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November 30, 2008

MAKE Flickr pool super-roundup!

Flickrmosaic 11 30

It's a been a while since we had our last roundup of projects from our Flickr photo pool, so here's a big ol' collection of recent highlights -

Google Code University - tutorials and course content for CS students

Google's Code University is another great "bootstrap education" resource for CS students. I've written previously about other free resources for the self-guided software engineer, such as MIT's Open Courseware and Standford's Engineering Everywhere. While Google Code University currently offers a smaller subset of courses, it's all geared toward topics related to large scale web application development.

This website provides tutorials and sample course content so CS students and educators can learn more about current computing technologies and paradigms. In particular, this content is Creative Commons licensed which makes it easy for CS educators to use in their own classes.

The Courses section contains tutorials, lecture slides, and problem sets for a variety of topic areas:

AJAX Programming
Algorithms
Distributed Systems
Web Security
Languages

In the Tools 101 section, you will find a set of introductions to some common tools used in Computer Science such as version control systems and databases.

As you might imaging, there's quite a bit of content that's motivated by the sort of development challenges that Google engineers deal with on their projects. For instance, here's a Lecture by Jeff Dean that discusses distributed storage systems, from the perspective of Google's Big Table technology:

If you're interested in large scale web application design and distributed application development, here's a good opportunity to learn from some of the experts.

Google Code University

Previously:
Bootstrap Education
Stanford Engineering Everywhere
Lecturefox: Free University Lectures

Sparebots!

What do you do with all those extra resistors, capacitors outdated Ic's and dull red LEDs? Make SpareBots!

Part sculpture, part recycling, SpareBots are a festive way to make figures, work with your hands and tell a story, like the SpareBot rodeo below:

Flickr user Charlie Beldon has posted up some neat little sparebots into the Make Flickr pool.

Have you tried your needle nose pliers at the craft of SpareBots? Would this be a good way to introduce young people to the components of electricity? Could it be a good way of learning soldering? What else could be done with the idea? Stop motion SpareBot animated opera? Post into the Comments or the Flickr pool with your ideas.

Best of CRAFT

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

Glass bottle shelving

Here are some Instructables for variations on building shelves with glass bottles as the verticals:

Bottle shelving with tension provided by a hook and bolt tightened between the shelves. FF4C9085Q2EUAIKWK2.MEDIUM.jpg

A kitchen shelving unit version of their design.

Check out Zero Waste's other projects here.

MAKE inspired honking pumpkin

I know Halloween is over, but I really wanted to share this project that Todd emailed us. The honking pumpkin was inspired by my How-to Tuesday: Scariest Pumpkin ever build. This is exactly why we do the builds for the blog. We want our readers to be inspired to make things, and maybe like Todd, make them better. Best of all, share what you have learned so others can do the same. Thanks Todd, you made my ~~day~~ year! Have you made anything inspired by the MAKE blog? If so, send us a link. Thanks!

My honking pumpkin used to scare the H-E-Hockey-Sticks out of Trick-Or-Treaters. I based this project on a Make-blog posted just before Halloween as I noted on the first page. The project turned out very scary indeed, but I had a lot of false triggering of the car horns on Halloween night. This site is about my re-build to make it better and more importantly I documented how I used my Oscilloscope to track down the cause of the false triggering and correct the problem.

More about the MAKE inspired honking pumpkin

More:

How-to Tuesday: Scariest Pumpkin Ever

In the Maker Shed:

Mkmd1-2
Bare Bones Arduino Board Kit (Unassembled)

Make your own Arduino controlled bell tower / carillon

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Mechatronics writes -

This is a set of musical bells which are driven by solenoids and controlled by an Arduino microcontroller.

There are 8 bells covering one octave.

The bells are controllable from a PC, or the tower can stand alone and play pre-programmed melodies.

Flaming legs

Evidently the people of New Mexico have seen it all. Even robolegs gone wild!

Carlos is a robotic everyman. He's not one of those fancy deep sea dwelling, swimming pool competing, publicity hogging, multiple kill, or planet exploring robots, just a regular robot doing his thing like us humans.

Carlos was a college kinetic sculpture project. I was interested in the concept of automating aspects of society that were considered not so "glamorous". Robotics are often used in environments which are considered dangerous to humans. Deep sea exploration, nuclear cleanup and volcanism are some of the "higher profile" adverse environments which robots are used. My question was, "What about other dangerous or hazardous areas?". For example, homeless people live in extremely dangerous environments. Shouldn't there be automated equipment used by this strata of society? So, for this project I chose to implement an automated walking, homeless shopping cart.

Check out some of the other projects at GizmoGarden!
Via Zoomdoggle

What do robots mean to you? Have you built a robot to solve a problem? Have you made plans for automating mechanisms? What have you done to create devices that move in response to sensor data? Add your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool, and bring on your comments!

Fire-Cooled Brew

MOE_firebrew
Photography by Simon Jansen

New Zealander Simon Jansen has all the bona fides of an alpha maker. A software engineer and classic car restorer, he's got a half-built R2-D2 and a custom minibike he made from scratch. He achieved geek fame with his ASCII animation of Star Wars scenes (asciimation.co.nz), which practically defined obsessive attention to detail.

But a jet-powered beer cooler? This bloke operates on a whole 'nother level of absurdity.

Jansen set out to make the holy grail of many a maker: the homemade jet engine. In his Auckland garage, he welded his own combustor, bolted it to an old turbocharger, and added a leaf blower for air flow and a propane tank (sans regulator) for fuel.

The trickiest part was the oil system, which must maintain critical lubrication pressure: "I used an oil pump from an old Ford Escort Mark 1, driven by the motor and gearbox from a cheap 12-volt rechargeable drill!"

Don't try it at home without an exhaust temperature gauge that goes to 1,000°F and an rpm meter that hits 100,000. But bloody hell! It worked, with

the head-splitting roar that jet hobbyists live for. "Incredibly loud," Jansen recalls fondly. "You can hear the air being ripped apart as it is sucked into the turbine. I was grinning for days."

From adversity came the real breakthrough. Jansen's jet burned propane so fast that the tank rapidly iced up, dropping the fuel pressure. So he stood the tank in a tub of warm water. When a colleague remarked that the iced water could then chill beverages -- eureka!

Jansen says beer and dangerous machines don't mix, so he abstains from the frosty bevvies until he's finished playing with the engine. Ever the tinkerer, he has stripped down and rebuilt the jet beer cooler several times. "The latest iteration should be more self-contained and portable," he promises. "I've been telling the mates at the office we'll fire it up in the car park."

>> Jet-Powered Beer Cooler: asciimation.co.nz/beer

>> More Homemade Jets: junkyardjet.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 11, page 19 - Keith Hammond.

November 29, 2008

MIDI Hero - Guitar Hero with a drum kit

This Guitar Hero mod posted by Youtube user Egyokeo blew my mind. A MIDI drum kit and some custom software on a PC send button-press input via the Xbox Input Machine (XIM) hardware to an Xbox running Guitar Hero.

Since I injured my middle left finger playing Guitar Hero 2 way too much when it came out, I've been dying to get back to playing it. But my finger hasn't healed. I was holding the neck too tightly on the X-plorer guitar controller and it hurts to bend it anymore. I've never had an injury playing the drums, so I thought "wouldn't it be great to be able to play Guitar Hero on the drums?" So I thought about how that might be accomplished... researched, implemented, borrowed, and here I outline the finished product.

Here's the whole chain of what's going on:

Me banging on my drumKat MIDI drum pads
drumKat MIDI Out to MIDI/USB adapter to PC
PC running my own custom MIDI Hero software
MIDI Hero calls into XIM which sends input to the Xbox 360 console

To make the songs playable with two-sticked drum input, some of the pads simulate multiple button presses for the 3 note chords and an input buffer on the PC automatically holds all notes until just before sending another hit event. You could tweak the setup to use a MIDI keyboard or even a MIDI guitar.

There are a lot more details on Egyokeo's site as well as the blog maintained by XIM creator OBsIV. Unfortunately, there are no instructions for actually playing like this. I'm pretty sure it involves secret ninja stuff.

MIDI Hero: Play Rhythm Games using any MIDI Instrument
Building your own Xbox 360 Input Machine (XIM)

Bamgoo: electric car built from bamboo

This doesn't quite look like the most crash-safe vehicle ever designed, but electric power plus bamboo construction does provide a dream-like level of sustainability:

(video found via G4TV)

Any guesses on what epoxy/resin they're using to hold the bamboo together?

Thanks to Ecofriend for finding some specs: "the 60-kg electric car can run for 30 miles on a single charge."

Couple this with your bamboo bike, and your only transportation problem will be outrunning hungry pandas!

Lyrics box for practice/gigging

Lyricsbox 3-Up
From the MAKE Flickr photo pool

While visiting family over Thanksgiving I witnessed this device in use - "Mark's Magic Box" displays song lyrics and note changes to simplify band rehearsals. The setup uses a laptop + LCD for storage and display - controlled via foot-pedal which was built from a mouse and housed in a handmade metal enclosure. A teleprompter for music - very cool!

Kevin Kelly on technology as the 7th kingdom

On O'Reilly Radar, Joshua-Michele Ross has an interview with the always-original and thought-provoking Kevin Kelly. The discussion covers various topics related to biology, technology, and net-connected culture. As Josh says:

This last section (at 7mins 30 secs) is the deepest and most provocative. Kevin assumes the point of view of technology to assess its needs and wants. This line of inquiry leads to some surprising conclusions. My favorite quote from the conversation: "We are the sexual organs of technology" Indeed.

I really like the observation that, unlike biology, technology is almost impossible to make extinct, and that it's hard to find any technologies from the past that aren't still being used in some fashion today. For instance, there are more human beings making arrow heads today, Kevin claims, than were making them in pre-historic times.

"Technology is the 7th Kingdom of Life" - A conversation with Kevin Kelly

More:

Waveform jewelry

Waveform Ring

Sakura Koshimizu's waveform jewelry uses actual audio as its source -

Waveform Series is the laser-cut shapes of the waveform of the sound in sound editing software environment. I used some human sound such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of church bell.

- Waveform Series

CRAFT - The 2nd Year Box Set

Get four volumes of CRAFT year two, combined in a special edition collector's box! CRAFT: The 2nd Year includes volume 5, volume 6, volume 7, and volume 8 and is now for sale in the Maker Shed.

Update: For those of you who already own volumes 5-8, you can get just the slipcase for storing your issues!

Noodle oracle

I don't generally do a lot of food posts over here, but I thought this was really clever - love noodles, but getting bored with your same old combinations? Consult the Noodlr, the noodle soup idea generator cooked up by Serious Eater Michele Humes. Via Angry Chicken

Best of GeekDad

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GeekDad Holiday Gift Guide #4: GeekMoms!
Mom needs presents too! The GeekDads have come up their best holiday gift ideas for GeekMoms.

Hey You Guuuuyyyys! A New Electric Company Starts in January!
Once upon a time, before he became a brilliant movie actor with an Oscar and dozens of films under his belt, Morgan Freeman was known to a generation of children as the Easy Reader, Count Dracula, and hosts of other characters on The Electric Company. Starting in January, an entirely new generation of kids will get their own version of the show, being developed by Sesame Workshop and to be shown on PBS Kids as part of their Raising Readers effort.

Dwarven Forge Hammers Out the Boredom of Plain-Jane RPG Battlemaps
If you head out to your Friendly Local Game Store and observe the tabletop gamer in his or her natural habitat, you'll see that every gaming table is different. Some gamemasters are hunkered behind laptops, others are peeking over their screens. At one table, the clatter of dice is constant, while at the next, it's all about roleplay and the dice still haven't left their pouches.

Geekly Reader - "The Radioactive Boy Scout" by Ken Silverstein
David Hahn was a geeky kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit during the early 1990's. Like most geeky kids, he was socially awkward and had an intense fascination with very narrow subject matter; in his case, science. But when David began working on his Atomic Energy Merit Badge, his rather obsessive pursuits nearly lead to an environmental disaster.

10 Geeky Movies That Were Terrible, but We Loved Them Anyway
What were the movies whose thin plot, or poor acting still won us over because they developed a level of geek credibility through excellent referencing, humor or attention to obscure details?

Mortar Shells to Coffee Grounds

MOE_mortar
Photography by Amber Henshaw

The area around the house of Azmeraw Zeleke in northern Ethiopia is littered with burnt-out mortar shells left over from a war with neighboring Eritrea.

For months, Azmeraw wondered what he could do with them as he saw them being sold around Mekele town (about 800km from the capital, Addis Ababa). They were being used for washing clothes or for crushing things. Finally, he struck upon the idea of converting the shells into the inner workings of coffee machines.

The shells stand about 1 meter high. Azmeraw cuts off the pointed ends, seals them, and puts holes in the aluminum cylinder. The cylinder then channels the water, coffee, and milk.

Coffee is a major export from Ethiopia and plays a big role in life. After meals, the traditional coffee ceremony allows family and friends to get together to share news and discuss the issues of the day. Coffee shops are also popular. Each of Azmeraw's machines costs about $1,300, which is relatively cheap compared to imported machines. A local coffee shop owner, Haile Abraha, says the machines work well and make great coffee.

Azmeraw thinks he has sold hundreds -- he's not sure exactly how many -- since he started production five or six years ago. But he says it can be difficult to convince people in the area to buy the machine because of the mortar shell. "These shells have all been used. We all need peace and we don't want war, but once these shells have been used, we should use our skills to do something with them," he says.

"Sometimes I think about the fact they were used for war, but I want to change them to do something good. They could be a symbol of war, but I am doing something good out of the bad."

Azmeraw has big plans for his small business. At the moment, he works out of three ramshackle rooms with gaps in the corrugated roof. His staff of six sells the machines to coffee shops and restaurants in the area. In the future, he hopes to sell them even farther afield -- perhaps even to Eritrea.

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 10, page 20 - Amber Henshaw.

iPhone Linux

The iPhone dev team, hard at work as usual, announced a successful iPhone Linux port today. It's still at a very early stage, but the kernel boots on first and second generation iPhones and the first generation iPod touch. A framebuffer driver and a working Busybox installation point to an exciting open source future:

What we have:

- Framebuffer driver
- Serial driver
- Serial over USB driver
- Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.

What we have in openiboot (but hasn't been ported yet):

- Read-only support for the NAND

What we don't have (yet!):

- Write support for the NAND
- Wireless networking
- Touchscreen
- Sound
- Accelerometer
- Baseband support

If you're a Linux hacker and want to pitch in with the porting process, hop on the #iphonelinux IRC channel at irc.osx86.hu.

iPhone Linux - Official Announcement

It's just a demo at this point, but if you can't wait to see this running on your own phone, here's what you need:
Installation Instructions
iphonelinux-demo.tar.gz

November 28, 2008

Open source hardware 2008 - The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2008

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric.

This is one of the new and emerging trends we've seen really take off over the last few years. Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now shipping over 60,000 units) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we've captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it's open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, everything is available.

You can also call this guide... "The Open source hardware gift guide - The one and only, 3rd annual celebration of open source hardware!" - we think these are some of the best things to consider for the holidays and it supports an exciting development in hardware design.

So sit back and get ready to scroll through the list! Here we go!

Mksp4-2
Arduino Duemilanove - The new classic
Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. "Duemilanove" means 2009 in Italian and is named after the year of its release. The Duemilanove is the latest in a series of USB Arduino boards.