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Hello there, here are your daily updates from the MAKE blog - 2009/02/02. Making Mr. MIDIShield Superbowl Sunday foods Best of CRAFT New stuff happening on the MAKE site... Tetherbot - browse on your laptop through the T-Mobile G1 Viewing Infra-Red DIY Superbowl Sunday... for Makers Bracketmeister - bulb mode bracketing for digital cameras More Recent Articles Making Mr. MIDIShield After finishing my second prototype of a MIDIShield for Arduino I've dug into writing a useful sketch to use with it. It's been tougher than I expected working with timer and interrupt settings for the AVR - though dealing with incoming MIDI data was pretty straightforward. The rough spot comes when I try to communicate with the DAC chip (MCP4921) within an interrupt. So far, using the "HelloSineTone" example from the Arduino Pocket Piano shield has proved unsuccessful. Hmmm, more development progress to come … Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Superbowl Sunday foods I live in central Arizona, where it's hard to avoid the droves of Cardinals fans at every turn (I didn't even know that the Cardinals wasn't just a baseball team until a few weeks ago), all buying cases of Bud to drink during the big game. Although I find football just about as mindless as any other televised sport, I sure do enjoy getting together with my friends for some tasty food. We're making Buffalo wings with homemade ranch dressing, nachos, and artichoke dip to enjoy with a few friends. We'll also be having the first carbonated taste of our homemade hefeweizen; the recipe is called "Dry Heat Wheat" by our local brewing shop. We also have a fresh crop of grapefruits on the tree in our backyard, so my roommate Sarah whipped up a cocktail recipe featuring the fresh juice. Football or not, we'll be eating well today! Photo above is "Homebrew beer fermenting in carboy" by geoffeg on Flickr. Becky's Homemade Ranch: .5 cup mayonaise .5 cup whole yogurt .25 cup 2% milk 2 tbsp. chopped celery leaves (a good use of them if you're serving celery stalks with your wings) 1.5 tbsp. chopped fresh dill 1.5 tbsp. diced onion (sweet or red) 1 clove garlic, diced 1 tsp. dijon mustard 2 tsp. lemon juice salt and pepper to taste Combine all ingredients and whisk together. Use a food processor to dice the onion and garlic if you have one. Let the flavors meld in the fridge for an hour before serving. Sarah's Raspberry Greyhound: 1 oz. Stoli Raspberry .25 cup fresh grapefruit juice Combine above ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker, then pour over ice into a tumbler. Fill with tonic water, enjoy! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Best of CRAFT Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week: Paper Heart and Ribcage Sharrow Sweater Aquatic Fascinators HOW TO - Crochet Master Shake Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • New stuff happening on the MAKE site... Some housekeeping - We are in the middle of some HUGE upgrades behind the scenes at MAKE. The MAKE site isn't something we "own" - it's your site just as much as it's ours. Everyone who participates in the MAKE community has made it the great resource it is today. We listened to all the feedback in 2008 and we're doing a lot to make the site even better in 2009. Here's an overview of what we're up to now, ahead and some of the changes on the site. Upgrading to the latest version of MoveableType (our online publishing system) - this should help our performance, add new features and make it easier to do new things. Hackszine is becoming part of MAKE while we do our site updates. Fixing comments - the comments work "most" of the time but during high load some users need to enter in the CAPTCHA twice in some cases, we're working on fixing that. We're also going to have OpenID 2.0 and things like Facebook connect as MoveableType adds support for it. We'll also add threaded comments. Projects section - we're re-doing the projects section on MAKE soon, we'll have 10 times the projects and new things to do! "Suggest a site" - we've updated to form so you can put where you're from and if you're a MAKE subscriber, we read those first. Number of posts - The feedback from all the makers out there is that there are too many posts to keep up with on MAKE - we're going to do lots of posts, just not as many, but the posts we do have will be longer and filled with more content. We'll have quick items, but we're working towards longer articles and more how-tos. More weekly features - we're going to have more regular weekly features - Right now we have "How-to tuesday" and "Weekend projects" - soon we'll have many more. Some of the daily authors on the site will do features and articles, we'll try this out and see how it goes. More of MAKE making MAKE - You'll see some new faces here on the site, but they're not new at all - many of our print editors are writing on the site now too - when you see them here, say hello! Guest authors - we'll have more guest authors this year, makers and we'll try and do a monthly "ask a maker" online chat starting in the spring. Design updates, ads and changes - we're polishing up the site, we're removing old stuff and working with our advertising partners to get more relevant ads on the site with sponsors who value the MAKE community. As the economy sinks more, we'll have less ads but hope you consider subscribing to MAKE and checking out our Maker Shed store. Stats on our site & videos - I'm going to publish how the site is doing each month. In January we had 4,665,156 page views +7.09% over December (4,356,165) and 2,669,305 unique visitors +11.64% over December (2,390,949) . In January we had about 2 million video views across YouTube, iTunes, blip.tv, vimeo and direct downloads. If you want to advertise on MAKE click here via the self-serve system, if you want to talk to us about advertising or video sponsorships email us! And that's just a start, we'll keep you all updated as things change and get updated. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Tetherbot - browse on your laptop through the T-Mobile G1 Tetherbot is a SOCKS proxy for the T-Mobile G1. Using this tool, you should be able to connect your laptop to the internet using your phone's data connection. It's not a true routed connection like you might be familiar with with other devices, but browsers like Firefox or Safari can be easily configured to use SOCKS. Also included is a port forwarding utility, which will allow you to tunnel SSH or connect to services with applications that aren't SOCKS compatible. I don't have a G1, but this looks like an essential tool. Has anyone tried this out that would care to comment on how well it works? Tetherbot - G1 SOCKS Proxy Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Viewing Infra-Red The Upload section of Make is dedicated to "digital arts and crafts." This can include any process, device, or software that you can tweak or hack to create digital, "uploadable" output. As the editor of this section I've pursued topics including how to make a chroma-keyed, "green-screen" video, how to use software that facilitates music synthesis on a desktop computer, and how to write a BASIC program to generate plaintext proverbs as a simple form of AI. Some time ago we published a piece by Richard Kadrey on infra-red photography, describing how to adapt a digital camera so that it will photograph wavelengths just below the visible spectrum. Shortly after that I bought a Fuji IS-1, which is specifically designed to photograph infra-red, since it omits the blocking filter that protects the sensors on most cameras. The picture above, of a sandy wash in the desert, was taken with an IS-1. Of course you still need a filter to block visible light, but these are readily available from photo supply sources online. Recently on www.boingboing.net a couple of readers suggested infra-red flash photography, which would be done by putting a visible-light blocking filter over the flash source. This would enable you to take pictures surreptitiously in darkness or near-darkness. I'm wondering if anyone here has had personal experience with this. Does the pop-up flash on a typical camera emit enough infra-red to make it workable? How about using a battery-powered camcorder floodlight, repackaged in a light-tight box with a filter on the front? That could cause overheating problems, but if all you want is to take still photographs, you could switch on the light for just a few seconds. I'm interested in exploring the infra-red topic further in the Upload section of future issues of Make. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Imaging | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • DIY Superbowl Sunday... for Makers There seems to be a split in the Maker world, half watch football, the other half doesn't know it's Superbowl Sunday... so first up, post in the comments, which camp are you in? Or something different? Sixty-one percent of Americans plan to watch the game! Either way, here are some fun projects and football inspiration for the big day! Pictured above - DIY tackling dummy... HOW TO - Stadium seating for Superbowl Sunday - Paul and his roommates planned on building stadium seating in their living room. The living room isn't too spacious and only had enough room for two futons. So, just in time for Superbowl Sunday, they created a cheap deck for stadium seating. All it required was plywood, 4×4 & 2×4 wood, a box of wood screws and basic tools. 100-inch uber Superbowl screen on a budget... After Paul and his roommate built a stadium seating setup for their living room then they went one step further and added a 2500 lumen projector to the mix to create the ultimate home theater system on a budget... Football helmet guitar lets you rock out on the field... Cute crochet football cozy! Simple 4 step design for recycling two old t-shirts into one handbag. This design uses an old football jersey for a quick drying beach bag. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Bracketmeister - bulb mode bracketing for digital cameras Joergen Geerds sent in his solution to long exposure night photography: the Bracketmeister, an Arduino set up that's used with a camera's bulb mode to automate bracketed, long exposure shots. I do bracket all my night photography, for various reasons: for exposure blending, noise reduction, dynamic range extension etc etc. Unfortunately, Canon thinks that all photographers only need +-2EV brackets, unless you own one of the very big Canons, and that 30 seconds is also enough. Unfortunately, it isn't enough for some of my night panoramas, and I was looking into ways to fix it (that included pleading to Canon, but we all know how far that goes). So I decided to build my own long-exposure bracket controller, based on the arduino platform, with an Nokia LCD to actually have an user interface, other than a red button, write my own piece of software and test it last night... I call the gadget "Bracketmeister 0.32″ for now. It works like a charm. Now I can have +-3EV (what I was aiming for, but the it does up to +-10EV, possibly more), exposures from 1 sec to 2 hours, and up to 11 shots for each bracket set (can be more). Now no night panorama is impossible anymore. You can grab the code and build instructions from Joergen's site. Put a nice case around this and it's a handy little item to add to your photo hacker's toolkit. Long-exposure Night HDR Photography With Arduino Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • More Recent Articles Geeks gather, make stuff Super Bowl 1/2 time build: Gakken Stirling Engine Fighting for our "right to repair" Drawdio round up - BZZZ BEEEP BLOOP Google becomes self aware says every site is harmful and malware... including Google Stop by the Maker Shed store and check out THE place for open source hardware, Arduino & Arduino accessories, electronic kits, science kits, smart stuff for kids, back issues of MAKE & CRAFT, box sets, books, robots, kits from Japan and more.

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