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November 18, 2009

Flashback: Spinout

Back in August of 2006, on the pages of MAKE Volume 07, Colin Berry shared the story of his maker brother Kevin Berry and the role that the Soap Box Derby played in his short life. This intimate story moved us all. In October of 2006, Colin read the story as part of our Maker Files series, with an introduction by Dale Dougherty, MAKE's editor and publisher. Below is Colin's story in full. To hear him tell the tale, here is the MP3. Or you can get the audio delivered automatically with iTunes.

Spinout
Was building a Soap Box Derby racer my brother's last best chance at escaping his fate?
By Colin Berry

All his life, my brother Kevin was plagued with terrible luck. It began when he was a teenager in the early 70s, in Longmont, Colorado — our hometown — and soon became something of a family legend. If the Trojan theater was giving away free tickets to Planet of the Apes, the kid in front of Kevin in line would get the last one. If Kevin sold enough newspaper subscriptions to win a clock radio, it was broken when he opened the box. If one of his friends shoplifted a pack of Odd Rods bubblegum cards on the way home from school, Kevin got collared for it. It was a pattern. He weathered it well, half-joking about his luck with his shy, gap-toothed grin, but over time it took a terrible toll.

In shop class, however, Kevin seemed to step out from its shadow. He was adept with tools and proved himself a skilled carpenter at an early age. I was seven years younger and remember marveling at the projects he brought home from junior high school: a varnished gun rack; a Newton's Cradle, with its five suspended steel balls; a sturdy set of bedroom shelves for his Revell models. Looking back, it follows that the noisy, meditative setting of the woodshop appealed to Kevin. It was a place where no one shouted at him and where no electronic parts could mysteriously fail.

In our basement, Dad had a woodshop, too, a flagstone-floored, fluorescent-lit grotto with an oversized plank workbench, barrels of wood scraps, and tools hung on a pegboard. It was here, from 1969 to 1972, that my brother built four Soap Box Derby racers. He would start in late winter, when snow still covered the ground outside, transforming a small stack of lumber and paper sacks of hardware into a teen-sized, gravity-propelled vehicle.

Balancing the shell of the car across two sawhorses, he built each the same way: a pine plank floorboard supported several plywood bulkheads, to which he anchored Masonite sides and a top. Each car ran on four red-rimmed Soap Box Derby wheels, controlled by a simple cable steering system and foot-pedal drag brake. Each was painted and then lettered with Kevin's name, number, and sponsor logo (Weicker Moving and Storage). And each one got faster.

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Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Nov 18, 2009 06:00 PM
Makers | Permalink | Comments (3) | Suggest a Site

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:

Dorkbot SF
San Francisco, CA
Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009, 7:30pm +

AUTOMATIC: An Art Show Benefit for RoboGames 2010
San Francisco, CA
Thursday, Nov 19, 2009 - Saturday, Nov 21, 2009, 5pm - 8pm

Breadboard Arduino Class
Garland, TX
Thursday, Nov 19, 2009, 7pm +

BRAF Presents - The Artumnal Gathering
San Francisco, CA
Friday, Nov 20, 2009, 9pm +

Make an Arduino from scratch workshop
Columbus, OH
Saturday, Nov 21, 2009, 11am - 2pm

Electronics 101
Atlanta, GA
Saturday, Nov 21, 2009, 2pm - 4pm

Los Angeles Microcontroller Club meeting
Topanga, CA
Saturday, Nov 21, 2009, 11am +

Google Sketch Up Workshop
Baltimore, MD
Saturday, Nov 21, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

Craft Night: Intro to Screen Printing @i3Detroit
Royal Oak, MI
Monday, Nov 23, 2009, 7pm - 9pm

Drop-in Arduino and Electronics classes
Berkeley, CA
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009, 7pm - 9pm

Project Lab with Expert Included
Berkeley, CA
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009, 3pm - 6pm

Start planning for:

Make:KC - Show and Tell
Parkville, MO
Tuesday, Dec 1, 2009, 6pm - 8pm

Intro to Welding @Willoughby and Baltic
Somerville, MA
Tuesday, Dec 1, 2009 to Tuesday, Dec 22, 2009, 7pm - 9pm

Woodshop Fundamentals @Willoughby and Baltic
Somerville, MA
Tuesday, Dec 1, 2009 to Tuesday, Dec 22, 2009, 7pm - 9:30pm

build your own lightsaber!
New York, NY
Wednesday, Dec 2, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

Tinkering 2.0

In a follow-up to the the WSJ piece, "Tinkering Makes Comeback Amid Crisis," NPR did an OnPoint segment on "Tinkering and American Innovation," with the article's author, Justin Lahart, Bre Pettis, and David Hounshell, Tech and Social Change professor at CMU.

Tinkering and American Innovation

"Father of video games" documentary

Motherboard has this wonderful look inside the world (and workshop) of Ralph Baer, creator of Pong, Simon, and other electronic/video game classics.

Ralph Baer and His All-Purpose Boxes

Electroluminescent liquor labels

glowing liquor labels.jpg

Among the hairier of my hare-brained schemes involves formulating a safe-to-drink chemiluminescent cocktail. I think the first person to do it will become a very wealthy laughingstock, which, as I understand it, is the very definition of The American Dream.

So I got really excited when I first saw this post over on TheDieline.com, because I thought somebody had pulled it off. Unfortunately, it's just the labels that are glowing, not the booze itself, but still it's pretty cool. If you ignore the crass commercialism, the shameless marketing, the horrors of alcoholism, drunk driving, etc., etc. [via Geekologie]

Morse code beacon using Arduino

Any hams out there that need a quick-and-dirty morse code beacon? Then you might be interested in Mark VandeWettering's Arduino Based Morse Beacon. I really like the clever way that he stores the code sequences for each character:

It's a little bit clever (a very little bit) but I guess it does require some explanation. Morse code characters are all length six or less, and each element is either a dot or a dash, so it would seem that we can store the pattern in six bits. Let's say that dits are zero and dahs are one. Lets store them so the first element gets stored in the least significant bit, and the next in the second most, and so on. The only trick is knowing when there are no elements left, because otherwise we can't tell (for example) K (-.-) from C (-.-.) To do that, we store a single extra one after all the other elements are taken care of. Then, when we are looping, we do the following. If the pattern is equal to one, we are done (that's our guard bit). If not, we look at the least significant digit. If it is a zero, we have a dit, if we have a one, it's a dah. We then get rid of that element (by dividing by two, or shifting right if that floats your boat) and repeat. Voila. Each character takes only a single byte to store its pattern, and decoding is just done in a few instructions.

Mark admits that using an Arduino for this is a bit of overkill, however I think that convenience trumps component cost for one-of projects like this. If you are up for the challenge, however, you could probably build one with more esoteric components, such as an EEPROM+counter, or even a music-box type mechanical system. Anyone create something crazy cool like that?

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Family

Make: Arduino

3D beehive bracelet

This beehive bracelet was modeled using OpenSCAD, a tool I'm looking forward to exploring! It was made by Thingiverse user Catarina; she printed it on her MakerBot. Stylish!

Batteryless remote powered by humans

Got a pedal-powered TV, but still have to keep replacing the batteries in that remote? Then you might want to keep an eye on this piezoelectricity batteryless remote (machine translation), being developed by NEC and Soundpower. Energy harvesting devices are nothing new, but this one seems interesting because it is apparently efficient enough to work off of the vibrations caused by pressing the buttons on it. They claim that it uses piezoelectric elements, which can generate electric current when bent or deformed, to capture the kinetic energy of your button press.

Of course, if you don't have access to fancy piezoelectric development tools or want to wait for their device to come out, you could probably whip up something similar by combining one of those shake flashlights and a regular remote. [via technabob]

Intern's Corner: Test-firing the HHO rocket

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 Steven Lemos, engineering intern

Making the Hydrogen-Oxygen Bottle Rocket (that Adam Savage is posing with on the cover of the new MAKE, Volume 20) was a pretty basic endeavor, with the exception of the circuit. The original schematic diagram had a flaw in it, but only after we breadboarded the circuit -- twice -- did we catch it.

I guess that's the reason we MAKE interns build the projects that run in the magazine, so it's us who bang our heads against the table and not you. I will kindly take that cookie now.

The experience showed me that, sure, when working with electronics it's easy to misplace a component or wire, or completely miss something, which I already knew, but it's just as easy to have a diagram be the culprit. So a word to the wise (a word I'm sure all the experienced hobbyists have already discovered for themselves): if you take care when putting together these tedious circuits it will pay off, for if you can trust in your work, then you'll know the culprit lies in the plans, and you won't spend hours chasing that metaphorical wild goose.

Twice we breadboarded this bad boy before discovering an error in the schematic -- so you won''t have to.

But on to the actual launch. :) We had talked to the local electronics store owner, who at the time was making his own hydrogen using a more sophisticated apparatus, and who was interested in what we were doing with ours. So he came to watch, and brought along his professional pyrotechnician friend, who showed us how to make fuses with 12V and tiny resistors (basically the resistors pass so much current that the wire heats up and can act as a fuse to light stuff -- voilà, cheap fuses).

Our beautiful 2-stage HHO rocket ready for test launching -- before being crippled by a crash.

The first launch was a success, with the two stages going off rather quickly in succession, so we dialed in a little more delay time in the circuit before the stage 2 ignition. This was good and bad. We got more height out of the rocket on our second launch, but on its return it landed electronics side down. This resulted in our circuit behaving oddly.

So, not ready yet to call it a day, we began firing off only one stage at a time, adjusting the proportions of HHO (hydrogen and oxygen gases), water, and air, and testing the makeshift fuses, which worked fine for a single stage, but due to the time they take to ignite (3sec@12V) might not work for 2 stages.

We probably launched 12 times that day, attracting passersby. Good weather, new friends (who like blowing stuff up), and multiple launches. All in all, a good day. Houston, we have liftoff.

• Related: MAKE, Volume 20: "For Kids of All Ages"

"Bomb-proof" kevlar wallpaper

Very clever idea commercialized as the X-flex Blast Protection System, in which a high-tensile-strength composite film is applied to the inside of a masonry wall to reinforce it against lateral impact. The video embedded above was produced by Popular Science, who included the X-flex system in their Best of What's New 2009.

MAKE's mostly $20 and under electronics gift guide

As the holidays approach this year, money is tighter than ever for everyone. When thinking about gifts to give, consider the gift of DIY electronics and kits, not only could a loved one learn a new skill, but it could start them on a journey to a wonderful lifetime hobby, possibly a career! Helping someone learn electronics is more than just giving a circuit board and a bunch of parts, you're giving the gift of time, hours of new experiences exploring the wonders of engineering and science. In the end, they'll also have something to show and share!

So let's get started. I've put together my 20 favorite (mostly) under $20 electronic kits and resources, some are from the Maker Shed, some are from other places (SparkFun, Adafruit, Instructables, TechShop, Solarbotics, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, Parallax). Many of them are open source hardware projects, so if $20 is still too much, you might be able to put these together on your own and print out the instructions for free too! Our gift guides are meant to inspire your suggestions, so if you know of a great $20 or under electronics kit, post it in the comments!

Read full story

Win a Nikon DSLR from Photojojo

Photojojo is giving away three Nikon D3000s, just because they love you (we do too)! They've opened up the giveaway to you, the talented, creative, awesome readers of MAKE and CRAFT. Just think of all the how-tos you could make with this thing! I'm getting jealous just thinking about it. There are many ways to enter, please do so as many times as you like! In addition to the ways to enter on the Photojojo site (like following them on Twitter), here are the ways to enter through MAKE and CRAFT:

Subscribe to the MAKE and CRAFT Newsletters. Each subscriber gets an automatic entry to win the camera! These are monthly newsletter to keep you up to date on what's going on in our neck of the woods. (We won't spam you, scout's honor!)
Follow us on Twitter. That's MAKE, CRAFT, make_tips, and craft_tips. All our Twitter followers are automatically entered!
Submit a tip! What special tricks do you use when making and crafting? Send a reply to @make_tips or @craft_tips for yet another entry.
Become a fan of MAKE and CRAFT on Facebook!

The giveaway ends at 5pm PST next Monday, November 23rd. Best of luck to you!

More:

Project Excerpt: Photojojo! by Amit Gupta with Kelly Jensen

Robolamps

robolamp 01.jpg

robolamp 02.jpg

robolamp 03.jpg

Croatian designer Robert Matysiak has made a delightful array of these "robolamps" by kit-bashing from plumbing supplies and variously colored light bulbs. They are, alas, not presently for sale.

How-To: Build a Seismic Reflector

Living in the UK, Jim hadn't experienced an earthquake firsthand. After watching recent quakes unfold in Indonesia, he decided to create a device that would keep him aware of the Earth's seismic events. His Seismic Reflector uses a Processing-based software monitor which feeds data to very motorized Arduino -

The aim is to build a device which responds to earthquakes being reported in near-real time via the USGS RSS feeds. The device responds by illustrating the magnitude of the reported earthquake via two fairly chunky vibration motors of the kind used in video game controllers. The device is connected to a PC via a virtual com port over USB (thanks to an on board Arduino). On the PC, an application sits there checking the RSS feed periodically and when a new event it posted to the RSS feed, the desktop app parses the data out of it and presents the magnitude of the quake to the Arduino which interpreters this as rate at which to activate the vibration motors.
[…]
I'd just like to stress that this project is about empathising in some small way with victims of earthquakes. I'm not trying to make light of peoples anguish or suffering, and I'm not trying to play on peoples fears of an impending "big one". I do not experience many earthquakes where I live, but I know a lot of people around the world (specifically around the Med and the Pacific) do. This is my attempt to understand that feeling a bit better.

Check out the Seismic Reflector instructable for details.

In the Maker Shed:

MotorShield for Arduino Kit

Machine pin headers make for easy chip sockets

Fresh out of 8-pin DIP sockets, I broke off a couple rows of female machine pin headers as a substitute - using the chip itself to align the pins for soldering. That was about a month ago, and I've continued using them ever since. Though it seemed a bit 'kludgey' at first, this process has proven a lot easier than trying to keep a variety of socket sizes at the ready. As always, your mileage may vary.

How to make your own caffeinated alcohol beverage

If San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera gets his way a generation of club goers will miss out on the sickly sweet tang of caffeinated alcohol beverages like Sparks, Four-Loko, and Joose. Yet, all is not lost. A group of enterprising practitioners have seized the opportunity to handcraft a batch of Bathtub Sparks in an attempt to recreate the extreme libation.

The following drink was reverse-engineered from a vintage can of caffeinated Sparks and rigorously tested via blind taste-test by SFoodie and four people who agreed to come over to the author's house and drink this stuff, plus two random guys on the street who should be applauded for their daring and general zest for life.

HOW TO make Moonshine Whiskey

Garbage bag + rice cooker = alcohol still

Home Distillation of Alcohol

Banned Xboxs flood online marketplaces

Xbox360
Banned Xboxs flood online marketplaces via BBG.

Hundreds of Xboxs have appeared on online marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist in the wake of the mass Xbox live bans. Over the past week Microsoft has banned nearly one million users from the online gaming service after finding that they had modified their consoles to play pirated games. Since the ban is connected to the console rather than a gamer's online account, many modified Xboxs have appeared online being sold by banned users. eBay has issued a warning to users on its website to be wary of buying consoles in the wake of Microsoft's move. In a post on the website's guide section, it said: 'If you are looking to buy an Xbox 360 on eBay in the near future, ask the seller if it has been banned from Xbox Live and be sure to pay by PayPal in case they lie. If you do get a banned console, start a PayPal claim.'
Microsoft has said that all bans are permanent to the console and no affected units will be permitted back onto Xbox Live on any account.

You can get a banned console for $40 now. I know that a lot of Microsoft folks read MAKE so please Microsoft folks, figure out something else besides permanently crippling millions of devices. Sure they can be used to play offline, but I doubt the owners will keep them, so it's one stop to trashville. They'll end up in a landfill, at least offer a way to re-active them or something, anything.

Homebrew transistor experiments

Jim did some experimenting with homemade thin-film zinc oxide and zinc-tin oxide, developing his own homemade transistors devices -

I did manage to achieve (with a liquid dielectric) voltage and current gain, as well as construct a functional astable oscillator using two of the devices constructed on a single substrate. While the speed of the devices (due to the liquid dielectric) is such that they are only interesting as a technology experiment, they've been a lot of fun to experiment with.

Some very interesting work here. There's really no better way to understand technology than to build it yourself. I can say firsthand, building a simple capacitor or LED from scratch is a lot of fun - a DIY transistor must feel like a straight-up triumph! Download the documentation of Jim's experiments in PDF format on his site.

Related:

MAKE Presents: The LED - and how to make your own from carborundum!

New in the Maker Shed: Robotic arm kit

With this award-winning Robotic arm kit, you can control the gripper, wrist, elbow, base rotation and motion, all from the tethered remote. The robotic arm has a vertical reach of 15", horizontal reach of 12.6", and lifting capacity of 100g. Features include a searchlight on the gripper and an audible indicator on all 5 gearboxes to prevent any potential injury or gear breakage during operation. Who is going to be the first to hack this with an Arduino?

DIY bike repair stand

We love bikes, just check out all our bicycle related entries. Unfortunately, sometimes our bikes break, and when they do it's a lot easier to repair them if you have a stand. Too expensive? Then make you own bicycle repair stand with a few parts form the hardware store.

I've needed a repair stand for a long long long time now. But....damn those things aren't cheap. Thankfully, I've got more than my share of blue collar blood in me....so I decided to build one. The process couldn't have been easier. I did a quickle google search on home made repair stands and saw some interesting solutions. In the end, I went with my own variation.

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