Every time we look at computer screen, millions of pixels of light disappear into our work, our correspondence, or our entertainment. Imagine if you could capture those dots of light and scoop them up as you would grains of sand on the beach. Puzzlemation explores this idea, by dividing the digital display into pixels you're free to pick up and re-arrange. It can be used to create things as diverse as modular animated signs, to a uniquely challenging dynamic puzzle. It is a tool that lets you create animated light displays of any size and shape for whatever applications you can dream up.

This project's display is made of a number of tiles, about 2" square with an 8 x 8 array of color LED pixels. Each tile is individually powered and animated, so your can freely pick them up and re-arrange them. To set up a display, the tiles are placed in a special tray. Animations are downloaded into the tray via Ethernet and stored locally on an SD card. The tray broadcasts the animation to each of the tiles, and then synchronizes them.

If the pieces are left in the tray, the animation can be updated continuously over the Ethernet connection. If the tiles are removed from the tray, they'll display the animation for several hours with their own re-chargeable battery power.

Once the animation is synchronized and running on the tiles, you can pick them up and place them anywhere. The display is completely reconfigurable. Need a tall thin display, a square one, or a long skinny one? No problem - re-arrange the tiles as you please.

The steam mechanics, oilpunks, contraptors, neo-Victorians cosplayers, retro-futurists, post-apocalyptic Playa pirates, New Dandies, and electric cowboys were all out in force at this year's Bay Area Maker Faire. There was the Victorian castle on wheels, the steam-powered runabout, the steam-effects scooter, the fire-spewing bar with vaudeville side-stage, the radio-tubed Theremin, and the outdoor Victorian sitting room with a disgorged cabinet of wonders of brassy computer mods, rayguns, clockwork guitars, and a light-spewing violin covering several tables. There were also at least three airship crews.

One of the coolest things about all this is that many of these artisans were already great virtual friends, even collaborators, but had never actually met in person. Seen above is a drawing, by the amazing Suzanne Forbes, of the inimitable Jake von Slatt (left) and Datamancer (right). This is the first time these two well-known steampunk makers had met in meatspace. Here they're seen building a special Maker Faire Contraptors' Lounge keyboard (which we'll likely give away here on the blog at some point). More of Suzanne's drawings from the Lounge can be seen after the jump.

Sitting in the Lounge: Crewmembers of the HMS Chronabelle, Magpie of Steampunk Magazine. In the background (left) Captain Robert of Abney Park and Jake von Slatt, (center) MAKE photographer Sam Murphy and me (the bald dude -- and I swear I'm NOT picking my nose), (right) David S. Dowling (black vest). Seen on the table is Molly Freidrich's Sinister Device and one of her rayguns.

One of the tables in the Lounge, this one mainly featuring work by Jake von Slatt, including his clockwork guitar, his copper-plated etched mint tins, his telegraph sounders, and a phone project he's currently working on. Also seen is the new Steampunk Anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and a portfolio of Molly Freidrich's work.

Tom Sepe's steam-assisted motorbike.

Jake von Slatt: You've just been "steampunked" (by Meredith Scheff).

Boing Boing tv's embedded robo-combat reporter Xeni Jardin witnesses warfare inside Robogames and Combots at Bay Area Maker Faire 2008, where robots battle until death -- or at least 'til one competitor busts a sprocket.

Next, BB-gun wielding battleships go BOOM!, with the Western Warship Combat Club. Participants painstakingly re-create historic battleships on small scale, and outfit each warboat with actual artillery. He who sinks last wins. The cameraman took a pellet or two in the pants, but the goofy safety goggles kept all eyes intact.

/MUKANA (the Finnish for aboard, along, in, on, part, with and within) is a piece of cutting-edge smart clothing for the visually impaired. It connects technology with textiles and thus promotes new approaches to dressing up. Users were given the main focus in the design. A group of visually impaired participated throughout the process of development. The final prototype was thoroughly tested by them.

..includes a cell phone, a wireless headset, a Global Positioning System (GPS) module and voice recognition software. The system takes account of the special needs of the visually impaired. Users can ask //MUKANA to tell them their location, to give information on what route to take to their destination or on the timetables of public transportation.

Andrew Turley turned a microfiche viewer into a musical/MIDI interface simply by pointing a photodiode at the screen and feeding the light values into an MCU and out to a Casio keyboard. As you scroll through the microfiche content, the changing light values of the data make music.

Maker Faire Highlights: Making Music the Hard Way

Related:

• Musical interfaces @ Maker Faire

Here are some of their latest products that looked interesting to me...


The AVR-GSM.

Series 2.5 XBee module with Wire antenna.

The GPS stick.

Here's a vid showing just a few of the many musical interfaces on hand at Bay Area Maker Faire. There were so many cool instruments, yet so little time to play them all. It was truly awesome to see such a great turnout on the sonic front - big thanks to all who made it happen!

John Edgar Park's RFID Conveyor Belt

Chris James' R2-D2 won four Make Magazine editors' choice ribbons at Maker Faire and it's easy to see why: not only it has every detail from the original—except having a little person inside—but this one is even more charming, capable of singing the Star Wars theme, and Indiana Jones sound bites. It only needs to have a built-in projector to be absolutely perfect. We asked Chris about the obvious next step: installing sensory inputs and artificial intelligence to make it truly autonomous. His take—and another video of R2 dancing with kids at Maker Fair...

Photos from Mina Kim, freelance journalist for KQED.

This was the first time my dad attended Maker Faire. Now a highly active retiree, he is forever in search of a good photo op. These are 16 from a set of over 700 that he took over 2 days. An excerpt of his excitement... "This was our first Maker Faire and we were happy to find an atmosphere charged with delight matching the very best of childhood birthday parties."

People have been asking for more details about the Maker's Notebook. It hasn't been officially released yet and is not yet available in the Maker Shed (our new online store), so all will be revealed after we've recovered from the most amazing Maker Faire to date.

In the meantime, here are a few more pics from the Notebook Modding Station that Becky Stern and I (and some awesome volunteers -- Hey Alex. Hey Matt!) ran in the Maker Shed at the Faire. This maker (whose name I didn't get) sat down and went to town on his book, adding a pen holder at the top, a button and string closure, a pocket in the back for his business cards, lots of stickers from the Maker's Notebook sticker sheets, and stamps from the Ink Blot Experiment line, kindly provided to us by Stampington. In the coming weeks, we'll have a webpage for the Notebook with images of other people's modded books and how-tos on adding your own pockets, closures, making your own stamps, stickers, and other add-ons.

Here are a few pages from the Reference section to give you an idea of what's included:

Related:

• Maker's Notebook released at Maker Faire

Fritz Grobe is working fast. He doesn't have long before he and Stephen Voltz will drop 624 Mentos into 104 liters of Diet Coke, unleashing enough energy to pump artificial sweetener and carbonated water all over a crowd of hundreds of cheering onlookers at the annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif.

Photo by squarecircle.

Andrew "Bruce" Lau made this amazing LED cape and wore it around Maker Faire all weekend. I caught up with him to chat about it, and he said that Leah Buechley's LED tank top was a huge inspiration. He used her suggested technique of soldering metal beads to surface mount LEDs and stitching them in a grid using conductive thread. Controlled by a PIC microcontroller, the cape scrolls letters saying "MAKE" and "DIY as well as traveling patterns.

Related:

Electric Tank Top on CRAFT

This weekend at Maker Faire Instructables brought their laser cutter and was laser etching laptops, phones, and other things for free. My favorite is Alex Schlegel's fractal-etched Vaio (source image included). If you had your gear etched, add a picture to the MAKE Flickr pool!

Thousands Gather to Make Their Own Fair, New York Times.

Maker Faire unboxed, CNET.

Maker Faire mimesis and open speculation, O'Reilly Radar.

Garage Edisons strut stuff, THIS WEEKEND'S MAKER FAIRE LETS GEARHEADS AND GEEKS SHOWCASE THE WACKIEST INVENTIONS THEY CAN DREAM UP, Mercury News.

Making a scene, Inventors display weird, wacky creations at fair, Bay Area News Group.

Maker Faire more popular than ever, CNET.

Make: Books rolled out the Maker's Notebook at the Maker Shed at Maker Faire. The Maker's Notebook is a project notebook, with 150 pages of engineering graph paper and 20 pages of reference material, from useful stuff like battery, glue, and wire data to really useful stuff like the amount of caffeine in different caffeinated beverages and how to say "Hello, World!" in various computer languages. It was a dream project to put together (who doesn't want to design their own blank notebook?). The covers of the book are printed in cyan "Maker" blue with a white grid debossed front and back. It's a storyboard beginning for a story. We printed up several sheets of accompanying stickers so that people can mod their books. There's also a red rubber band enclosure. The photos above show how some Faire-goers modded their books.

The Maker's Notebook sells for $19.99 and will be available in the online store soon. Stay tuned...

Update:
By popular demand, here's what a page of the notebook looks like. It's a 1/10' engineering graph paper. The pages are numbered, non-removable, and there's a place on every page to list project name, date, sign or note, and a place to link project/related pages ("From Page___, to Page___). There's also a two-page ruled Table of Contents.