up a nice piece about the design of the MakerBot Frostruder MK2, currently in its second prototype. He talks about the challenges of designing a cheap, small device capable of computer-controlled cupcake frosting:

My first experiment was with some thick, chocolate frosting that you can find in nearly any grocery store. I simply wanted to see if it was possible to use air pressure to extrude frosting, so I wired up a solenoid to a switch and used that solenoid to turn the air pressure on and off to the syringe. I was using a 21GA (0.53mm) needle and a standard 60cc syringe. I hooked it up to the air pressure and opened the valve. Nothing happened right away, but I gradually turned the pressure up until about 50-60 PSI I started getting a frosting extrusion. I kept turning up the pressure to about 80 PSI where I got a really nice, very fast frosting extrusion that was about 0.5mm wide. Success!!!

From MAKE magazine:

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and lots more, in MAKE, Volume 19! Subscribe here, or buy the issue in the Maker Shed.

Skatchbox instrument amplifies plucking, picking, & scraping

Tom Nunn demonstrates the "skatchbox" a simple percussion box outfitted with contacts mics and a plethora of objects for scraping, tapping, swiping, etc. The shuffling and raspy textures the boxes make are pretty unique, certainly warranting further investigation by audio experimentalists out there. And if you've got some plastic combs, a piezo disc, and a flat box building one of these should be a breeze.

Patchable digital synth with Arduino

From the MAKE Flickr pool

The Arduino-based synth project formerly known as binder synth is now known as Adasynth - and it sounds like development is coming along right nicely. Davitr0n provides some background on his project -

The goal of this project was to make a patchable synthesizer as versatile as we can while keeping the cost down. Since I know how to program C++ and have a basic understanding of electronics we chose to use an arduino. So far we’ve stayed pretty true to that goal. With just the arduino, a resistor chip, some recycled wood, and a lot of help in the form of interface components (plugs and jacks) from my old electronics teacher we have a working synthesizer.. and to be honest the results so far are much better than we expected.

Here's hoping he posts source/schematic - patchable digital synthesis looks like fun!

Pocketpianokit Crop

Arduino Pocket Piano Synth Kit

Transformers Soundwave costume

Pretty amazing costume build tutorial from Instructables user Incrxtc.

Digital Mixtape plays mp3s old school style

MAKE subscriber Justin fused the convenience of digital music with the feel and playback functionality of a cassette -

It is a cassette tape adapter and a micro usb port hooked up to a tiny mp3 player that I picked up at target. Its a simple build and only took an evening. Its an on going project I started a while back.

Neat idea! More pics plus earlier versions of the project can be found on Justin's blog. Hmmm ... maybe the next incarnation could have FF/REW capabilities triggered by turning the spools?