[MAKE Magazine - daily] - MAKE Magazine

Hello there, here are your daily updates from the MAKE blog - 2009/02/26. Flashback: Home Mycology Lab Yet another Drawbot Book Giveaway: The Paper Architect by Marivi Garrido and Ingrid Siliakus Another Internet dog feeder In the Maker Shed: Learn to solder bundle Ever filmed video on a rollercoaster? Brooklyn's new culinary movement Rockets from office supplies! ARDX - Arduino Experimentation Kit Steerable plumbing tube sled Art-record animates with a kit How To - Make sound effects Sierra Bravo's Overnight Website Challenge Hamster-controller iRobot Create David Rowe on Open Hardware business models (video) Dev blocks for modular breadboarding Berlekamp's switch game Kindle 2 taken apart Safari 4 beta and Safari 3 on the same machine MAKE in iTunes Mobile Phone Mega-Market in Shenzhen In the Maker Shed: Fuel Cell Car & Experiment Kit The Story of the Match ~ a Great World Industry Bugle dinosaur More Recent Articles Flashback: Home Mycology Lab Start a cultural revolution in your own house with Philip Ross' Home Mycology Lab project from MAKE Volume 07, our Backyard Biology issue. Mushrooms are fascinating (and tasty), and this article introduces you to what it takes to make them grow. I love this illustration: Philip offers a detailed how-to on making your own miniature mycology lab using an off-the-shelf home air purifier with a HEPA filter to create a "clean box" pristine environment. The project takes about an hour to build and about 2 weeks to grow, and provides a fun and easy window into the magical world of mycelium. Philip Ross has extensive experience with mushrooms, and incorporates them (as well as other plantlife) into his artwork. Here's an example: Check out Home Mycology Lab in our Digital Edition. Other projects in Volume 07 include extracting and replicating your own DNA, hacking your plants through grafting and pollination, freezing and reviving a garden snail, building a videocam rocket and a Stirling engine, and a whole lot more. Unfortunately, we're sold out of back issues of Volume 07. The good news is if you subscribe, you can have digital access to all 17 volumes of MAKE! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Biology | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Yet another Drawbot Here's a sweet piece with a dad and his two daughters working with a drawbot they made from yogurt cups, DC motors, and art pens. They made some really nice wrapping paper. What a great thing for kids to be able to declare: "We made robots and they drew the art on the paper your present is wrapped in!" Drawing robots BTW: Our very own Jonah Brucker-Cohen did a drawbots project in 2001. You can see the piece on that at his website. [Thanks, Jonah!] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Book Giveaway: The Paper Architect by Marivi Garrido and Ingrid Siliakus Although it's been years since I've done much papercraft to speak of, it's always been a craftform that's fascinated me. When I was a kid, I used to get those Dover Publication papercraft books, of castles and other historical buildings, and I'd spend countless hours cutting, folding, and gluing. I made an entire Medieval castle and village as a D&D miniature setting. I still have a couple of the buildings, now shabby with age, but they give me little memory tickles, of the countless hours each one represents. They are now part of our family "Island of Misfit Toys," a mantle display of broken, but not forgotten, bits of Christmases past we venerate each year. Crown Publishing has just published The Paper Architect, an awesome-looking book of fold-it-yourself buildings and structures. It contains 20 structures, including the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, and the White House. The fine folks at Crown have been kind enough to give us five copies to GIVE AWAY to YOU! To be eligible, just leave a comment in this post. Tell us about some of your favorite papercraft projects or otherwise why you think you NEED this book! Be sure you include your email address in the comment form field (it won't be published). All eligible comments will be closed by 3pm PT Thursday, Feb 26. Winners will be announced on Friday here on the MAKE blog. Good luck! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Another Internet dog feeder Here's another remote dog feeder, this one using an IOBridge I/O module to handle the networking and a simple servo-controlled dispenser made from a compact disc. iPhone enabled internet dog feeder More: Internet dog feeder HOW TO - The Internet Dog Feeder Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gadgets | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • In the Maker Shed: Learn to solder bundle Announcing our new bundles available exclusively in the Maker Shed. This time it's our Learn to solder bundle. This bundle includes a bunch of great products that will get you on your way to being a soldering pro in no time. Keep an eye out for a lot more great bundles exclusively in the Maker Shed. The Learn to solder bundle includes: (1) Learn to Solder Kit $14.95 value (1) Solder Practice Kit $9.95 value (1) Maker's Notebook $19.99 value (1) MAKE Volume 01 $14.99 value (featuring a learn to solder article) All of these items are bundled together for the discounted price of $39.95. That's more than 30% off if you were to purchase them individually. More about the Learn to solder bundle in the Maker Shed Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Ever filmed video on a rollercoaster? Not pictured above: a Make: television cameraman (or John Park for that matter). Why would we ever expect any camerman in his/her right mind to risk life, limb, or most importantly, expensive video recording equipment for the sake of some jumpy footage of a roller coaster in action? In this week's Maker Workshop segment of Make: television, John Park uses an Arduino microcontroller and a hacked Wii controller to make a Personal Flight Recorder... which is, of course, perfect for measuring the stomach-churning G forces of roller coasters like the one pictured above. Fortunately, this slightly less frightening roller coaster also expels a healthy amount of G forces. And thanks to the steady hands of our camerman Mike Phillips (seated on the coaster conveniently right under the big yellow arrow), we have a very watchable, non-stomach-churning Maker Workshop segment to prove it. Visit makezine.tv this Saturday, 2/28 to see Episode 9 featuring CCRMA's Computer Making Music and the Personal Flight Recorder. Check out all of the previous episodes at www.makezine.tv/episodes Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Brooklyn's new culinary movement Brooklyn's new culinary movement - a lot of handmade action and guys with turn of the century beard action, industry is seeping back - and it's starting with food it seems... These Brooklynites, most in their 20s and 30s, are hand-making pickles, cheeses and chocolates the way others form bands and artists' collectives. They have a sense of community and an appreciation for traditional methods and flavors. They also share an aesthetic that's equal parts 19th and 21st century, with a taste for bold graphics, salvaged wood and, for the men, scruffy beards. Rick Mast, 32, said he and his brother were initially attracted to the borough because it was cheaper than Manhattan. "But now I think the real draw is the creativity," he said. "In Brooklyn, to be into food is do it yourself, to get your hands dirty, to roll up your sleeves. You want to peek in the kitchen in the back, as opposed to being served in the front." .... The Brooklyn Kitchen carries major brands, but it is the sole retailer for knives from Cut Brooklyn, a local specialty knife maker. "It's difficult to keep those guys stocked," said Joel Bukiewicz, Cut Brooklyn's owner and solitary employee. "It's like sweeping a dirt floor." Maybe that's because Mr. Bukiewicz takes 10 to 12 hours to fashion one eight-inch chef's knife. In an average week he will make between four and six knives. He first learned how to make hunting knives in Georgia, and started creating kitchen knives in his small Gowanus workshop in 2007. "There's an appreciation here for craftsmanship and people who work with their hands," Mr. Bukiewicz said. "I had no idea there was going to be this convergence of artists, artisans and food culture in Brooklyn." Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Rockets from office supplies! Here's a great how-to on building a "liquid fueled" rocket using little more than a fat Sharpie marker, a can of compressed air, and a few more supplies found down on the Cube Farm. The resulting rocket can fly up to 75 feet! But hey there, John Glenn of the IT Department, BE CAREFUL! This is actually a project you don't want to take lightly. Launch it outdoors, wear safety goggles, don't "burn" yourself on the compressed air (it's *very* cold). Generally, be smart, and use common sense whenever dealing with any type of projectile and components under pressure. What you need: A Sharpie Canned Air Electrical Tape (Substitute Packing Tape) Ball Point Pen Rubber Band Bottle Cap Leatherman The innards are removed from the Sharpie and a port for the canned air tube is fashioned from a ball point pen tube and secured to the thrust end of the rocket. The fins are made from electrical tape. Plug the compressed air into the port on the business end the rocket, fill will gas from the can, and... BLAST OFF! TIP: On the Comments to this Instructable, a maker suggests cutting off the bell-shaped end of another Sharpie and adding it to the thrust end of your rocket to form a De Laval nozzle for better thrust performance. See the full Instructable for more details. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Flying | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • ARDX - Arduino Experimentation Kit oomlout is a rising star in the OSH world, check out their kit that is under development. For the OSH biz geeks - think about how interesting it will be to "license" their design, instead of just being a reseller - you'd download their files, laser cut up some stuff, print some labels and now you're a distributor (assuming you stock parts and Arduinos). It's the future kids! You'll route around paying atom-tax shipping goods around! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Steerable plumbing tube sled From across the pond, Instructables user AndyGadget designed a sled (or sledge) made from pvc tubing: We have a couple of the cheap plastic sledges which are pretty fast, but not at all steerable and break easily. I wanted a sledge which was strong, steerable and fast. I chose the waste pipe to give a minimal contact area on hard snow but a larger area as the snow deepens. The tube is also slightly flexible to allow bending for the steering. This is his second version, hence the grass in the background. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Art-record animates with a kit Now here's a good example of musicians adding value to their tangible music release - Jari writes in regarding the new record from the band Shogun Kunitoki. The custom record features printed art that deisplays an animation when lit by the accompanying 555/LED owl kit, otherwise known as "Mystical Shogun Kunitoki Strobe Light" of course. That is an awesome little PCB they've designed - here's hoping animal-circuit boards become the new 'thing'! Those old Red Raven animation discs he mentions are quite the cool artifact/collectible nowadays. WFMU posted some good examples and info here. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • How To - Make sound effects For all you budding Foley artists out there, Epic Sound posted a growing list of what items to use and how to use them for creating specific sound effects. Some cool (and gross!) ideas kicking around in there - Alien pod embryo expulsions etc. Certain kinds of canned dog food make useful sounds as the food comes out of the can. The chunky stuff isn't so good, but the tightly packed all-one-mass kind makes gushy sucking sounds when the air on the outside of the can is sucked into the can to replace the exiting glob of dog food. This sound can be used as an element in certain kinds of monster vocalizations, alien pod embryo expulsions, etc. Ashley Walker Yup, I've thought of similar things during pet feedings of the past - oof! Read more ideas for DIY sound effects over on the Guide to Sound Effects. [via Synthtopia] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Sierra Bravo's Overnight Website Challenge Geek Squad's Founder and Chief Inspector, Robert Stephens, sent Make: television some info about an upcoming event that he's judging called the Overnight Website Challenge. The event sounds really cool and all of the effort goes to helping 12 nonprofits. Mark Hurlburt is one of the event's organizers, "The event is kind of a creative marathon. 120 people get together and spend 24 hours in a room making something that has a direct and measurable impact on the ability of the nonprofits to accomplish their mission. It's all about putting the nerdy and the needy together in one room and watching amazing things happen!" For more info on this event, check out overnightwebsitechallenge.com For live updates during the event, visit blog.nerdery.com Geek Squad is a major funder of Make: television, check out the story behind their sponsorship at www.makezine.tv/about/sponsor Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Hamster-controller iRobot Create Here's a vid of a hamster, in a hamster ball, controlling a iRobot Create. The hamster controls the robot by running in the ball in whatever direction he/she likes. The ball is supported on three rollers and an optical sensor measures which way and how fast the ball is spinning. Those values are fed into a microprocessor that controls the drive wheels to make the robot mimic the motion of the ball. iRobot YouTube Channel Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • David Rowe on Open Hardware business models (video) David Rowe on Open Hardware business models (video) In 2005 David started working on open hardware techniques for telephony. The idea of open hardware (people collaborating to build free hardware designs just like open software) was a big experiment, especially when it came to commercial products. Much has happened since then. New projects, and even businesses have spun out of the project. Coolest of all - open hardware products are now in volume production. People are buying and using these products - often in preference to products developed using traditional closed development models. Open hardware works! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Open source hardware | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Dev blocks for modular breadboarding Flickr member Kitty's Pictures shares these shots of her homebrew develeopment blocks. Who can resist an array of mini-modularity? uC prototyping blocks, aka "Dev Blocks." These are small single component boards that are ready to plug into a breadboard. Here the connectors are interlocked. From left to right: Piezo element Bi-color LED (red/green) x2 SPST, N-O momentary switch w/ pulldown resistor Light dependent resistor (LDR) DS18B20 I2C digital temperature sensor LM35 temperature sensor (10mV/C) I've made some similar boards with header pins for my most commonly used prototyping parts and small circuits. It's definitely a good move if you find yourself a non-plussed about breadboarding. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Berlekamp's switch game Retromodo: Berlekamp's switch game.. I hear you :) Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Kindle 2 taken apart Kindle 2 taken apart via Giz. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gadgets | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Safari 4 beta and Safari 3 on the same machine The Safari 4 beta looks pretty slick, but what do you do if you aren't quite ready to give up your trusted browsing companion? Neil Lee has the solution for running both Safari 3 and the new version 4 beta on the same Mac: Apple dropped the first public beta release of Safari 4 today, and installing it overwrites the old version of Safari as well as the system Webkit frameworks. This means it's not possible to run the current Safari 3 release and the beta on the same system. That is, not possible without some fiddling. Here's a quick how-to get both Safari 3 and 4 beta running on the same system. You will need to use the terminal for part of this, and we will download an older copy of Webkit, which is Apple's development builds of Safari. This is a pretty big deal for me, since I'll need to start testing sites I develop in both versions of Safari. I already need to run a few virtual machines to test applications under different versions of IE and Flash, so it's sort of a relief that the Safari versions will work out side-by-side on the same box. How to run Safari 4 beta and Safari 3 on the same mac Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • MAKE in iTunes Here's a fun presentation we did about MAKE and all the things we've tinkered with in iTunes, iPods, iPhones and more! It's been about 5 years and we've hacked iPods, created enhanced podcasts, 3D PDFs, MAKE in PDF in iTunes - you name it, we've tried it! We were even the first TV show in history to debut in iTunes, blip.tv, vimeo, YouTune and LegalTorrents! If you haven't already subscribe in iTunes (click here). I wanted to post this for other magazines and brands too - we're not doing anything ya'll can't do - and the results for us have been great - we'd love to see more amazing how-to videos, PDFs and more in iTunes! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Mobile Phone Mega-Market in Shenzhen Bunnie visited the cell phone market in China... One thing that's true about the technology markets in China is that the more you learn about it, the less you find you know. Liam Casey, "Mr. China" himself, and the CEO of PCH, came in and said exactly that our first day on the tour. I had a first-hand experience with that while I was acting as a tour guide of the SEG market in Shenzhen. I knew that the SEG market was big, and that it had a lot of stuff, but somehow I managed to miss the massive mobile phone market for the two years that I had been shopping there. A friend of mine in PCH tipped me off to the market, so at the end of the walking tour of the main market that I was familiar with, we decided to head out and try to find something that none of us, including me had previously seen. My eyes fell out of my head when I saw it. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Cellphones | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • In the Maker Shed: Fuel Cell Car & Experiment Kit MAKE is going to be at Greener Gadgets later this week. One of the kits we will have on display at the show is the Fuel Cell Car & Experiment Kit by Thames & Kosmos. It looks like a really well made kit that includes everything you need to get started with fuel cell technology. It even comes with a digital multi-meter! I have never played with a fuel cell before, so it should be an interesting kit to try out at the show. Assemble and experiment with a unique reversible hydrogen Fuel Cell. This fuel cell kit provides a playful introduction to one of the most significant technologies of the 21st Century. With this kit you can build a model car that actually runs on water! 96-page full-color book. Ages 12 and up. By Thames & Kosmos. More about the Fuel Cell Car & Experiment Kit More: More about MAKE at Greener Gadgets Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • The Story of the Match ~ a Great World Industry The Story of the Match ~ a Great World Industry - Modern Mechanix 1930. Modern methods and modern machinery have trans formed the making of matches from a dangerous, disease-producing business into one of the world's great industries. Here we have the story of how science has made the present-day match possible. HOW many matches have you used today? You should, according to America's premier match making company, have struck seven, if you got the daily share allotted to every man, woman and child in the United States. In other words it takes 840,000,000 matches a day to supply the fire making needs of a nation of 120,000,000 people. That's at the rate of 306 billion, 600 million for normal years of 365 days. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Modern Mechanix | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Bugle dinosaur This sculpture by Constantin Luser is called "Virbrosaurus" and is made of bugles and tubas. Do you think it was chromed after it was shaped? I never really learned how chroming works. Via VVORK. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • More Recent Articles FYI - Make:NYC meeting rescheduled for 3/5/09 The ol' Blue Boxing. Good times, good times. John Park brings MAKE to Attack of the Show! - Thursday, February 26 MAKE wins - Brit Insurance Interactive Design of the Year Award Tinkerbots' rayguns 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.

---

Click here to safely unsubscribe now from "MAKE Magazine" or change subscription settings

---

---

Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498