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November 16, 2009

In the Maker Shed: Cabaret Mechanical Movement

The Cabaret Mechanical Movement book is packed with information, diagrams, and useful tips on making your own automata. The book uses machines and automata from the Cabaret Mechanical Theater to explain levers, shafts, cranks, cams, springs, linkages, ratchets, gears, and even coin-op control. This is a great introduction for those inspired to go and make their own work.

Posted by Maker Shed | Nov 16, 2009 01:00 AM
Arts, Maker Shed Store, Toys and Games | Permalink | Comments (2) | Suggest a Site

History of curved origami

Interesting article from MacArthur fellow Erik Demaine covering the history of origami-style models that include curved folds. Shown above is "Concentric Circular Tower" by late UCSC Professor and noted computer scientist David A. Huffman (Wikipedia), whose curved-origami work was covered posthumously by the New York Times in 2004. The Flickr curved fold pool is chock-a-block with fascinating models of this type. [Thanks, Jon!]

More: Curved tetrahedron origami

Amazing Star Wars Tauntaun costume

Solid Works2
First Caulk
Seethru

Check out the amazing build log of this Star Wars Tauntaun costume, Scott (the maker writes)...

TaunTaun costume, 2009 for the Exotic Zone ball in Sacramento. I'm wearing the Luke Skywalker outfit for this shoot. On Halloween my buddy Brian wore the Luke outfit, and I was his spotter dressed as Han Solo. Sorry bout the shaky camera, my wife was walking and holding our daughter in the other arm.

CRAFT weekly recap

Here are some of my favorites from CRAFT this week:

Price Chart Necklaces

Thanksgiving Feast: Side Dishes

Literary Clutch Bags

Build: Chumby Guts kit

When I put together my Chumby Guts kit, I had to stop and scratch my head a few times because I didn't know how to orient a part or which screws to use. I filmed the second time around, to share with you how easy it comes together! Now all that's left is to build a plush enclosure for it. Keep an eye out for an upcoming CRAFT Video about that!

Subscribe to the MAKE podcast in iTunes, or download the m4v video.

More:

In the Maker Shed:

Chumby Guts

An Open-Source Approach To Better Prosthetics

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An Open-Source Approach To Better Prosthetics @ NPR via Chr1s.

Before Jonathan Kuniholm had a tour of duty in Iraq, he worked for Tackle Design, an industrial design, research and development firm. After that tour, he was missing part of his right arm — which he lost when his Marine patrol was ambushed near Haditha.

When Kuniholm returned to his design shop, he brought along three prosthetic arms given to him at Walter Reed Medical Center — the same body-operated hook many veterans have used since World War I, a shorter utility prosthetic, and a new, state-of-the-art myoelectric arm. Each one had its drawbacks — and when Kuniholm and his Tackle Design colleagues disassembled them, they quickly concluded that they could improve on the designs. They founded the Open Prosthetics Project, an open-source collaboration that makes its innovations available to anyone. And Kuniholm signed on with Revolutionizing Prosthetics, an initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

Kuniholm's story — including the details of his injury and how his experience in Iraq has shaped both his work and views of the war — is featured in Michael Belfiore's new book, The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs. He joins Fresh Air contributor Dave Davies for a conversation about the Open Prosthetics Project and its goals.

STEM resources for teachers

This weekend I had an opportunity to attend a renewable energy workshop organized by the Southeastern Massachusetts Achievement and Retention in Technology group at Bristol Community College. The morning was packed with teachers sharing their lesson and unit ideas on ideas based around the STEM subjects of green technologies and energy.

The college offers a Lending Lab for tools and lab equipment that most schools are unlikely to stock. Through using these equipment resources, teachers can get their students' hands onto enough materials to for a series of lessons on windmill design, hydrogen cars, air purity testing, and more. Teachers shared their experiences in bringing this equipment into their classes and how it affected student learning.

The NEED Project was a new one to me, focusing on bringing the ideas of energy systems to the classroom. Their site has an extensive collection of materials organized by grade level that are ready to implement in the classroom, from background information to student handouts. Chuck Lawrence of Upper Cape Regional Technical High School shared his experiences of having his students evaluate the energy use of educational spaces in the school, and has encouraged his students to help their families understand their use of energy from environmental and financial perspectives.

Read full story

Open source swarmbots

One of my fave websites at the moment is Hizook, Travis Deyle's robot news portal. Here's a snippet from a piece he posted about the University of Stuttgart and University of Karlsruhe's open source swarm robot project:

I'm a huge fan of so-called micro robots -- those with cm length scales, thus μ m3. I've posted about numerous micro robots before, including the amazing Alice micro robot swarms from EPFL, and I am a long-time micro and nano autonomous sumo robot advocate (see RoboGames). Perhaps that is why I'm so excited about the SwarmRobot.org open hardware micro-robot swarm, developed by the University of Stuttgart and the University of Karlsruhe. All of the hardware and software is open (in the GPL sense), including parts lists, circuit board and chassis designs, and software. With a stated goal to produce sub-€100 robots, I'd really like to see this take off. Combined with a wireless power surface, a micro-robot in perpetual motion would make a great desk ornament!

Open Hardware Micro-Robot Swarm Project

Brush furniture could become bristlebot

The scrub together table and lazy stool furniture pieces by designer Jason Taylor are pretty neat looking, but is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Thats right, they are just a motor away from becoming giant bristlebots! The bristles look like they might need to be bent over a bit first, though. [via dude craft]

High voltage line robot

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Very cool High voltage line robot from HIBOT...

High-voltage power-line inspection has always been a dangerous job for humans, so a handful of companies are sending in the robots. One such company, the Tokyo-based HiBot, is working with western Japan's Kansai Electric Power Co. to field a new robot next year that can inspect several power cables at once, a first for such daredevil bots.

Chumby in a box

Kent was impatient at having his Chumby Guts laying loose on the table, so he took to the box that it came in. This is a good way to see what the casing process entails and considering what it will ultimately need before committing to a proper case. Think of it as a Chumby case sketch model. Some of the other possibilities we've heard are cigar box Chumby and Teletubby embedding (called either TeleChumby or ChumbyTubby). MAKE Flickr pool member Pauric posted a set of photos showing how he gutted his first gen Chumby and installed it in a nice wooden case.

How are your Chumby Guts doing? Post up some Chumby photos in the MAKE Flickr pool, and send us some tips in the comments.

More:

In the Maker Shed:

Chumby Guts

Ham Hiking: North American SOTA Activity Day

Today is the first North American SOTA (Summits on the Air) Activity Day. Ham radio operators across North America will be hiking up mountain tops to activate summits by setting up portable radios to make contacts. You can join in and activate your own summit, visit here for more details. Or you can make contacts with activators, or listen in. Check SOTAWatch to see who will be on the air, at which location and frequency. Currently more there are more than 16 activations scheduled.

Piano music composing computer from 1965 on TV

Inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil appeared on I've Got a Secret in 1965 when he was 17 years old. He made a computer that plays music, at the end of the video they show the computer - via Bruce Sterling.

iPhone controlled bipedal walking robot with multi-touch gestures

Most of the iPhone controller hacks I've seen tend to use the accelerometer along with on on-board camera. Walky is a bipedal walking robot that's controlled using a natural gestural interface. [via GeekyGadgets]

Yuta Sugiura and his colleagues at the Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University, have developed a new control scheme for robots and virtual characters called Walky for the iPhone. Rather than using a cumbersome game controller or keyboard, which may pose a problem for novice users, they can use Walky to control walking, turning, jumping, kicking, and other actions through simple finger gestures on the iPhone's touch screen.

Amazing homemade globe

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool:

Flickr member davesbit built a globe by making a mold from a beach ball, and designed a map for it using The Generic Mapping Tools.

The globe is about 20inches in diameter, made from fiberglass and filled with foam. The map parts are built with the Generic Mapping Tools and glued on...

Making-of photos on the Flickr photo page.

DIY water purifier

Mark @ BoingBoing points us to this homemade water purifier build by a retired Russian engineer.

My new favorite etchant

From the MAKE Flickr pool

I love etching my own PCBs. It's a great way to incorporate some of art-school skills with my love for DIY electronics. Up until now, I'd always used traditional ferric chloride to etch my boards, though I'd heard many sing the praises of an alternative etchant easily made from common ingredients. Tired of mail-ordering ferric and dealing with proper disposal, I decided to give cupric chloride a try.

Following Open Circuits' recipe, I picked up some muriatic acid from the local hardware store and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide 3% from the pharmacy. After setting up next to my big window fan, I slowly added 16oz of the muriatic to an equal amount hydrogen peroxide, resulting in a clear solution. Shortly after immersing my masked PCB and agitating a bit, the etchant turned a brilliant green hue as it began work on the exposed copper. Several minutes of gentle sloshing left me with a perfectly etched board - plus a etchant that can will last me a very long time. For me, that's the real 'selling point' of cupric chloride - by oxygenating (air-bubbling) or adding some more H2O2 to the solution, I'll be able to refresh this batch once it's spent - awesome. I'm left wondering why I hadn't tried this sooner!

Billy Bass brain upgrade

Here's a Design News Gadget Freak column on using an ARM-powered processor (the MBED ARM Cortex-M3 MCU Dev Board) to make a Billy Bass animatronic fish speak and move as you wish. [Caution: mild cursing in the video.]

Gadget Freak Case #150: Hotrod Your Billy Bass

Handmade Music Austin #2 this Sunday

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Looks like the Austin-area Handmade event series is going strong, not to be missed for those local -

We’ll be building 4ms’ Autonomous Bassline Generator. The upper division class is filled but there should be some space in the beginner class. Even if there aren’t any seats available, there will be all kinds of things happening in the gallery space for EAST. You can play with the Thingamagoop 2, Eric Archer’s noisemakers, Andromeda Space Rocker kits as well as other handmade instuments.

More details over at Handmade Music.

Regular GPS not accurate enough? Try RTK-GPS!

Want to fly your plane or drive your car using GPS signals, but finding that your receiver just isn't accurate enough to make things work? Well, MAKE subscriber Bruce Mueller writes in to point us at an impressive solution: an open-source real time kinematic GPS receiver. Researchers Tomoji Takasu and Akio Yasuda of Tokyo University developed the RTKLIB library to perform the RTK-GPS calculations, and then ported the whole thing to run on a low-cost beagle board and commodity GPS receiver. Want to try it out? Full source code, circuit layouts and instructions are provided on their site.

So, how does it work? A GPS receiver normally works by measuring the delay between an internally generated signal and one received by a satellite. This specially crafted signal makes it possible for the GPS receiver to find and latch onto the satellites signal, however it's wavelength limits the accuracy of the receiver. The real time kinematic system gets around this limitation by measuring the phase delay in the carrier signal. Because this signal has a much sorter wavelength, it is possible to make a system that is accurate to the centimeter.