Hello there, here are your daily updates from the MAKE blog - 2008/12/01.
Best of CRAFTHere are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:
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. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!Glass bottle shelvingHere are some Instructables for variations on building shelves with glass bottles as the verticals:
Check out Zero Waste's other projects here. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!MAKE inspired honking pumpkin
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: In the Maker Shed: Make your own Arduino controlled bell tower / carillon
This is a set of musical bells which are driven by solenoids and controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this! Flaming legs 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! 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! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!Fire-Cooled Brew
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. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Made On Earth | Digg this!MIDI Hero - Guitar Hero with a drum kitThis 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. 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 More Recent Articles
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