[MAKE Magazine - daily] - MAKE Magazine

MAKE Magazine In This Issue... Checkin' In: Hacker Kingpin Joe Grand Hey kids, Tweet-a-Watt kits! The BBC on "makers and hackers" External keyboard for iPhone from our own iPhone Hacks--no jailbreaking needed! Introducing Make: television Outreach Self-immolating wood oven Open Heart kit controlled by a Wii Nunchuck Electronic candle Building a Ruben's Tube Robot Fest 2009, April 25, Linthicum, MD Every possible 4-bit 32 sample waveform … eventually Working on a DIY solar project? Experimental tongue music iPhone garage door opener Edit Gmail filters with XML Make your own trash bag holder More Recent Articles Checkin' In: Hacker Kingpin Joe Grand Joe Grand is always getting into something interesting. He's been a contributor to the pages of MAKE since our very first issue. The man lives the MAKE ethos for sure: "Hardware hacking is, to me, a perfect example of 'anti-establishment'. Make a product do something it was never intended to do, add a personal touch, and make it your own. Not just buying a product and using it as is (which is what The Man wants you to do!)." In Volume 01, he broke down the basics with a Primer on soldering and desoldering. Then, in Volume 02, he gave us one of the longest projects we've ever run: coming in at a whopping 35 pages, "Retro Game Heaven: The Atari 2600 PC" shows you how to cram a full-featured PC system into an Atari 2600 video game case. Just so you can get a glimpse, here's a window into the project in our Digital Edition and some pics: Also in Volume 02, Joe taught us how to add a power switch to an external drive. In Volume 03, he offered up the basics of reading and drawing schematics for folks just getting started. He also had articles in Volume 05 (building your own satellite dish mast), 06 (building a kit to read radio frequency ID tags), 08 (a chat with Ralph Baer), and 10 (voltage, current, and resistance broken down). We checked in with Joe to see how he's been spending his days and he wrote: "I've been very busy lately. Let's see. Here's a partial list :) I finished filming a season of thirteen episodes of Prototype This, an engineering show for Discovery Channel. That was a great way to introduce/show off engineering to the masses. It was a very interesting experience and ended up turning a lot of viewers on to the fun side of engineering, which was a nice surprise." [Check out his video interview with Joe, where he gives insight into his background, including how he's actually on a Trivial Pursuit card. Also, here's a great Prototype This! segment on creating the six-legged vehicle.] "My backup unit (Ben) was born in October and is well on his way to becoming a young hacker. He's a lot of fun :)" [Yes, folks, Ben maybe a baby, but he has his own blog!] "I've started Kingpin Empire, a project that gives back to the computer underground, technology, and health communities through charitable donations. In 2008, we donated just under $2,500 to the EFF, ACLU, Hackers for Charity, American Cancer Society, and American Heart Association! I know we can do better, even in this tough economy, so I'm hoping to get the message/cause spread far and wide. I'm currently working on the DEFCON 17 badge for DEFCON. It's the 4th year in a row that I've had the honor of designing the conference badge as an active, artistic electronic device. Previous years' [14, 15, and16] work here:" "I'm also working on some still-in-stealth-mode hobbyist electronic gadgets and getting back to my roots with some security analysis of hardware infrastructure. I'll go public with this stuff when it's ready." Thanks, Joe! Keep up with Joe Grand on his site, Grand Idea Studio. And pick up any back issues you may not have at the Maker Shed. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Hey kids, Tweet-a-Watt kits! Our pals at Adafruit have released kits for their most awesome Tweet-a-Watt, a kit that turns a lonely Kill-a-Watt power meter into a Twittering energy-usage reporter. Now you can tweet your ravenous power hunger to the entire world! The Tweet-a-Watt Starter Kit, with everything you need to create one outlet monitor (minus the Kill-a-Watt unit), costs $90. Additional Add-on outlet kits sell for $40. We should have Tweet-a-Watt kits in the Maker Shed soon and will let you know as soon as we do. How to make your own Tweet-a-Watt will also be one of the major projects in MAKE, Volume 18, so stay tuned for that. Tweet-a-Watt kits now available... More: Tweet-a-watt - our entry for the Core77 & Greener ... HOW TO - Make your own Tweet-a-Watt Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Kits | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • The BBC on "makers and hackers" UK subscriber John Honniball sent us a link to a piece on the BBC's site, with videos, about the recent Maker Faire Newcastle and the maker movement in general. I like the title: "We are all makers and hackers:" And it is this urge to control that is among the most important parts of the maker movement, said Mr Frauenfelder. "Western culture has forgotten that our hands have this full range of motion and ability to do things rather than just pressing game controller buttons and tap on a keyboard," he said. "You gain a great sense of self-efficacy once you master things," he said. "It gives you confidence in other related areas and it builds upon itself. "This is what we are evolved to do." John Honniball himself is in the video piece, talking about his retro-computers (the Compukit UK101 from 1979). Way to go, John! We are all makers and hackers Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • External keyboard for iPhone from our own iPhone Hacks--no jailbreaking needed! The authors of the brand new iPhone Hacks have posted one of the coolest hacks from the book: using a Cypress PSoC to connect an external serial keyboard to the iPhone, without jailbreaking. The great thing about this hack is that it can be adapted for other serial devices, including TTL serial, and the authors show you how to do all this in Chapter 12 of the book. It's amazing stuff. I built the circuit myself to test it out when I was tech-editing the chapter, and it really blew me away: A number of industrious individuals have achieved what to some is the holy grail of iPhone accessories: an iPhone keyboard. But most have done it in a very hard-to-repeat manner, and few have shared the methods they used. Expanding on their audio port modem, PerceptDev engineers Zack Gainsforth and George Dean developed a hardware and software solution that allows infrared keyboards to be used for typing on the iPhone, using less than $20 of electronics. Zack used a Cypress PSoC microcontroller to emulate a simple modem, and then expanded it to detect an infrared signal or read from a USB host controller, which converts this signal to FSK for transmission to an iPhone. iPhone Keyboard - no Jailbreaking required, using 2.0 SDK. [Check out the coverage on ars technica, Gizmodo, Hack a Day, TUAW, and Wired] iPhone Hacks by David Jurick, Adam Stolarz, Damien Stolarz Our Price: $34.99 With iPhone Hacks, you can make your iPhone do all you'd expect of a smartphone -- and more. Learn tips and techniques to unleash little-known features, find and create innovative applications for both the iPhone and iPod touch, and unshackle these devices to run everything from network utilities to video game emulators. iPhone Hacks is exactly what you need to make the most of your iPhone. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Introducing Make: television Outreach A little over a week ago, Make: television (with help from the Science Museum of Minnesota and Geek Squad) hosted the first-ever Make: Day. Heavily inspired by the many successful and amazing Maker Faires that MAKE magazine has hosted around the country world, Make: Day was a blast. And in case you missed the news, Make: Day was filled with robots, music, stuff for kids, and tons of other crazy and cool projects and inventions. The principles that guide much of MAKE magazine and Make: television are right in line with the goals of events like Maker Faire and Make: Day-- to celebrate the ingenuity and inventiveness in our communities. We believe those same goals inspire all makers, which is why we've launched a spiffy new Outreach website, chock-full of free resources for anyone who's ever thought of spreading some maker vibes across their community. Here you'll find out how to: Throw a Make: viewing party! You can watch an episode, and even invite local Makers, artists, or inventors to lead a discussion about the show. Hold a "Meet-and-Greet" with a local Maker, such as an inventor, engineer, artist, or other creative community member who can demonstrate a project and inspire others. Delve deeper into the technology of Make: by inviting an engineer or other technology professional to explain the science behind a project in the Project Pack. Use the Project Pack to instruct and inspire participation in creative activities. Hold a Mini-Maker Faire by inviting appropriate community partner groups and individuals who may wish to showcase their projects during the event. Host a competition at work to see who can build the best project from the Project Pack! The Outreach site was designed for all of you educators, after-school program teachers, community engagement workers in our midst to get people of all ages thinking, creating, recycling, upcycling, and just making. And the tools are perfect for, basically, wherever people are gathered! Go check it out for yourself. Think of these resources as only the beginning - once you get started, you might not stop. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Self-immolating wood oven I love this log, spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, cut with an air intake and a chimney to create an outdoors self-contained heating unit. All in one, disposable oven Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Open Heart kit controlled by a Wii Nunchuck Phil sent me a link to this cool project that uses a Wii Nunchuck to control an Open Heart kit. Check out the link for a lot more information about the build, including the source code. You can purchase the Open Heart kit in the Maker Shed.Thanks Phil! Recently I ordered the kit for an OpenHeart: an LED panel in the shape of a heart that uses charlieplexing to minimize the number of I/Os required to address the LEDs. The instructions were great and I picked up some tips to make my soldering better. The author made it very easy, even providing a flash-based programmer that lets you define your animation sequence and writes the code for you, so for animations all you need to do is cut-and-paste the code into the Arduino IDE and download it. More about the Open Heart kit controlled by a Wii Nunchuck Related: How-to Tuesday: Valentines LED display In the Maker Shed: In the Maker Shed: The Open Heart kit Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Electronic candle "On" by Aram Bartholl Installation/Video 2009 Mixed media: Candle, resistance wire, copper wire, switch, 12V power transformer Dimensions: 20 x 5 x 5 cm Video 10 min, 1080i HD Via FAT. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Building a Ruben's Tube Tinla put together a Ruben's Tube sound-to-flame visualizer on the cheap netting some nice results. The basic idea is that you have a length of pipe with hole drilled along the top. The ends are sealed, at one end there is a speaker and at the other end there is a gas source. Once the pipe is flooded with gas you light the vapour flowing out of the hole, crank some tunes into the speaker and stand back. The speaker creates waves of sound pressure through the length of the tube, and these variations in pressure cause the flow of gas through each hole to vary... resulting in a visualisation of the sound wave painted in flames. Of course, pinching pennies while working with pyrotechnics is generally a very bad idea - medical bills cost a heckuva lot more than proper equipment! Ahem … that being said, check out the project page for more details. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Robot Fest 2009, April 25, Linthicum, MD Some of my Dorkbot DC cohort put on an event each year that should quicken the hearts of cogheads everyhere: Robot Fest, held at the National Electronics Museum in Linthicum, MD. Lithium-where? Linthicum, Linthicum Heights, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Now in its 9th year, the Fest offers hands-on workshops, demonstrations, displays of robots from TV and film, and lots of bots and bot builders to inspire and inform. Robot Fest 2009 Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Every possible 4-bit 32 sample waveform … eventually Recently, Sebastian of the Little-Scale blog has been conducting some interesting experiments in sound synthesis with Max/MSP. The above is the output of a patch designed to playback all 4-bit 32 sample waveform conceivable - There are 16 ^ 32 possibilities. The patch plays 100 different waveforms for every second, at a constant frequency of 440 Hz. At this rate it will take 1,079,028,307,100,000,000,000,000,000 centuries to complete. He also wrote a noise-generator patch based on the LFSR pseudorandom number algorithm - numbers R fun! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Working on a DIY solar project? The folks at Voltaic, purveyors of fine sun-powered products, are looking for a few good DIY solar projects to show on their website. They're offering a deal: send them details of a project you're developing, be willing to show the results on the site, and they'll sell you the components at wholesale. Nice. See their DIY Solar page for more info... Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Experimental tongue music Hye Yeon Nam shares this demo of a music controller made for mouths - The Tongue Music system is an experimental instrument using the tongue, rather than the hand, to generate sounds. There is one person performing in front of projector, which displays an abstract video image consisting of hundreds of dots. The performer controls the mouse with his tongue to simultaneously manipulate the video images (the color and size of dots are changed along with music), the piano sound, as well as the presence or absence of a beat. Interesting idea, but it's a bit unclear how the control is operating. I suppose I was expecting audio that reflected this actual movement of the tongue, with all it's characteristic jerkiness and such. Whatever the technique may be - it makes for some cool headgear. [via Synthtopia] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • iPhone garage door opener MAKE subscriber Rakesh Agrawal fashioned a garage door opener on his iPhone using some X10 gear and the X10 Commander app for iPhone. Using my iPhone as a garage door opener Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in iPhone | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Edit Gmail filters with XML Gmail added a filter import/export feature recently that allows you to save and load filter data from XML. The cool thing about this is that it allows you to create and manage a whole heap of filters in text format and then import them all at once. Matt Thommes explains the procedure: Here is the XML structure for a new filter item: Here we are setting up a filter to capture incoming email from joe@site.com, and applying a label of "Web." Just like the Gmail process of setting up new filters, you can apply as many labels as you want, as well as other directives, such as sending directly to Trash: Check Matt's blog entry and the Gmail Labs discussion forum for more examples on how to use this. Maintaining Gmail filters with XML New in Labs: Filter import/export Filter Import/Export Discussion Forum Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Make your own trash bag holder Sean Ragan made this trash bag holder using PVC pipe, ENT conduit, and come ball chain clips to hold the bag in place. Beats the SkyMall version any day! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • More Recent Articles Flashback: Easy Backyard Graywater System CRAFT sale in the Maker Shed Photographing LEDs Mark's Clubhouse Strummer In the Maker Shed: Deluxe breadboard jumper wires

---

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