Recently I've been helping a friend's 11-year-old daughter get started in electronics. The use of a solderless breadboard was counterintuitive to her until I gave her one of these clear-cased versions, available through Solarbotics. As she puts it, "you can see where the metal is."

Last Friday night, this piece of "blood"-soaked "meat" (which is, I think, actually some kind of dyed latex product) was smeared roundly about my face and neck by a large man, who may or may not be named "Thor," dressed as a butcher, at the 2009 annual Scare for a Cure haunted house, held each this year at the palatial Austin estate of video-game entrepreneur Richard Garriott, aka Lord British. I paid a couple of extra bucks for the special glowing red chemiluminescent necklace that identified me as amenable to the "extreme," full-contact version of the experience, and I'm so glad that I did.

My friend, Christie, got about a bucket of "blood" "vomited" onto her head by a ceiling-mounted ghoul, and came out looking like Carrie on prom night. I saw it happen, and the moment is frozen for me like a scene from a Dario Argento movie: Christie's blond locks, suffused by a pale, flickering, blue-green backlight, her mouth slightly open as she looks up, laughing, into the torrent of black, sticky ichor that tumbles, in exaggerated slow motion, onto her face. In my mind's eye, I can still see my own gaping mouth reflected in a small, spherical droplet of that blood as it spatters across space and time. I think that droplet will be falling, in my memory, for many years to come.

Thanks to all the volunteers who worked so hard to make this such an incredible event. If you missed it this year, go mark your calendars now.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still time left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is 11:59 PM PDT, November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Britons John Bryant and Chris Sangwin have written a book called How Round is Your Circle? that looks incredible. I haven't read it (yet), but the promotional website by itself has me sold already. Highlights include Reuleaux tetrahedra, square-hole drilling, and self-righting polyhedra.

The best email newsletter hands down for photography crafts is Photojojo. Thanks to Amit's review one year, I found my Nikon D40 and have been in love with taking photos ever since. Now Amit and Kelly wow us again with their new book, Photojojo! Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas filled with 50 projects so you can do more with all the cool photos you take. It's not just about printing them out and making a photo album. This book shows you how to use your photos to make cool things such as a lampshade or messenger bag (pictured below).The second half of the book is like taking a photography class. You'll learn techniques for taking better photos as well as fun ways you can experiment with different photo techniques. I love the tips on how to do digital color correcting after you've taken your photos. If you love taking photos and want to learn how to do more with them, this book is for you!

Book Giveaway Time!
We are giving away 3 copies of the Photojojo! book.Just leave a comment in this post and tell us why you need this book. Please make sure you include your email address in the comment form field (won't be published). All comments will be closed by Noon PST on Wednesday, September 23rd. The lucky winners will be announced next week on the site. Good luck!

Project: Ginormous Photo Mosaics
Even if you are living in an apartment and can't put holes in your walls, you can still get some great art up. Download the project PDF to make this stunning photo mosaic where you'll be able to see the wonderful memories you have of your friend and family.

If you're a Lovecraft fan and have not yet seen the HPLHS's 2005 silent-film adaptation of Call of Cthulhu, well, there may be nothing, anywhere, that's more important than that you go do so immediately. So. Very. Good. The look they achieve on a low budget is amazing, and a lot of that is due to the outstanding props, including several awesome Cthulhu idols, many of which are available in reproduction. But the art deco "LeGrasse" idol shown here is my favorite.

If you've ever wanted to experiment with low-melting-point metal alloys, for casting toy soldiers or other purposes, Rotometals, Inc is a great online resource. Their Low-Melting-Point Bismuth Based Ingot 158-190-ALLOY, for instance, can be melted in a pot of boiling water. If you're concerned about lead or cadmium toxicity, their slightly-higher-melting 281-ALLOY contains only bismuth and tin. The also carry pure bismuth, indium, magnesium, and other metals and casting supplies in convenient quantities for small users.

I really like this wooden flashlight sold by the Museum of Modern Art. It's pricey, but if you have a wood lathe sitting around and are looking for something more original to make with it than a bowl, a pen, or a salt shaker, this could be a great project.

Cool Tools has a review up for The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay and Neil Ardley, which has just been added to my wish list. The striking and explanatory illustrations show you how even very complicated things work in a simple and fun way.

“The Manga Guide to Electricity”, part of “The Manga Guide” series by No Starch Press, is a novel approach to the old problem of getting over the initial mental block when trying to learn electronics.

We decided to compare this book to another introductory text: “Getting Started in Electronics” by [Forrest M. Mims].  [Mims]‘ book is a handwritten masterpiece of electronic literature. The writing style is friendly and concise, the examples are simple, and the drawings are excellent. It also makes sure to keep the learning process as application based as possible. Unlike other books, it doesn’t bog the reader down with math and theory that is only useful to advanced students. Since its original printing in 1983, [Mims]‘ has become the de facto standard for beginner electronic literature.

“The Manga Guide” attempts to walk the beginner through the very basics of electronics using the interactions between [Rereko], a resident of planet Electopia; [Yonosuke], a transdimensional robot cell phone; and [Hikaru Yano Sensei], an electrical engineering researcher at a Japanese university. [Rereko] is apparently very bad at electricity, and is sent to learn the basics from Hikaru over the summer by her professor.

“The Manga Guide” is a lot of fun to read. The interactions between the characters are lighthearted, and the whole setting has a sort of quirkiness about it that makes you keep reading just for the joy of it. It covers most of the basics thoroughly and with excellent examples. The art is a very well drawn, playful style of manga.

On a related note, MAKE now has Forrest Mims as a columnist!

At this year's Maker Faire, I met Dale Wheat. He was at a counter in the Maker Shed demonstrating his kits. I was impressed at how clever they were, and how inexpensive. We talked for a few minutes, and then I went off to explore. Before the weekend was over, I dropped a few of Dale's kits into my shopping bag. They seemed like they'd be fun to work with. This week, I finally got around to assembling the three kits I got.

The Wee Blinky is the simplest and easiest of the kits. With two transistors, two LEDs, two capacitors, and four resistors, it makes for a very quick build. Since the parts for stuffing the board are labeled on the silkscreen mask, you don't even need documentation. He does have some docs for the build, and they are worth reading through. They're written in a conversational tone with some of his personal perspective on choices you might make.

Lux Spectralis is a little more complex, but again, the mask on the board tells you where to put everything, and the online documentation steps you through it perfectly. This kit has two clever part features: a preprogrammed Atmel AVR ATtiny13, and a red-green-blue tricolor LED. The chip comes with a bunch of color combinations loaded which show some uses for each of the colors on the LED. If you pick up a programming cord and want to get into learning to program with it (or already know about programming AVRs), then have at it. Otherwise, the program on the chip should keep you happy. The RGB LED is a neat thing in itself. With the three colors, you can make it glow or blink in each of them, or it can cycle through the colors.

Tiny Cylon is the third kit I tried. It sports a row of five red LEDs that are controlled by an ATtiny chip. Already on the chip are a cycle of blink and glow patterns that make it useful as soon as you're done with a quick solder. HAL, KITT, and Cylons are a few of the cultural references in the lighting patterns.

These kits are great for beginnings. Why? Because they're inexpensive, have instructions embedded onto their physical surfaces (and easily located online), and because once you see how they work, you can customize them to suit your own purposes. The programmed ones use momentary buttons for selecting the settings. The button could be mounted off of the board to help fit it into another project. If you want to make a plushy doll with blinky eyes, you could add wires to the Wee Blinky's LED pads and move the illumination further away from the board. If you want to make a model car into KITT from Knight Rider, you could Dremel out the hood of a remote control car and pop the LEDs into the hole.

Once you start to see that you can solder a kit, and that it's fun to build and use, you'll want to see what else you can do with soldering and kits. Once you see how easy it is to make one, you'll feel confident in making chances on the next one. These kits have a low cost of entry and a high probability of success for the beginner. Once built, they can lead you into customizing your own circuits and programming for light and sensor control.

You can check out Dale's site for more information, downloads, build instructions and more.

In the Maker Shed:

The MAKEcation learn to solder bundle is a fun collection of all things blinky. All the kits are easy to solder and each one makes a fun little blinky piece of hardware. The bundle also includes our Maker's Notebook and MAKE Volume 01, which features a great learn to solder tutorial. Have fun this summer, learn to solder, and blink some LEDs!

Features:

• MAKE Volume 01 $14.99 value
• tinyCylon $10 value
• Wee Blinky $8 value
• Lux Spectralis $10 value
• Maker's Notebook $19.99 value

More about The MAKEcation learn to solder bundle

I've wanted to get into knifemaking since I was a teenager, but for years had been deterred by the belief that I first needed to buy a bunch of expensive equipment, like a 3-wheel belt grinder and an annealing oven. Then I found Wayne Goddard's $50 Knife Shop, which is a compilation of material originally prepared for Goddard's eponymous column in BLADE magazine. It kind of does for knifemaking what Dave Gingery's books did for foundrywork, going back to the historical fundamentals of the technology to get at what you really need to do good work. Goodies include homemade forges and anvils, homemade disc and belt grinders, scavenging steel for blades (including forging wire rope to make Damascus steel), finishing techniques, backyard heat treating, and a whole chapter on "tribal knifemaking," which is the modern art of making knives without using electricity. Fascinating stuff.

If you hang around makers long enough, especially older ones, sooner or later somebody will mention Dave Gingery. And then everybody within earshot will either A) genuflect or B) look around in confusion at all the people who are genuflecting. For those in the latter category, here's an explanation I wrote for Supernaturale awhile back:

Some people are better with tools than others. Like most human attributes, there's a normal distribution of this talent, with a few exceptionally handy-capped people, a few übermechaniker, and most of the rest of us somewhere in between. The late, great Dave Gingery definitely belongs in the "über" category. His classic 6-book series, available for decades now through Lindsay Technical Books, begins with instruction about how to build a home blast furnace and sand table so you can melt scrap metal and cast your own metal parts from wooden patterns. The remaining six books go on to describe how to use these castings to make your own lathe, metal shaper, milling machine, drill press, and indexing head. The order is important, because each tool requires the use of the previous machines in its construction. While the project seems a bit ambitious for me given my available time, I keep a set of the books around on the off-chance I'll be solely responsible for rebuilding industrial society in some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario.

Dave, sadly, left us in 2004. Personally, I think there should be a formal day of remembrance among makers. Meanwhile, Dave's son Vince is carrying the torch and has published a healthy oeuvre of DIY books himself. The works of both father and son are available through Lindsay Technical Books.

From the pages of MAKE:

Dale Dougherty reviewed Lindsay's Technical Books way back in MAKE 04. The review includes some classic Gingery quotes.

More:

• Ann Arbor aluminum casting demo
• How-To: Making glass with a grill and vacuum cleaner
• Homemade lathe...from a lawnmower
• Homemade metal spinning lathe

My recent post on glassknapping mentioned Kevin Dunn's 2003 book Caveman Chemistry, and I've received many requests for a dedicated review. So here goes!

Caveman Chemistry came to my attention a few years ago through the Lindsay Technical Books catalog. I'm a chemist by profession and a hacker by calling, with a long-standing interest in garage science, so the book's title was basically irresistible to me. I plunked down my nickel and twiddled my thumbs for a week while the snails carried it to my doorstep.

Thankfully, we're now looking forward to the end of this month, when The IT Crowd, The Complete Season 2 comes out on US format DVD on June 30th. Sure, you can watch it online or on the IFC channel, but we'll be happy to have the whole series on DVD, both for the funny 1337 extras and the subtitles, which my son uses (he wears hearing aids).

Word on the internets is that the 4th season of The IT Crowd will begin in July in the UK, and a Season 3 DVD may hit the States this fall. Bring on the IT Brits!

Ever get confused about what sort of glue to use on a project? I'm twice degreed in Chemistry, and I certainly do. A great resource is This to That,, a comprehensive "glue advice" database run by a theatrical prop-builder and some buddies. They say:

We aren't a front for any manufacturer or some National Glue Association (if such a thing even exists.) Our recommendations are totally impartial. We have advertisers but they don't influence our selections at all. And they never will. We promise.

The folks at This to That were kind enough to give MAKE permission to reprint their main glue chart in The Maker's Notebook, so it's available in the notebook's reference section in the back.

In the Maker Shed:

We started the week with my How-to Tuesday: Arduino 101 blink an LED, which seemed to be very popular with all the people getting into programming these amazing little micro-controllers.

Collin had a great how-to video about making games with Meggy Jr. I really like his unique sun-catching game that he programmed. I have to pick up a Meggy Jr. and try my hands at programming my own game.

Later in the week I made a post about building my new favorite kit by Gakken, the Stirling Engine Kit. It's an amazing kit, full of high quality parts. I really enjoyed learning about how these engines work. I have a few plans on hacking this kit, but more on that in a later post.

Gareth finished up the week with 2 great posts from the Maker Shed. His first post was a review of the SERB Robot kit. He was really impressed by the quality and completeness of the kit. I plan on doing more posts about programming this cool kit in the near future.

Gareth also posted a great excerpt from the book Eccentric Cubicle. I don't own this book, but after reading this excerpt it's a must-have for my book collection. What a great read about finding hidden gems in the scrap yard.

Jared Boone, of ShareBrained Technology, was kind enough to send me a brand-new Chronulator 2.0 kit. It's an Arduino-compliant analog clock (or anything you want) that uses panel meters as the display. I've written up a full review for MAKE volume 17 (verdict: great kit).

This is a photo I took of the clock I built. I used a cigar box for a case, mounted the board on top, and printed some stock clock faces for the meters (I'm dying to redesign those to match the lovely Romeo Y Julieta typography when I get some time). My more pressing modification is to add some LEDs for face illumination.

Chronulator 2.0 kit

We recently got a copy of No Starch Press's The Manga Guide to Statistics, by Shin Takahashi - but I didn't get to look at it for a few days because my son snagged it pretty much as it came through the door. Which confirms my theory - if you want to introduce a subject that kids wouldn't normally be very interested in, give it an amusing storyline and wrap it in cartoons.

In The Manga Guide to Statistics, our heroine Rui is determined to learn about statistics to impress the dreamy Mr. Igarashi and begs her father for a tutor. Soon she's spending her Saturdays with geeky, bespectacled Mr. Yamamoto, who patiently teaches her all about the fundamentals of statistics: topics like data categorization, averages, graphing, and standard deviation.

Reluctant statistics students of all ages will enjoy learning along with Rui in this charming, easy-to-read guide, which uses real-world examples like teen magazine quizzes, bowling games, test scores, and ramen noodle prices. Examples, exercises, and answer keys help you follow along and check your work. An appendix showing how to perform statistics calculations in Microsoft Excel makes it easy to put Rui's lessons into practice.

Once I (finally!) had a chance to look at the book, I really liked it. I have to admit I wasn't wild about statistics in college; this book was a lot more fun than my statistics textbook. Each chapter starts with a cartoon that's followed by supplemental text, then exercises and a summary, so you have the material presented in several different ways, that helps you remember. The pace of the book is good; the chapters present the concepts in bite-sized pieces and the storyline was funny. I'm sure my son didn't completely learn everything that was presented, but someday, when he's faced with Cramer's coefficient and chi-square distributions (I know I can't protect him from these things forever), he'll have some familiarity with the ideas and they will be easier to learn and use.

No Starch is publishing The Manga Guide to Statistics as the first of a series of educational manga previously published in Japan. We're really looking forward to seeing the rest, especially the one about electricity that's due out in April.

The duct tape roses I made over Thanksgiving were fetching (until they were gummed by the cat), but post-turkey lethargy prevented me from digging into the meatiest projects in “The Best of Instructables” (Make: Books; $34.99). One example: the concrete light bulb wall hook, described as “an excellent excuse for driving a lag bolt into your wall” by its inventor, Ray Alderman. He and it are emblematic of the instructables universe, a blogging community of do-it-yourself-ers, robot-makers, food hackers and techno-geeks who share their crafty ways at Make magazine and Instructables (makezine.com and instructables.com), sometimes selling the finished products on etsy.com, the online bazaar for handmade things.

"Mr Wizards 400 Experiments in Science". (Reno: "Emilio Lizardo is a top scientist, dummkopf." Perfect Tommy: "So was Mr. Wizard." -The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, now available on DVD!). Written by Mr Wizard himself, Don Herbert with Hy Ruchlis, this book is more about demonstrating scientific principles and phenomena in the home with less-sophisticated equipment. No beakers and Bunsen burners, this is all water glasses, pencils, string, tin cans and rubber bands. Just like the original Mr Wizard shows. This stuff is great. This book, thankfully, is a little more affordable! There seem to be several reprints of this with different covers, as you can see from the Amazon link. There's even one called "Soft Blu Bonnet Margarine Presents Mr. Wizard's 400 Easy Experiments in Science by Don Ruchlis, Hy Herbert". Because when I think of melting something on my toast, I want to think of chemistry! And who the heck are these Hy Herbert and Don Ruchlis guys?

How to Build With Grid Beam is a guide to a clever and flexible system of construction for a wide range of home-built projects, from storage units to work spaces to furniture, vehicles, and structures. The system relies on the use of “sticks” or beams of square tube steel or aluminum or wood with holes placed at regular intervals along the length of each stick. Using lag bolts or other fasteners, these sticks can be assembled quickly and easily into structures that are quite robust and easily adapted and reconfigured. And when you are finished with a project, you simply disassemble the project and use the components for something else. By using adapters and add-ons, most of which can be found in hardware stores, industrial supply houses, or fabricated in even a modestly-equipped shop, the system can be expanded to encompass a staggering array of applications.

• Interaction design and physical computing
• The Arduino hardware and software development environment
• Basics of electricity and electronics
• Prototyping on a solderless breadboard
• Drawing a schematic diagram

Getting Started with Arduino is a great place to start your journey into the amazing, and sometimes crazy, world of micro-controllers and physical computing.

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, editors of MAKE: Magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of technology how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and new build techniques you won't find anywhere else. Over 300 pages!

There are a couple of PDF sample chapters online.

I really like the Magnetic Refrigerator Lights [PDF] and the DIY Vacuum Former [PDF].

Another really popular project is the screen-printing tutorial. [PDF]

You can pick up a copy in the Maker Shed, it's a really great read!

The $50 & Up Underground House Book teaches how to build the lowest cost, most sunshine-filled, best ventilated and driest underground houses of all. It teaches how to incorporate greenhouses, root cellars and fallout shelters into an underground home. It covers both hillside and flat land design, and explains how to solve drainage problems with dependable gravity rather then expensive, failure-prone building materials. It also details ways to pass or otherwise deal with the building codes.

If you're interested in building an analog synthesizer then the VCO (voltage controlled oscillator) circuit is the best place to start. Oscillators form the core of the instrument, generating basic waveforms which are then shaped and shifted by accompanying components like LFOs, VCAs, and filters and then delivered to our ears as tasty electronic audio candy.

I recently picked up a copy of synth-designer Thomas Henry's VCO Chip cookbook from SMS Electronics. The 100+ page book covers three chips - the 566, 8038, and XR-2206 function generator. The cookbook covers several recipes for attaining sine, triangle, and square waves from each chip with difficulties ranging from beginner-friendly to advanced-worthy. As a bonus, instructions for some unusual wave-shapers (rampoid, anyone?) and basic test devices are drawn out as well. Most of the plans included are intended for use with a +/-15V power supply. It's also worth mentioning that the 566 and 8038 IC's are no longer manufactured but can be purchased via ebay, and several rare/surplus electronics dealers.

I sat down and assembled one of the XR circuits on a breadboard in about an hour. Once I had things powered up and oscillating, I removed the pitch control potentiometer and replaced it with a couple force-sensing resistors which I'd been waiting to put to good use. You can see the scratchtastic results below -

It's refreshing to have a nice spiral bound manual at the workbench instead of referring to the multitude of webpages and printouts I'd begrudgingly grown used to. I found Henry's explanations and schematics easy to follow and I plan on using that XR-2206 circuit for a few upcoming projects.

- The New VCO Chip Cookbook

- SMS Audio Electronics

For me the posing interface is the most powerful and fun method of playing with Femisapien. As you can see in the accompanying video review, you can create a Femisapien dance or skit in literally seconds. You put her in Learning Mode and you simply move her at one of two different speeds, slow or fast. That's it. After each movement she will beep at you to tell you she's memorized the movement. Then just adding keep movements until you're done, up to 80 movements total. To finish the sequence just wait 4 seconds or tilt her head out of Learning mode. Any time you want to see the sequence just wave your hand in front of her face. It really is that simple. This brings us to her second interface mode, the Hand Gesture interface.

Michael Faraday, a man with little formal education, is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time. He is also considered the father of electrical engineering. During the Christmas holidays of 1860 and 1861, Faraday presented a series of six lectures before a Juvenile Auditory at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In addition to these six lectures, this book includes an additional lecture on the element platinum.

Faraday was an amazing individual who overcame many setbacks with determination and perseverance. When he was an apprenticed book binder, Faraday attended a series of lectures given by Sir Humphrey Davy and took detailed notes. He later transcribed the lectures into a note book and presented it to Sir Humphrey, who offered Faraday a job.

In addition to my admiration of the great Michael Faraday, SAS’s own Forrest M. Mims III remarked that he considered Michael Faraday “a great inspiration and personal hero.” Albert Einstein stated that he considered Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell as three of the most influential people in the history of science. This book was recommended to me by 2002 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Dr. John B. Fenn, who is also a long standing member of the Michael Faraday fan club.

Interview/Article by Jonah Brucker-Cohen

In the multifarious world of circuit bending outdated audio and video sampling devices, there is a strong community of artists and makers who are pushing the envelope on their designs with each new incarnation of their work. One of these impresarios is Dutch artist and maker, Karl Klomp. Klomp's work includes modded video samplers and intricately bent video descramblers and sync generators that change their visual output based on audio feeds and are completely customizable through many switches, knobs, and other sensor inputs. Make recently caught up with Klomp to discuss his approach to building these devices and to discover exactly how many custom knobs are necessary to generate the optimal bent performance.

More images and full Interview at the link below.

Core77 has a review up of Richard Sennett's book "The Craftsman," which

is a conglomerate of case studies that explore the relationship of hand to mind, craftsmanship to Enlightenment. Herein, Sennett, a renown London-based sociologist with a zest for the human experience, argues that the most basic, fundamental ability we humans share is that of craft. When properly trained, this process functions as muscle memory, literally training the mind while working the hand. If its up to Sennett, all those hours spent learning how to throw clay pots, plane wood, and mix plaster for some toy-design/coffee-maker/mobile-phone project actually might just make you, the designer-cum-craftsman, a more enlightened person. From the computer screen to the workshop table, it's the stuff we've known for years: think, make, share, and do it again. It's what we wake up to do every morning, and what we dream about at night.

I know what's on my summer reading list...

One reader of The Automata / Automaton Blog wrote to me with an interesting question. "I'm looking for a simple mechanism to convert rotational motion to reciprocal motion along the SAME axis as the rotation, not perpendicular."

I decided to investigate potential solutions in one of my favorite books on mechanisms, Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements: Embracing All Those Which Are Most Important in Dynamics, Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Steam Engines... (Astragal Press, 1995).