While at Maker Faire in May, I got a chance to get a terrific demo from Vivian Lavinskas of Singer Sewing Company on their Singer Futura line of computerized embroidery machines. Having one myself and being a techie, I can vouch for how amazingly cool these machines are. They connect easily to a PC and allow you to embroider from pre-set designs or in the CE-250 and CE-350 models, you can also use your own images for embroidery!

As mentioned in the podcast, each month a new embroidery motif is available for free download from the projects section of the Singer web site. You can also check out the many great sewing and embroidery projects as well.

My first project with the Singer Futura CE-250 embroidery machine was to test out the CRAFT logo above. The software was really simple to use and imports lots of file formats, then coverts it over to embroidery stitches that the sewing machine reads. Then I used that design template to embroider the logo onto vintage tablecloths which were used at our booth at the recent ICE Atlanta craft fair.

A little more about the Vectrex Standalone Sound Sequencer

Today I am going to show you how to build a simple temperature sensor using one LM35 Precision Temperature Sensor and Arduino, so you can hookup on your future projects. The circuit will send serial information about the temperature so you can use on your computer, change the code as you will. I’m planning to build a temperature sensor with max/min + clock + LCD

I can't believe how much work someone put into this adorableness. I'd love to see remakes with other animals and games. Sonic with real hedgehogs? Via Cute Overload

I featured Jerome Demer's ingenious little one-motor walker in my book Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. I've been hoping he'd put up an Instructable and he finally has. This is a bit of a finicky mechanical build, but worth the effort. It uses a standard BEAM bicore circuit as its brain (via the 74HCT240 chip).

How to build the one motor walker!

More:

• BeetleBot Revisited
• HOW TO - Build a Beetle Robot

The Sashimi Tabernacle Choir is an art car project by Richard Carter, John Schroeter (Houston, TX), and some thirty volunteers. The car incorporates 250 singing Billy Bass animatronic fish and 250 mechanical lobsters, including a conductor that's perched on a boom over the hood of the 1984 Volvo sedan the choir calls home.

After the car made an appearance in Lewes, DE yesterday, the Cape Gazette wrote:

Occasionally you witness firsthand an astounding display of American ingenuity. Such is the case with the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir art car that wowed dockside crowds in Lewes Wednesday afternoon. When you see such displays, you wonder: wouldn't we do better in Afghanistan and Iraq if we rolled more of these down the streets of Kabul and Baghdad?

The project's website has a lot of construction information, photos, and video clips of the car singing and twitching its goofy little heart out.

Sashimi Tabernacle Choir [Thanks, Judy Willard!]

Sean Ragan welded together his own flask for green sand casting of aluminum. A flask is the two-part frame that holds the sand for this method of casting. His is better than a wooden flask (which can't handle the high temperature if you accidentally spill some molten aluminum), and his method of construction is quite clever and well documented on his site.

Around the 12 minute mark it gets really exciting.

HD version @ Vimeo for close ups of all the soldering action or view the gallery photos.

More:

Want to build your own SIM card reader? The SIM card reader/writer is available at Adafruit Industries, it is for experimentation and investigation of SIM & Smart cards. Once the kit is built, accompanying software can be used to read and write from the card. Together they can be used to backup stored SIM card data, recover deleted SMS's and phone contacts, examine the last 10 phone numbers dialed, etc. (Despite being called a SIM reader, it can also write to SIM cards). Source, schematics and software included.

Here's two things I'd never think to combine: Tori Amos portraiture and everyone's favorite childhood building blocks. Found in the MAKE Flickr pool, Steven Goodwin made this Tory Amos portrait entirely from LEGO blocks.It really looks a lot like her when you squint at it.

Here's a nice how-to on pitch bending a standard cassette walkman. This hack uses a photocell as a tripper pot on the device. Check out the link for instructions on how to put this together.

Primer: Pitch-Bending a Walkman

This "obnoxious noise maker" called the "Ubnox-O-Phone" by its maker is a combination of a sound generator and Ruby Guitar Amp who's schematic can be downloaded from their site. The whole project only cost $35 so it's a pretty cheap way to annoy people. Check out the video at the link below.

The Ubnox-O-Phone!!!

To download Styrofoam Plate Speaker MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the Styrofoam Plate Speaker article MAKE 12 "Styrofoam Plate Speaker" & You can see that in our digital edition.

Jon Edmiston wrote a nicely flexible C# application to control a LEGO NXT car with a Wiimote - he says he could switch the remote out for a Wii balance board and he could still control the car. via NXT Step

A commenter from our previous humongous woofer post points out another contender for biggest-sub-ever - Enter(literally) the Matterhorn -

The most powerful sub ever created. It was born out of a
military request and is housed in a 20' x 8' x 8' shipping container.
40 drivers, 40 kwatts of self powered and built in generator to boot.

CNET posted a piece outlining what HOPE is all about and conducted a brief interview with the conference founder and 2600 publisher Emmanuel Goldstein -

"Basically what the hackers and phone phreakers of the past were doing, everybody is doing today," he said in an interview on Thursday. "This is the price of success; we have these fads of everybody jumping into technologies and playing with things, (but) it's also gotten more commercial."

Back in the day, the phone system was a "giant toy that people wanted to figure out. That's what hacking is all about," he said. "The interest is still there. People want to know how things work, but there's no practical reason for (phone phreaking) beyond curiosity" because of the advent of the Internet.

Meanwhile, the widespread distribution of technology has turned millions into would-be criminals. "It's a free-for-all as far as legal precedent goes," Corley said. "Something you think is completely above-board, like running a program on your own computer, can be a violation of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)."

The MAKE team will be covering HOPE for its duration - we'll be posting coverage live from the scene so keep checking back for all the deets!

The "Rechnender Raum / Calculating Space" is a light-weight kinetic sculpture by Ralf Baecker that is constructed from sticks, strings, and fishing weights. The sculpture also functions a fully functional neural network. Really impressive piece and the video at the link below is pretty amazing to see it in action. Also, the piece will be showing at Arbots 2008 this coming Sept, in Dublin, Ireland.

Rechnender Raum / Calculating Space

It's amazing how a simple idea can take on a life of its own once you start. Have a desire to build a boat for fishing at your local lakes and a bunch of American Ingenuity? Build a boat out of things American, Duct Tape, PVC pipe, and plastic.

I wanted a boat that would allow me to cast into the shore instead of from the shore. Being a mechanical engineer, one thing led to another and as the years passed I decided I would build a skin-on-frame kayak. The final kayak would be wood framed and fabric skinned. I searched for additional ideas and eventually made a balsa and tissue paper model of an 18 footer. Not wanting to invest more money and time than necessary in a prototype, I began thinking of a simple and quick way to test a design.

Again one thing led to another, and my son Daniel and I came up with the idea of a PVC pipe frame, duct tape for fastening the pipes together, and 4 mil construction plastic for a test skin. We arrived at an initial design that would use 10 foot sections of PVC pipe, since that was the length available at our local stores. Since fishing was the primary aim for this boat, shorter and wider would be more maneuverable.

We put our first prototype in the water in the summer of 2007 and it sat a little lower in the water than we wanted. The next design, shown in this article, was widened from 30 inches to 36 inches but the keel form stayed the same. Each boat was put in the water for less than $25.00. In addition to the change in width, we added the use of brackets formed from PVC pipe to help hold the pieces in the proper position, since the duct tape lashing on the original design had allowed two joints to shift slightly.

Having to interface continuously with a gadget to update your online presence is a drag on your real-life presence. Using a bandana/hankerchief instead is at least briefly amusing and requires only minimal setup typing.

Read more about Hanker-'tude

Learn how to make a Seat made from bike parts and crutches

Learn how to make your own Lipo Charger

When the you push the button, The Applause Machine claps it's hands for you. The Applause Machine is a motorized automaton designed by Martin Smith that will be widely available in September of 2008. The piece is constructed of coated steel, brass, Walnut, plastic and a small motor. It measures about 45cm in height and is powered by 2 AAA batteries. It will be available in a number of very nice colors.

This looks like a simple enough remake, spotted in the MAKE Flickr Pool: a bench made from two snowboards. Might be great for your out-of-commission boards or for ones so artsy you can't bear to take them out on the snow.

More:

• Building your own Snowboard
  
• Skateboard art
  
• Laser-etched skateboards
  

Brooklyn artist D. Billy makes impermanent onomatopoeia interventions to his surroundings, helping to bring comic book joy to our surroundings. He writes:

Using colorful media such as twisting balloons, party streamers, and artist tape, I have begun to add visual representations of sound effects to public spaces as a sort of dimensional graffiti. After embellishing the found scenes and photographing the results, I leave my additions in place to engage passers-by for as long as the materials hold up. For me, this process encourages a reexamination of surroundings and objects that are usually taken for granted, and injects a hint of the fantastical surreality that I have established in my other work.
Or, at the very least, I hope someone thinks these things are kind of funny.

Via Laughing Squid. (Thanks, Matt!)

Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of MAKE and CRAFT, is on the road this week and writes:

On a visit today to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, I got a quick tour of the collections, a place where objects not in active use are stored. One thing caught my attention: a wooden treadmill. I learned that it was built as a treadmill for a dog and its purpose (the big wheel) was to generate power. So a dog-powered generator, built and once used on a farm.

Thanks to Kathleen McCarthy for the tour. I could have spent hours there so I'll have to come back.

Museum of Science and Industry

Someone has created this fun Flickr Pool of photos of common (and not so common) objects that resemble the faces of robots.

Looks Like A Robot

My friend has been carrying around this empty shell of a Micro Muzak Model 1008 for years with the intention of converting it in to something... someday. Apparently this was used in a university to pump the college station through all the buildings and had long since been left to fall in to ruins.

Using parts you can easily get and very little modifications to the actual case it came out looking preatty good. We reused the original knobs where they were still available for that original look. The tubes were left on the case to look cool, they do nothing.

I admit this is less of an instructable and more of a hey-check-this-out-able, but maybe it will inspire you to make something neat.

IVC Wiki has an excellent roundup of projects for adding internal components (Flash storage, Bluetooth, FM radio, etc.) to an Eee PC laptop. There are several points on the Eee's mobo that make 3.3v and 5v readily available.

Eee PC Internal Upgrades [via Hacked Gadgets]

More:

• Eee PC teardown
• HOW TO - Add a keyboard backlight to an Eee PC for under $15
• HOW TO - Install OS X on the Asus Eee PC

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) presents Immune Attack™, an educational video game that introduces basic concepts of human immunology to high school and entry-level college students. Designed as a supplemental learning tool, Immune Attack aims to excite students about the subject, while also illuminating general principles and detailed concepts of immunology.

Austin Children's Museum
201 Colorado Street
Austin, TX
(512) 472-2499

A paper cup, a sewing needle, and a simple LEGO Mindstorms robot make for a nice little record player. This might be a fun project to work on with the kids this 4th of July weekend. You know they've been wondering about the boxes of vinyl frisbees in the basement. Aside from anything else they might be learning, it's a good opportunity to slip in some information about how music used to be groovy.

The artists essentially use grass as a form of photographic paper, projecting a black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows in a dark room, and using the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs...

When grass gets plenty of sunlight, it produces chlorophyll and therefore turns green – but the less light it receives, the more yellow the colour is,” explains JWT art director Mark Norcutt of the process used to make the work. “Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey discovered that by projecting a bright black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows (in an otherwise dark room), they can use the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs. From a distance it looks like any other monochrome photograph (albeit with a slightly unusual tint); up close, it looks like perfectly ordinary grass. But even individual blades sometimes have a range of hues, as any given cell can respond to the amount of light it receives.

This photo gallery by Marc Steinmetz really illustrates the essence of making what you "need" from what you have at hand; the objects are rough, but incredibly elegant solutions to problems that most of us will never have to solve.

Mac started using the Cypress Programmable System-on-Chip as a robotics platform - In order to get acquainted with the micro he decided to explore some of its non-robotic capabilities -

This project describes how to use a Cypress CY8C29466 Programmable
System-on-Chip (PSoC) to drive a standard VGA display. Minimal
external components are required to accomplish this feat. Horizontal
and vertical sync pulse generation, video blank timing, pixel
serialization, and the generation of three-bit foreground and
background colors are implemented via ten PSoC digital blocks.
External communications are accomplished through two PSoC UART
blocks. The driver is realized in a PSoC Designer 4.4 project, which
can be downloaded, along with a PDF version of the project document,
on this web page:

In the Maker Shed:

"Critter & Guitari" Cellular Automata Video Synthesizer Kit

This project turns a vintage "Planet Lamp" into a parabolic microphone for recording and uses a CMoy, low power amplifier circuit for the microphone. The whole project runs runs from a 9 volt battery. Check out the link for circuit diagrams and instructions for this project.

The Lamp - Parabolic Microphone

Arcade-style pushbutton switches are fairly roomy and easily drillable - perfect for adding LED enhancement - Make your own DIY Glowing Pushbutton Switches

More:

HOW TO - Make your own illuminated buttons

The "Foldable Greenhouse" by Daniel Schipper is a light-weight, flexible modular greenhouse built specifically for small spaces like city apartments, balconies, roof terraces, or even town gardens. The system is "frameless" and built from recyclable plastic which can be folded flat or expanded when required. He's looking to produce these for the masses, so if you want to help, drop him a line and head to the link below.

Project: Foldable greenhouse, via Green Upgrader

Calling All Dallas/Ft. Worth Area Makers - Join Us for "An Afternoon at Maker Faire" on July 19th.

Make Magazine, Craft Magazine and the Maker Faire team will be coming to Dallas to host an "Afternoon At Maker Faire" at The Museum of Nature and Science on Saturday, July 19th (from 9am - 5pm).

We will bring together Dallas/Ft. Worth area makers to exhibit their creative projects for a fun afternoon at The Museum. We are hoping to have cutting-edge DIY projects based around art, robots, electronics, alternative crafts, new music and interactive art and we are inviting all area Makers. If you are interested in being a part of this special event, please email sherry@oreilly.com for more information, and be sure to include some information about your project. And, if you know of any Dallas/Ft. Worth area Makers that we should be talking to, please be sure to send them our way.

Learn how to make a Binary Clock with an Arduino

More:

Make a Binary Clock

Proposed specs, courtesy Ray:

• 2 assignable cross faders, an extreme pitch control that goes to zero RMP, a thumb worn magnet that triggers a sensor inlaid in the back of the neck
• Three control knobs, and 2 TRS stereo outputs
• Fender P bass neck, Basslines 1/4 pound pickups, and Fender flat-wound strings
• Technics 1200 motor, plater , and controls
• The experimental, spring loaded ,3 pole, zero drag stylus cartridge caddy / Bas string bridge, will be a one off custom piece of metal work
• I will need a dsp unit that has a phono preamp built in, I was thinking I could cannibalize a Rane TTM-56

Read more about the Plattabass

The game was based on the best contemporary technology: analog electronic computers built out of op-amps, relays, and the occasional transistor. It took Higinbotham and his technicians several weeks to design and build the game. Of course, some things have changed over the last 50 years. Using convenient modern electronics, we have designed a functional and playable replica of the original that can be put together by a hobbyist in a couple of evenings.

Read more about Remaking Tennis for Two

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Dave Rocamora turned his old Ikea night table into a charging station for his gadgets, and made it an elegant lamp at the same time. He made a nice instructable about it, too, so with not much more than a router and utility knife, you can achieve the same look.

Younger sibling to the bC16 the new Chimera bC8 lacks the patchable banana jacks but has a whole some sweet sequencing features -

A powerful DSP generates a VCO and LFO (similar to the bC16), also the DSP performs VCF and VCA functions as well controlling the patching of functions to each other and running a simple but powerful ‘ one button’ pattern sequencer. bC8 is controlled by eight rotary knobs and one push-button. Four LED’s indicate battery status, LFO and EG level and other mode elements. bC8 pattern sequencer records the timing/duration of the button presses and all the knob settings for each action, these can be altered live for acid loops etc…

Zach writes -

I'm very proud to announce a new board, designed and developed by the RepRap Research Foundation. Its called the Magnetic Rotary Encoder, and it uses a magnet to provide positional feedback information. It is based around the AS5040 chip, and provides 10-bits of resolution per rotation (1024 different positions!) It has 5 different output modes, a 6.1mm hole that fits the magnet for easy aligning, plenty of diagnostic LEDs for coolness, and 6 different mounting holes for ease of use, including GM3 gearmotor mounting holes.

More:

Make a Reprap Robot Part 1: The Electronics - Weekend Project Podcast