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June 29, 2009

The Furby Youth Choir

Those of you who attended Maker Faire 2008 in Austin may recall the performance of local circuit-benders Furby Youth Choir. I recently had a chance to attend one of their live performances at the United States Art Authority, next to Spider House on Fruth St. in the UT Campus area.

A Furby, for those who were living in a bunker preparing for Y2K during their vogue, is a robot toy that looks a lot like Gizmo from The Gremlins. They talk and sing and move their mouths and eyes and other neat stuff, including reacting to their environment and, to an extent, "learning" certain patterns of behavior. The large feature set makes them popular with hackers, especially circuit benders.

Anyhoo, as one can imagine, a small army of them singing on-stage is fairly unsettling. What's more, FYC's music is decidedly avant-garde, dissonant, and ominous. Two performers stand over a table covered with circuit boards and wires and bend the aforesaid circuits in real time. Add to that mix a video projector beaming twisted animations and other visual psychedalia upstage, and the whole experience becomes a bit....overwhelming. US Art Authority is a small venue, and to my 25-to-34-year-old ear, they were rather too loud for it, but they still get huge points for originality. If you get a chance to see them, you should. Just be sure to pack a pair of earplugs.

Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Jun 29, 2009 04:00 AM
Electronics, Events, Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Suggest a Site

Make: Projects - Sew a cute Morse code key leg strap

Diana Eng (best known from her season on Project Runway and her book Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech) is our current guest contributor, covering ham radio for Make: Online. In this Make: Project, Diana adds a little fashion frill to a standard piece of ham radio gear, the Morse code key. - Gareth Branwyn

I am just starting to learn Morse code and got a brand new key from American Morse Equipment. Most keys need to be mounted to hold them in place while the operator is dah-dit-ing. Keys are mounted on a heavy platform, or fastened to a radio. And some keys are worn on a leg strap. As a lady operator, and fashion designer, I wanted something cuter to keep my key on my leg, so here it is -- how to turn a standard leg strap into a cute Morse code key leg strap.

Materials:
* 1 yd 2" wide satin ribbon
* 1 yd 3/8" wide patterned ribbon
* 1 yd 3" wide lace
* 2 spools of thread (to match patterned ribbon and lace)
* scissors
* a small amount of tulle (an 8" x 8" square will work just fine)
* a small amount of organza
* pins
* screw driver
* measuring tape

* key
* leg strap

1. Using the measuring tape, measure around your leg where you'd like to wear the strap. Subtract ½" from this measurement and cut the lace and patterned ribbon to this length.

2. Using a sewing machine, straight stitch the edge of the ribbon 1 1/8" in from the edge of the lace.

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In the Maker Shed: Fiber Optics Kit

MKEL8-2 2.jpg
Learn the basics of fiber optics communications while you build this exciting kit. Transmit your voice or 1kHz signal through the fiber optic cable to a fiber optic receiver. Comes complete with all of the necessary components including the PC boards, microphone, speaker and fiber optic cable. Requires (2) 9-volt batteries.

More about the Fiber Optics Kit

Heads on Fire at Maker Faire

Heads on Fire hosted the Bay Area Maker Faire Fab Lab. At Maker Faire Austin, the Fab Lab has been hosted by the Boston Fab Lab at the South End Technology Center. Wikipedia has a decent list of the various Fab Labs around the world.

Blogging epic kludges

The latest addition to my feed reader is There, I Fixed It, a site collecting fantastic and hilarious examples of jury-rigging in daily life. My favorite so far is the point-of-use hot water heater shown above, but the "Franken-chair" has to take a close second. Thanks to Melody for steering me to it.

AIDG: water solutions

AIDG is a NonGovernmental Organization (NGO) that helps provide low technology solutions to help address environmental and health needs to people living in communities without great access to the systems that many of us consider requirements.

Here are a few of their water-based initiatives:

Solar Hot Water:

XelaTeco, with support from AIDG's wonderful interns, recently installed a solar water heating system and water tower for La Guarderia, a childcare center in Llanos del Pinal, Guatemala. La Guarderia was started by two non-profit organizations, Pop Wuj and Jóvenes Juntos, who saw the need for daycare and after school homework assistance in a community plagued by poverty, domestic violence and alcoholism.

Jóvenes Juntos requested the hot water system to promote healthy hygiene practices amongst the children served by center, particularly in the cold winter months. The presence of hot water is expected to reduce the occurrence of skin ailments, such as scabies and other rashes. This segment of the project was funded by AIDG.

Ram Pump:

As the water runs downhill from the source to the ram pump, it gains force and velocity. When this velocity reaches a determined point, the water closes a valve in the ram pump known as the "impulse" or "waste" valve. The force of the water against the now closed impulse valve causes pressure to build inside the pump. The water sends high-pressure shock waves in all directions (the "water hammer," or "ariete" in Spanish, from which the pump gets its Spanish name, "Bomba de Ariete"). These shock waves open another valve, the delivery check valve, and water squirts through reaching altitudes of up to ten times greater than the vertical distance from the water's source to the pump. An air vessel installed in the pump acts as a kind of regulator which keeps the flow at the top steady, instead of delivered in bursts, as the pump internally functions

Sand Filtration:

Properly managed sand filters remove 96%-98% of water borne pathogens such as E. Coli and Giardia, producing a positive significant impact on the health of target users. The greatest effect is expected for young children, who are extremely susceptible to diarrheal diseases caused by exposure to contaminated water. Diarrheal disease causes approximately 2 million deaths per year among children in developing countries.

The World Health Organization has some good documentation on sand filtration technology.

To find out more about AIDG, check out their blog and their photos.

DIY air rocket

From rosendahl in the MAKE Flickr pool:

Built from plans in Make Magazine with a couple mods. Made from a sprinkler valve and PVC (and of course duct tape!), compressed air fires the rocket high into the sky. Our rocket is make of the foam cylinders you wrap around hot water pipes (and duct tape!).

Here is a printable pdf of the rocket body and cone. Check out the article in the digital edition of MAKE, Volume 15.

CRAFT weekly recap

This week on CRAFT we saw:

Pool Toss Game

Surveillance Camera Cross Stitch

Making Your Own Play Dough is Fun

Make: Projects - Magnetic toolbox

My Dad got a shiny new red tractor the week before Father's Day, which created a great opportunity for an easy, inexpensive, handmade gift: I bought a classic little red toolbox, to match the tractor, and fitted it with eight 3/4" ring supermagnets on the bottom to make it stick to the fender. There's a rubber washer between each magnet and the bottom of the toolbox, to cushion the magnets, each of which is secured using a 3/4" automotive panel fastener--basically a barbed plastic push fastener.

Inserted through the hole in the magnet, through the rubber washer, and through a 1/4" hole drilled in the bottom of the toolbox, the panel fastener secures everything in place. The head of the fastener also makes a nice black plastic "foot" on the bottom of each magnet, which protects the finish on the tractor from marring against the magnet, without being so thick as to block magnetic attraction.

More:

Creep out your babysitter!

From planetwrite in the MAKE Flickr pool, This ought to scare the daylights out of your average babysitter!

Make your own radio programming

[Photo from MetroMode]

Michael Jackson's death caused radio's roboprogrammers to take a back seat for a while. Increasingly, over the past few decades, broadcast radio has ceased to be a local affair. As the FCC regulations on local ownership of media outlets has faded towards corporate behemoths, radio programming more and more these days is done by databases and distant decision makers. For those of us who remember real radio dj's who made personal decisions about what song would come next, this has driven us more towards our own music collection, rather than being stuck listening to the corporate drivel. Pandora and Last.fm are okay, but they lack the personal touch.

With Michael Jackson's death announcement, the clacker driven music machine was taken off line, if only for a few hours and only on a few stations. Human beings again ruled the airwaves of some radio stations.

"It's a good reminder of what live radio can do, of the role that radio can play in bringing a community together,'' said Scott Fybush, editor of Northeast Radio Watch in Rochester, N.Y.
Many stations no longer have live announcers, using canned voices for part or all of the day, and so can't react to a major news event, he said.

DJ Deirdre Dagata, 39, has been working at Mix 98.5 part time since May, after being replaced at Kiss 108 by recorded programming the month before. And yesterday, she was back in action for the biggest radio day in memory.

Dagata was in constant motion during her 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift. Sitting in an elevated office chair in front of four computer screens, she punched blinking phone lines, tapped on keys, and slid knobs - simultaneously editing recorded calls and fielding a steady stream of new ones from listeners who wanted to share stories about Jackson.

Back in the day, I recall listening to the radio knowing something unique was happening. The radio announcers had their own tastes in music, and they helped to create a following around their musical tastes. Sometimes there was dead air as the dj missed the cue for a variety of human reasons, some more innocent than others. This caused me to volunteer at and work at several radio stations in the 1980's and 1990's. I actually chose my university because I liked the on air feel of the campus radio station, which turned out to be a very influential organization for me. At the station, I did on-air work, production of public service announcements, newscasts, dj training, and eventually became Program Director. The audience's active listenership of the music and programming was exciting to be involved with.

Back then, radio was a public service to be provided to the community, not just a marketing opportunity. Almost radio programming was done with people at the microphones, nearly always they were playing actual records, tapes or cds. Even the commercials were created in-house, except those for national campaigns.

Do you miss real radio? There are a bunch of college radio stations around, and most of them depend on the student body and sometimes local community members to create their programming. With web streaming, it is possible to listen way beyond the broadcast range of your favorite station. WERS in Boston plays a good mix curated by communications students. KEXP in Seattle has a wonderful mix of live performances and genuine djs choosing the music they play. Transom and Youth Radio are helping to cultivate the new voices of radio that we need. Public Radio Exchange has a channel on XM radio, and features a mix of voices that you may not have heard before.

With podcasting and the great suite of computer software and hardware available for free, just about everybody has the radio recording studio in their laptop, desktop, cellphone and digital camera that I had in my bedroom as a high school kid. If you want to broadcast, you may want to build your own transmitter. Sending out your homebrew radio programming out to your house or close neighbors could be a neat experience. You could record some short pieces like songs, jokes, or seque buffers, drop them into your music library and set your music player loose, sending your personalized radio program out to the transmitter.

Radio used to be a LOT of fun as a listener and programmer. Now the tools are much easier to get and use for us regular folks. Hopefully, the corporations will lighten up on their centralized programming and return to the human touch of radio, but even if they don't we can realize that we can choose what radio we listen to or create. If you have any stories of making your own or listening to real radio, pirate or otherwise, tell us in the comments.

LOLrioKART: Dancing in the rain

Well, classes are finally over, and people like Charles can finally settle down to the important work of...extreme grocery carting:

While I seem to be in "build season" mode year-round, it is during long breaks with little in the way of academic or life obligations that I get the most done. Last summer, I began work on LOLrioKart and built Überclocker, Pop Quiz 2, and Nuclear Kitten for Dragon*Con.

So, for many of us, summer has arrived. Whether you are a teacher, student or neither, you likely have some essential experiment, project, mission or other task for the curious long days ahead. Fill us in through the comments, and point out some links so that we can see your winter and spring dreams come to summer's reality.
[via MITers]

Getting real with Physical Design

[Image from Shopbot Tools]

Daniel Smithwick has been working to develop a new model for architecture. Instead of building each structure as a custom object, people can use software and hardware to make repeatable designs that can be manufactured and assembled where and when they are needed.

He recently wrote an article on the Shopbot site to help explain his vision of design and manufacturing of housing and other objects.

Our company's vision is to revolutionize architectural design and production and to make these processes transparent by empowering consumers throughout the world with the online tools and resources that enable them to become the producers of their own creations.
Not only are there incredible inefficiencies in the current practice of design, fabrication and construction of architecture, but until now these processes have been limited to costly design professionals, wasteful manufacturing facilities and labor-intensive site work.

You may want to take a look at the Physical Design site for more information.

iPod birthday cake

Looking for the perfect birthday cake for an Applephile? You couldn't go too far wrong with a cake like this cake from April Julian. No screen polishing needed here.

Prototyping Thermatron, flame-controlled synth

Lorin Parker of Electric Western (creator of the Phantastron) puts fire to work controlling sound -

The THERMATRON is essentially a voltage controlled oscillator and wave shaper controlled by the action of a flame. This is possible because electricity can be conducted through a flame. This is not a new discovery, in fact the electrical properties of flame have been known for hundreds of years and well studied. For example, many hot water heaters have a sensor that detects flame by sensing the current inserted through the gas flame (if the gas flame goes out, the current does not reach the sensor and the heater knows that the flame is out).

Check out the project's post for a much deeper explanation of the Thermatron's funciotnality and flame conduction in general.

Future death machine nose art

I'm pretty sure this TrueType font designed in 1998 by the now-apparently-defunct "Dragon's Den Type Foundry" was intended for players of Games Workshop's Warhammer: 40K tabletop wargame.

But c'mon, seriously: what project wouldn't be improved by a little faux-fascist heraldry? Perhaps a flying skull transfixed by a dagger and with lightning shooting from its eyes?

I can't think of one either.

Blimpduino and UAV at Maker Faire

Chris Anderson demonstrates the systems of the BlimpDuino.

The Blimpduino kit is a very low cost, open source, autonomous blimp kit. It consists of an Arduino-based blimp controller board with on-board infrared and ultrasonic sensors and an interface for an optional RC mode, a simple gondola with two vectoring (tilting) differential thrusters, and ground-based infrared beacon. Assembly is required, including soldering.

Anderson created the BlimpDuino with Jordi Munoz of DIY Drones. Their entry, shown in the video above, took first place in the Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition a few months ago.

If you want to build the BlimpDuino, the documentation is on the site and pretty good. Printing the build notes out and setting aside a few hours with the soldering iron should have you in pretty good shape.

Heavy Metal II at MOS

Heavy Metal II, Amped Up is the culminating event, hosted by the Boston Museum of Science and the Lemelson-MIT Program, is part of Eurekafest, a multi-day celebration designed to empower a legacy of inventors.

Watch teams of high school students from across the country compete in an all-day challenge to build wind turbines that can hoist empty garbage cans to the ceiling of the Blue Wing. Explore a range of "windy" activities with Museum Exhibit Halls interpreters and educators from the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

Go check it out, and take a wander through the Museum of Science, which has lots of great exhibits, and an educators' library. Take some photos and share them with us in the MAKE Flickr pool.

ARRL Field Day 2009

Today is Field Day, the annual event where thousands of hams across the nation publicly demonstrate their emergency communication abilities. You can find hams constructing emergency stations in parks, schools, backyards and shopping malls operating using only emergency power supplies. If you are interested in getting started with ham radio but don't have a license, today is a great day to do so. Field Day is one of the few opportunities when you can operate without a license at the GOTA (get on the air) stations (which are supervised by licensed hams).

You can find your local field day station on the ARRL Web station locator.

Altoids tin tacklebox

If fishing is in your weekend plans, you can whip up this quickie Altoids tin tacklebox! It uses an old gift card and some popsicle sticks to make compartments and a stacking tray.