PingMag has an interview with Yoshiharu Shinohara, a Japanese "furin" (glass wind chimes) maker.

Lastly, please tell me what it takes to be a craftsman in this day and age.

Lately, parents of young people will come up to me, and say "My child is really quiet and withdrawn, and just likes to stay in the house all the time, so I want him to become a craftsman." But this is what I tell them: "Lady, you've got it all wrong. It's tough to be a craftsman these days. You've got to find your own way to market your product, explain it by yourself, and add value to the product so it will sell for a good price. If you're quiet and withdrawn, you'd better forget about being a craftsman." But you know, if you're good at it, you can use your hands and your mind and make much more money than your average white collar worker. (laughs) If you want to succeed as a craftsman, you've got to be passionate about your work, passionate about your wife, and passionate about your land. Look at my family. We all get along. My son's going to take over the business, and even my granddaughters says they want to make wind chimes. Even though they both went to a good university. (laughs)

Blowing in the Wind [Via Dinosaurs + Robots]

Tim Hunkin is known for his automata - the Disgusting Spectacle at Maker Faire 2007 was inspired by one of his pieces. He's also a talented explainer. You can find entertaining explanations for a huge range of topics at his site, Rudiments of Wisdom.

Related:
Tim Hunkin's giant automaton clock for the London Zoo
The Secret life of Machines - videos

I'm sure I owe my fascination with glass eyes to my grandfather, who lost an eye when he worked on the railroads and had a glass replacement. His visits meant nervously brushing my teeth while keeping my eye on his, staring out at me from its glass of water on the bathroom counter. I found this beautiful photo essay by Marc Steinmetz about the process of making glass eyes.

Related: Eye maker

David Lasky is a Seattle artist and teacher who has been making comics and zines since 1991. He teaches both kids and adults at 826 Seattle, Richard Hugo House, Seattle Art Institute and with Arts Corps. His work has been published in The Comics Journal, The Stranger, and many anthologies, including Best American Comics 2006. His comic series, Urban Hipster, was nominated for the comic-book industry's Harvey Award.

Did you draw as a kid? How did you learn? Who helped you?
I drew as far back as I can remember. My mother encouraged me a great deal. I also had some good art teachers in school. And occasional there would be a neighbor who painted or took photos whose work I could look at. But I didn't know any cartoonists as a kid.

When did you publish your first comics/zines? Did you sell them?
I published my first mini-comics in early 1991, and sold them at Comic Relief in Berkeley, CA. This was before the Internet, so I would also submit them to a magazine called Factsheet 5, which listed all kinds of zines and comics that people were selling.

Do you think kids should try to publish online instead of paper?
Online comics (and writing) is nice because it gets ones work out there quickly and without the expense of printing on paper. But printing (or photocopying) on paper creates something that stands on its own and could potentially be kept around and mulled over by the reader. So both ways of doing it have their benefits.

How is teaching kids different from teaching adults?
Kids are usually less inhibited about trying new things. Many adults will not want to take my class because, they'll tell me, they "can't draw." Kids won't worry (as much) about what they think they can or can't do. If they really want to draw comics, they're usually willing to give it a try.

Any tips for kids who want to become comic artists?
Practice, practice, practice. Practice drawing, and also writing. Learn about storytelling. Study the comics you like reading to see how they were made. Also look closely at movies, books, TV shows, etc. -- to see how they tell their stories. Don't just copy the drawings of artists you like. Learn how to draw from life. Practice facial expressions and "body language". And don't let yourself get discouraged. Believe in what you're doing.

Drawing is kind of solitary - I know you've done comics jams, could you explain how those work?
Comics jams are one of the great challenges for a comics artist. Two or more cartoonists gather together (OR: work by mail, which is much slower). You draw a panel on a page, and then pass the page to someone else who is asked to draw the next panel in the story. Meanwhile, someone is passing a page to you, and you have to decide what will be drawn in the next panel on that page. Pages are passed until all the panels are filled up. Sometimes the results are hilarious, sometimes just... weird.

Can you recommend some books for us?
Scott McCloud's two books are great: Understanding Comics and Making Comics.
For manga, I really like Draw Your Own Manga: All the Basics by Haruno Nagatomo.
And its sequel, which is called Draw Your Own Manga: Beyond the Basics.
And for zines, this is a nice book: Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? by Esther Pearl Watson.

Rick builds these totally incredible prone carts to help him achieve tasks otherwise impossible from sitting in a wheelchair. He mods golf carts and tractors so that he can drive them from the prone position. While in his carts, he can weld, garden, cook, and make beautiful wood furniture, things that can be difficult or impossible from a wheelchair. His creations are stunning and quite numerous! He even has a tutorial for how to make your own prone cart.

Today's BBtv is a little ambient profile piece on the Oakland-based electricity arts group known as "Omega Recoil." The video includes footage of their Bay Area Maker Faire '08 performance.

Omega Recoil: Electricity as art

I stopped in at Thingamajigger Friday night, it was great! John Medina effortlessly held the crowd's attention while he talked about attention, Dan Savage told us how tech has ruined his life, I talked to Hazard Factory's Rusty Oliver about optimum sanding belt grit size for the best power tool drag racer traction, Beth Goza explained Knitting 2.0, and Simon Winder told me about his Ionization Clock.

Eric Archer makes some incredible electronic instruments - Among his collection is the money synthesizer, a geometric oscillator[as seen above] modified to produce complex patterns similar to the engraving designs found on currencies throughout the world -

I’m not interested in counterfeiting. I’ve wandered into this area simply to explore the beautiful, peculiar patterns that this technique produces. Since my system is electronic, it has on-screen (oscilloscope) ‘preview’ capability that allows facile tweaking of a pattern before it is committed to hard media. Another aspect of my system is that it can produce designs outside the scope of a mechanical system; the ‘gears’ in my system (Quadrature Wavetable Oscillators) are not constrained to mesh with one another, and instead can spin at arbitrary points in the plane while still moving a stylus. Consequently, the coherence and beauty of true Guilloche patterns takes some tweaking to achieve with the Money Synthesizer…

Be sure to browse Eric's device gallery for other examples like the Brainwave-Controlled Drum Helmet -

A head-worn music accessory. Translates brainwaves (or head movement) into drum sounds. Based on a batter’s helmet, DIY accelerometers, and a BOSS DR-660 drum machine. The drum helmet has four output signals. As with most new instruments, practice is required to produce attractive results.

Eric Archer's device gallery - EricArcher.net [via Deviant Synth]

Congrats to our pals at TechShop for the article about them in yesterday's LA Times.

Since opening in October 2006, TechShop has attracted 300 members, each paying $100 a month for hands-on access to the sophisticated tools. The operation also sells supplies and charges for classes.

"It's like a health club," said TechShop founder Jim Newton, a former science advisor for the TV show "Myth Busters." "But instead of exercise equipment, we have welders and laser cutters and sheet-metal equipment."

Now TechShop is poised to expand. Newton, 45, plans to open 11 additional locations in the coming year. Soon, TechShops may appear in markets as diverse as Austin, Texas; Orlando, Fla.; and Los Angeles.

TechShop: Where do-it-yourself inventors do R&D

DIY Design Electronics Kit - Harness the power of the electron! Create games, toys, and contraptions with these fundamental components. Follow the easy instructions to make a light detector, LED flasher, noisemaker and more! Once you master the basics, you'll be ready to create your own! Everything you need to get started is right in the box, including switches, buttons, diodes, capacitors. transistors and regulators. Learn the amazing concepts of resistance, capacitance, voltage and current with the step-by-step project manual. Soon, you will be the electronics wizard! Great introduction to electronics for all ages.

In this video, Kristin White from TalkTech interviews Bryan Pate, co-founder of PT Motion Works about his elliptiGO glide bike, which is powered by an elliptical training motion. If you missed the elliptiGO at Maker Faire this May, this video is a good introduction. As a former ironman competitor, Bryan explains why this bike is a great alternative to the indoor elliptical trainer for folks who love to exercise outside but can't stand high-impact running.

Related:

elliptiGO Glide Bike at the Maker Faire site

Garth of Extreme Craft had the Zen Paintball booth at Maker Faire and was pleasantly surprised by the parents.

The Zen Paintball booth was a smashing (splatting?) success. I should've seen it coming, but I didn't anticipate that 80% of my paintball artists would be kids! THAT was a great surprise. Claire and I had a blast helping young artists realize that they don't need a brush or crayons to make art. I like to go on diatribes about how overprotective parents can be. The Maker Faire parents were an entirely different breed. We had parents helping some tiiiiiiny toddlers pull the trigger on the paintball gun. My faith in parenting is restored.

He managed to get out and experience the Faire, too - his write-up is here.

This custom built synth, called the "Abyssal" by Atomosynth (who we covered in Make back in the fall) is an analog, photo-noise and oscillating filter synth that features one square wave and saw waveform generator with a large pitch range, from subsonic to ultrasonic sound. Everything is controlled from a large photocell visible from the front that allows it to work as a photo "Theramin". Pretty cool videos of it in action at the link below.

Abyssal

Boing Boing TV did a really nice two-part interview with MAKE contributor, Whole Earth Catalog and Review editor, and Wired co-founder (and one of my personal heroes) Kevin Kelly. While not mainline Make: Blog fare, Kevin talks about a number of things makers might find interesting: nomadic photojournalism (and how you can take good pictures with any kind of camera), his photography book, Asia Grace (one of the most awe-inspiring collection of images I have ever seen), cross-country bike touring, art journaling/haiku biking, living your life as if you only have six months left to live, and Kevin's concept for making a living doing what you love, supported by 1,000 True Fans.

BTW: Kevin also does two of our favorite websites: Street Use and Cool Tools

Next Meeting:
Tuesday 27 May 2008
7 PM - 9 PM (ET)
ALWAYS FREE!
Location:
St. Stephen's Church's auditorium
hosted by HacDC
1525 Newton St NW (near 16th and Newton NW)
Washington, DC 20010

NOTE: This meeting will take place at St. Stephen's Church (thank you HacDC!), and will
include an exclusive tour of HacDC's burgeoning shop! See sidebar for directions.

Pindar Van Arman  :  Zanelle

Pindar will speak about his progress with Zanelle, Van Arman's painter 'bot. Van Arman has written all software required for her to perform. To create each painting, Zanelle instructs her robotic appendage to make multiple independent design decisions, self-mix up to 24 colors of acrylic paint and apply the medium with upwards of 25,000 intentional brush strokes in a time period of 12-36 hours.

He'll talk about the mechanical aspects of how she paints as well as the multiple neural nets that drive her decision making. He will also discuss plans to introduce a feedback loop that will adjust her painting style as she paints a canvas.

Pindar Van Arman is an artist/roboticist that first got involved in programming during the dot com era. As a graphics artist he noticed all the programmers at his start up were driving much nicer cars than his. In a quest for a nicer car, he taught himself object oriented programming. Shortly after becoming obsessed with programming, he wondered why he had not done it earlier. He expanded into the field of robotics by joining Team ENSCO and participating in two of DARPA's Grand Challenges where he wrote navigation software for DEXTER, Team ENSCO's autonomous off-road racer. Since then he has been working on Zanelle, which paints with an artists brush on canvas.

 

Andrew Buckland  :  Data_Scape

Recent MICA MFA, Andrew Buckland, will talk about his data-driven piece, Data_Scape, a live representation of Internet traffic passing over the local network. "As information is read it is then transformed both in the sound and image. This transformation of information questions the notion of a digital environment we find ourselves knowingly or unknowingly participating within."

Data_Scape also uses sound to represent traffic on the network. High and low frequency sound activates the space as traffic wanes and waxes, respectively. In order to elicit the psychoacoustical and physical effect of immersion, a sine wave tending downwards from 20 kHz towards 32 Hz is played as maximum network activity is approached. Data_Scape also provides a visualization of dataspace as an other-worldly but familiar cityscape tending towards landscape, tapping into the recurrent theme of the artificial environment he has explored in his work. For example, Buckland's photographic work deals with the mutual effect of humans on landscapes and vice versa.

 

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).

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

Related:

• National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest 2008 (Pictures)

"Pandimensional importer/exporter" Molly "Porkshanks" Friedrich will be showing off some of her otherworldly wares in the Contraptors' Lounge at the Maker Faire next weekend. When not winking in and out of the spacetime continuum, Molly fashions really cool wearable art/jewelry and retro-futuristic gadgetry and sells them via Dangerous Detritus. [Photo of Molly by Libby Bulloff, who is also co-hosting the Lounge]

The Contraptors' Lounge is an outdoor Victorian sitting room and cabinet of curiosities being set up at Maker Faire. Such steampunk/retro-tech icons as Jake von Slatt, Datamancer and Abney Park will play host. As one of the on-site activities, Datamancer and Jake von Slatt will be double-teaming the build of a special Maker Faire edition retro/steampunk keyboard in the Lounge. It may be raffled off or auctioned for charity at the end of the Faire. The two will also be giving a talk, on the main stage, about their work.

Related Contraptors' Lounge posts:

• Datamancer works his magic, on desktop, at Maker Faire
• Victorian all-in-one PC

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset May 3rd and 4th at the San Mateo Fairgrounds, CA (Upcoming.org). It's for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things. Buy tickets now and save, discount ticket sales end on April 25th, 2008.

If you're in the Bay Area, or plan to attend Maker Faire add "makerfaire" to your Twitter, we'll be giving away tickets and will have updates before and during Maker Faire!

Next Tuesday there will be two events at ASU which should be interesting to us maker-folks. One is the exhibition from the Vizproto class, which is about 3D visualization and rapid prototyping in an arts context. Projects range from robot chassis to RFID tags embedded in acorns (above photo) and used in interactive installations to antique mechanical movements printed in 3D. Entitled Protoduction, the show's opening reception will be on Tuesday the 29th from 3-6pm.

The other is the Arts, Media and Engineering departmental open house where students will showcase current projects which range from gesture-recognizing immersive environments (above photo) to collaging software to my knitted Body-Technology Interfaces and Electronic Embroidery. The open house is also on Tuesday the 29th from 6-9pm.

I'll be at both of these events, and I hope all of you in the area will make it, as well!

Above mechanical simulation by Alex Schlegel.

Related:

• LilyPad Arduino Embroidery

• Body Technology Interfaces

One of the most enthusiastic responses we've ever gotten to a Make: Blog post was for the video of French radio ham Claude Paillard's built from scratch vacuum tubes. If you haven't seen the video yet, you're in for a real treat. It still triggers passionate and effusive praise, such as this comment from a former Hughes Research Labs employee:

Dear Mr. Paillard,

I worked at Hughes Research Labs (now, HRL) for over 30 years and, vividly recall how skilled and talented the technical staff was. As a physicist, I relied immensely on our technical staff to fabricate the devices that we invented, without which, nothing would have become practical. It is magnificent to see and evaluate actual devices --- made with such precision (as you so beautifully demonstrated) --- evolve from our calculations and sketchy drawings. Your brilliant work brought back such fond and wonderful memories (you would have been hired on the spot!). In our laboratories, experimental and prototype lasers were made from scratch, just as you beautifully demonstrated with the triode. The gas discharge lasers required many of the skills that you posses, for this class of laser could be thought of as a "vacuum tube" with optical windows at both ends, and filled with a specified amount of spectroscopic purity, low pressure atomic or molecular gas(es), such as helium, neon, carbon dioxide, argon, xenon, etc. Moreover, such lasers require the vacuum-tube equivalent of a filament, cathode and anode to maintain a stable electric discharge, which is used to excite the active laser's gaseous medium. In many cases, a "getter" was "flashed" in the tube (using external RF to heat it up as you so eloquently performed), and, the evaporated material such as cesium (the shiny coating one sees along the inner walls of the tube) is used to absorb contaminants (e.g., oxygen) that would otherwise render the device useless.

To those readers that have never worked in a research environment, it is easy to overlook all the fine skills that are necessary to actually fabricate a triode, each aspect of which is a specialty in itself: metal forming and machining, instrument design, vacuum technology, materials processing, high-power RF technology, glass blowing (including forming and annealing), understanding of the detailed device properties of a triode and how to characterize its electronic performance. Your work is excellent and, viewing your video is refreshing and inspiring, for you make an extremely difficult labor of love appear so effortless --- true genius! Bravo to you!!

Make your own vacuum tubes?

How did they choose what to include? As Tom Nguyen, one of the organizers, put it in an email: "Well, they have a cool-factor that requires no explanation (you'll know it when you see it), they're radically new rather than improvements on existing products, and they represent an essential combination of design form and function." (By the way, that's him up above with Joe Wilcox's fun-to-ride Tilting Trike.)

Here are a few of the things that really stuck in my mind (and more in my Flickr set).

Brent Teal is a total maker--he built this Glide Cycle prototype in his garage after a friend of his wanted to continue jogging despite his bad knees. It's like a cross between an elliptical machine and a bicycle--the demo video is hypnotic. Elliptigo



I've fantasized about wireless chargers for years, so it was a thrill to see one in action. You buy WildCharge cases for your various devices, and then you lay them down on the charging pad. Voila! Maybe not the most efficient way to go, but it is cool.



Speaking of chargers, this one was also nice: the HY Mini, which allows you to charge up your cellphone with either a tiny solar cell or a mini fan. Jason Wang was manning the table when I stopped by, and he said he charges his cellphone as he drives to work by sticking the fan on his car.



On the non-commercial side of the spectrum was the Embrace Infant Thermoregulator, which replaces expensive incubators with a simple, portable $25 sleeping bag with a phase-change material insert.



And I totally loved MagnoGrip's awesome magnetic belt clips, tool pouches, carpenter belts, and other construction accessories. Suspenders are cool again!

I had the opportunity to interview quite a few of the participants, so look forward to a video piece on these makers (from both the high school and college competitions) and their machines in action once we get that edited together. For more pictures, you can check out my flickr set of the event.

We make money not art has a piece about a retrospective on Ant Farm, the American media art collective from the 1970s. Ant Farm is most famous for their Cadillac Ranch installation in Amarillo, Texas.

I had the pleasure of meeting and becoming friends with Ant Farm co-founder Doug Michels in the early '90s. He was as delightfully crazy as ever, drawing up designs for spheres of water floating through space filled with dolphins, a Japanese sex theme park, a giant couch, called the National Sofa, in the park across from the White House, where people could come and interact with the First Family via the National TV set. This was definitely not a guy who liked to paint inside the lines. Sadly, Doug died in a freak climbing accident in 2003.

The Ant Farm retrospective is at The Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla, Spain.

Ant Farm retrospective in Sevilla

There's something divinely surreal about giant cupcakes tooling around with human heads poking out of their centers. We had the cupcake cars at last year's Bay Area Maker Faire and I had a laugh every time they trundled by the MAKE booth.

In this BBtv video, Xeni rides with the Cupcake Cutthroats (shiver me sprinkles!) and gets a guided tour of their motorized muffins. Think: Russ Myers meets Hostess.

Cupcake Cutthroats: muffin-shaped electric art cars gone wild

In response to our posting of mint tin guitar, a reader pointed us to this Argentine group called Les Luthiers which repurposes everyday objects into instruments. Unfortunately, none of the site is in English.

Instrumentos Sección Cuerdas

Here's the video of last night's Colbert Report with Dean Kamen talking about his vapor compression distiller.

The Colbert Report

Reader Erica points out this story about a resourceful British maker -

A British businessman fed up with being targeted by vandals has installed a 30-foot Roman-style catapult on the premises to hurl bucket loads of chicken manure at culprits attacking his rural offices.
[...]
The defense arrangements, which include priming the catapult with chicken droppings from a nearby farm, include 32 closed-circuit TV cameras, security fencing and motion-sensor lights -- all guarded by a no-nonsense sign that reads:

"WARNING: These premises are protected by smart poo ..."

Read more - Ex-stuntman targets vandals with nasty catapult

Related:

Robotic security officer is menacing, sprays water

HOW TO - Build a torsion catapult

Laser beam alarm system

Robot-turned-Synthmaker Stanley gives an awesomely quirky video demo of his new sound-making device. (WARNING: contains a little cursing, smoking, and lovable condescension)

Stanley Povoda, the worldfamous "Robot Man" is now creating all kinds of sound-devices for Metamorphosis. He built countless robots in his life and just recently decided to take again a more musical direction, by designing and contstructing his own synthesizers. His devices are built into old tapemachines, solariums, telephones, whatsoever.

If you're curious about Mr. Povoda's adventures in robotics, read more @ Prague.tv

and don't miss this 360 degree pic of Stanley at home with some of work.

Mike Disher makes custom acrylic turntables -

About 5 years ago I decided to try my hand at building a custom turntable. Turntables and mechanical watch and clock movements fascinate me. I view them as functional pieces of kinetic art. I based my turntable design on the legendary Rega P3, and I created a new, custom acrylic plinth and a set of feet. I also devised a way to hide the motor, and I improved the motor mounting system. The plinth rests on small silicone dots, providing added isolation. The result was a very modern looking table. I called it the P3 Skeleton. Skeleton is a watchmaking term for a movement in which material is removed from the plates and bridges to reveal the inner workings. A fellow audio enthusiast saw this table at my house and offered to buy it on the spot. I did not sell it, but I was happy that others appreciated my work.

Custom Turntables[via]

Related:

DIY Turntable