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Archives: June 2008

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June 30, 2008

LightCoder will help you survive urban chaos

The Lightcoder by artist Geraldine Juarez is an analog urban communication device in the form of a bag made from reflective mylar that uses a light source to encode messages into morse code. The bag itself comes with the Morse code alphabet guide, a map of Manhattan, a broken digital compass, lantern, aspirin, rad-block, dust mask, utility knife, hand made shape-lock cups, and fire starters. The result, says the artist, is a symbolic object that explores the possibility of survival in urban environments by bringing out the vulnerability of modern digital technologies and communications devices.

LightCoder Project page

Build a dancing game that uses your hands instead of your feet

"Para Para Revolution" is like the famed "Dance Dance Revolution" game but instead of dancing on foot pads, players wear gloves with accelerometers that detect when they wave their hands and signal directions. Check out the link below for details on this project, including circuit diagrams and code samples.

Para Para Revolution

Record player turned into train tracks while its needle drives over them

Although we've seen train car record players before such the kind that "drive" over the record platter itself and play tracks as it moves in a circle. This "Sound Chaser" is actually a train track made from old records that have been spliced together to look like a real track. As the train drives over them, it plays the jumbled songs and you can even dance in unison with the player as it scuttles around on the floor.

Sound Chaser

Hydrophone eyeball?

Hydrophone Eyeballhat
From the MAKE Flickr photo pool

Vancouver microphone-maker Trust in Dust made this condenser mic for underwater use. That silicone membrane creates a strangely ocular appearance - the optional top hat adds a uniquely Residents-esque feel :o - Condenser Hydrophone on Flickr

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Gestural vocal performance with an infrared shirt

Sonic explorer ADACHI Tomomi absolutely tears it up in this performance. His Infrared sensor shirt allows for some very dramatic and at times downright surreal control of the effects applied to his own vocals. Things get quite intense by the 3 minute mark.

The Highest Popping Toaster In The World

Freddie Yauner has another fun project that he has just posted on his website. This time it's his "Highest Popping Toaster in the World". You may remember his other piece "The Fastest Clock in the World" which started a little controversy in the comments. Hopefully this time no one will dispute his claim of the highest popping toaster.

Everyone loves it when a toaster has a good pop to it, so I thought this was the logical next step, to create a new space in the market.

And now, what appears to be a very official measuring of he aforementioned "popping toast" via YouTube.

More about The Highest Popping Toaster In The World

Related:

More about The Fastest Clock in the World

Len Lye: Kinetic Sculptures

This is an interesting excerpt from a 1987 documentary called Doodlin'. It reminds me of the sounds created from circuit bending. The difference is, all these noises are made by banging, hitting, and just plain abusing sheet metal and not kids toys. My favorite part is when he describes a 25 million volt arc (3:33) that he wants to shoot out of one of his sculptures.

Arduino Life Clock

The Arduino powered "Life Clock" integrates the Conway's game of "Life" and a few other more useful bits of information. I like the cherry case that holds all 3 boards together in a nice little package.

No, it doesn't tell you how long you're going to live. It's simply a combination of several things I've been working on these last few months. The Life Clock plays Conway's game of "life" and displays the time and temperature as a marquee between games.

GPS logging Arduino shield

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Adafruit has released a GPS logging Arduino shield, freaking cool! Pop this on to an Arduino and you can make your own GPS logger, locative art projects & more! The kit is available here.

This shield requires a GPS module (sometimes called an "engine board" or "engine module") to receive the timecode data from GPS satelites. There are dozens of GPS modules on the market, each with slightly different specifications. The Adafruit GPS shield v1.0 supports 4 popular hobbyist modules and is geared specifically for the EM-406A: the required connector is already soldered on and ready to go. If you want to use a different module, check the parts list for the required connector as they are not included.

June 29, 2008

Objective-J and Cappuccino: Cocoa for the web

There's a neat article over at Ars Technica that takes a look at 280 North's 3-person development team, their recent release of a keynote-like web application called 280 Slides, and the framework that they constructed to make the application. Some time before 280 Slides was developed, the team created an Objective-C-like superset of the Javascript language called Objective-J which implements message passing and a Smalltalk-style syntax. Building on that, they re-implemented much of the Cocoa framework in Objective-J, allowing Cocoa-style applications to be developed that will run natively in the browser.

With Objective-J and Cappuccino, you don't create applications with a mixture of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Instead, apps are written entirely in Objective-J, following a development model that's similar to creating desktop applications for OS X. From the article:

"Cappuccino is a re-implementation of Cocoa in Objective-J, which means we reimplemented AppKit, Foundation, CoreGraphics, and parts of CoreAnimation," Boucher told us. With it, developers familiar with desktop GUI applications can create a rich, desktop-like web app with the same relative ease Cocoa programmers can create a rich desktop app. "Coming from a background of desktop programming, and Cocoa in particular, we realized how much harder building a web application was. So we wanted to try to make things just a little bit easier."

280 Slides stands on its own as a powerful web-based presentation tool. It's simplified when compared to its desktop cousins, but it does exactly what most people need in a presentation tool, and it can export to PPT for fine tuning and end-presentation use. The fact that its development inspired the creation of a new language as well as bringing a desktop application development framework to the web just blows my mind.

Objective-J will be released to the public soon as an open source project. On the one hand, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable moving away from the web development technologies I've grown accustomed to. On the other, it would be cool to work in a language that allows you to seamlessly port your applications between the desktop and the web.

If you have experience with both Cocoa and AJAX development, please share your thoughts in the comment area.

Cocoa on the web: 280 North, Objective-J, and Cappuccino [via Slashdot]
280 North Blog
280 Slides
Objective-J.org

MAKE Flickr Pool weekly roundup

Flickr Mosaic8-29-08
From the MAKE Flickr photo pool

Bent voice morpher [above, top-left]
DIY guitar picks [above, top-right]
Bucket-borne hydroelectric generator [above, bottom-left]
Solar Bench [above, bottom-right]
Orientation aware camera
The Time Harp
Basic I/O for Arduino

As Becky so astutely pointed out, MAKE pool hit 4,000 members this week - Woohoo!

Flickrpool 4Kmembers

and growing ... and growing ... and growing ...

HOW TO - Make 3D glasses for an old Silicon Graphics box

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Mark writes in...

Ever since I got myself an Octane, I've got a renewed interest in everything Silicon Graphics. And with that, my old (imaginary) list of things-to-do with such a machine has been dusted off too. One of those things was making some 3D shutter glasses (cheap). And even though I'm tinkering with SGIs for years already, I never took the time to build some stereographic glasses myself, a project which has been online for years already and I've been wanting to do ever since I read it. And now it was time to actually make my own pair. ^_^

One of the official possibilities for these kind of machines is connecting CrystalEyes StereoGraphic glasses to them. Most (if not all) graphic options for SGIs have some kind of stereo capability. Now even though a lot of the SGI related goodies have become cheap (on eBay for instance), I couldn't find the glasses plus the transmitter anywhere. I could find glasses separately, but that would still mean I have to make a transmitter and well, I had these parts around for ages already so I gave it a go to finally connect cheap shutter glasses (instead of the CrystalEyes ones) to the StereoView Port of one of my SGIs.

Amplified LED throwie wall

Susan Clausen of AS220 made this amazing target for LED throwies. It's made of sheet metal, but she also put some audio pickups on the back and ran it through an effects pedal and into an amplifier. It made for some extremely satisfying tosses. The video shows the throwie wall in action at the 2008 AS220 Fools Ball (MAKE was a sponsor).

More on the Pico-Hydro system

Prompted by the coverage of the AIDG Pico-Hydro system, here and on Gizmodo, Catherine Laine of AIDG asked the developer, Sam Redfield, to provide more information. She tells us that he's also going to try and get a parts list and tech specs that she'll share with us. [Thanks, Cat!]

Sam Redfield on Pico-hydro at La Florida

Best of CRAFT

Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

HOW TO - Stackable sound baffles

Jim Robert made an instructable for stackable "gobos," portable sound baffles for absorbing or reflecting sound for a reconfigurable sound work environment. He has the tutorial up on his website, too.

Smart domino run

Here's another cool project from Studio 3D - a smart domino run, with an option for using a LEGO RCX brick.

June 28, 2008

JSVI - Javascript Vi for web forms

There are so many WYSIWYG editors for html forms, it's about time someone put together a decent web version of the Vi editor. JSVI is written in Javascript and seems to be fairly cross-browser compatible. With a few tweaks to your code, you can now make any textarea behave exactly like Vi. How cool is that?

To use it, download the GPLed vi.js file from the link below, include it in your html document, and then add an onfocus="editor(this);" to any textarea that you want vi enabled. If your textarea contains any preset information, the text will be loaded into the editor when the field is clicked. Saving the file with :wq will exit the editor and store the changes back in the input field.

Somewhere there must be a unix blog or forum that will adopt this for their submission and comment fields. Shame on them if they don't. That is, unless they are waiting for the emacs version.

JSVI - VI in JavaScript (demo)
Download vi.js

The Time Harp

The Time Harp is a stringed musical instrument by Larnie Fox. It uses motion sensors to trigger what appears to be rotating plastic lids to vibrate the strings. I'm not too sure how close I would get with all that exposed wire!

View a Flickr photo set of the build.

RFID aesthetics article

PingMag writes:

Now, while strolling the booths at the RFID Expo that just took place at Tokyo’s Big Sight, we began wondering what RFID is used for best: as a button on a chef’s uniform to let him open the kitchen door; as an infant’s bracelet for a motion detector; embedded in boxes to trace its contents on their way across the globe or inside price tags in department stores to calculate the sales. Ah, well, if you just keep standing in front of the chip displays, you start to make out figures and characters of their shapes, wondering who came up with these fascinating structures… Instead of delving into new technology, this time PingMag takes a closer look at the appearance of RFID transponders.

Read the full article on PingMag. Via Core77.