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MAKE Magazine In This Issue... Arduino MEGA video featuring Tom Igoe Flashback: Solar Xylophone Trashbag whales Pay phone charm Lights made from water bottles Set TiVos on MAKE (and ABC's Nightline) TONIGHT! Print your own Moleskine pages Wired reports on the rise of the hackerspace Safe-T-Flow demo, part deux Modding the DS-1 distortion for extra oomf Jeff Duntemann's shop tips The Fuzz box documentary Dancebot USB (think: DIY Keepon), new for Trossen Upgrade Twitter to 141 characters How bi-metallic coins are made More Recent Articles Arduino MEGA video featuring Tom Igoe I stopped by Eyebeam in NYC on Tuesday to chat with Tom Igoe about the new Arduino MEGA and few other projects that he is working on. I took a quick video and some pictures of the new board to share with our readers. If you don't already know, Tom is the Area head for physical computing classes at ITP. He also wrote two of my favorite books, Making Things Talk and Physical Computing (with Dan O'Sullivan). Did I mention he is also part of the Arduino team? Now that's cool. Subscribe to the MAKE podcast | Download for iTunes Eyebeam is a really cool space. I haven't been there before, but I have heard a lot about it. Hopefully I can check it out more in the future. It looks like a great place to be creative. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Flashback: Solar Xylophone With spring in full swing and the sun shining longer every day, we've got solar on the mind. A great summertime project is a flashback from MAKE Volume 12: the Solar Xylophone! How does it work? A regular xylophone fits inside a solar-powered player box that holds a mallet over each of its 8 chime tubes. Each mallet is powered by a system that includes a solar cell, a simple Solarengine circuit, and a small motor. The systems work in parallel: the brighter the sunshine on each panel, the more frequently its corresponding tube will be struck. Now you can listen to sol music by day and be lulled to sleep by the gentle sound of your hard drive wind chime (also in Volume 12) at night: Here's the Solar Xylophone in our Digital Edition for you to scope and build. And for plenty more where that came from, pick up a hard copy of Volume 12 in the Maker Shed. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Trashbag whales You've heard of balloon animals. How about trashbag whales? Spotted on our MAKE Flickr pool. Bertrand, air whale. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Pay phone charm Just in time for every prankster's favorite holiday, Alex Schlegel made these chained up gems attached to this payphone, much like a giant Asian schoolgirl's cell phone charm: I designed the faceted gems in Solidworks, printed out templates for each face using images I made in MATLAB, cut out each face from 18g. mild steel sheet on a hydraulic shear, brazed all the pieces together with brass brazing rod and an oxyacetylene torch, cleaned up the edges with a 4" grinder, and then brazed them together with chain. I could only find zinc-plated chain so I burned off all the plating with the torch, which is probably not too advisable considering zinc fumes are bad and can give one something called "zinc flu". Finally I rusted the whole getup with a ferric nitrate solution I prepared by dissolving steel wool in nitric acid. I secured the charm to the pay phone with a padlock for safekeeping. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Culture jamming | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Lights made from water bottles Talk about your village ingenuity. (And yes, clearly, it's only for indoor lighting during the day). Use a 2-Liter Bottle as a 50 Watt Light Bulb lightbulb hack Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Set TiVos on MAKE (and ABC's Nightline) TONIGHT! If all goes according to plan (and there are no breaking stories to bump it), ABC's Nightline is running a segment tonight on MAKE and the maker movement. They taped a piece with Mark Frauenfelder and Mister Jalopy. There may be scenes from Maker Faire and Make: television as well. The show broadcasts at 8:35pm Pacific,11:35pm Eastern. Please help us spread the word! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Print your own Moleskine pages Moleskine is offering a new service where they let you print whatever you want on the pages of one of their notebooks. Great for keeping your address book handy without re-writing it every time you get a new notebook. Via Core77. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Paper Crafts | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Wired reports on the rise of the hackerspace Wired posted a nice article detailing the proliferation of hackerspaces in the US, even mentioning our fair organization in the process - While many movements begin in obscurity, hackers are unanimous about the birth of U.S. hacker spaces: August, 2007 when U.S. hackers Bre Pettis, Nicholas Farr, Mitch Altman and others visited Germany on a geeky field trip called Hackers on a Plane. German and Austrian hackers have been organizing into hacker collectives for years, including Metalab in Vienna, c-base in Berlin and the Chaos Computer Club in Hannover, Germany. Hackers on a Plane was a delegation of American hackers who visited the Chaos Communications Camp — "Burning Man for hackers," says Metalab founder Paul "Enki" Boehm — and their trip included a tour of these hacker spaces. They were immediately inspired, Altman says. On returning to the United States, Pettis quickly recruited others to the idea and set up NYC Resistor in New York, while Farr instigated a hacker space called HacDC in Washington, D.C. Both were open by late 2007. Noisebridge followed some months later, opening its doors in fall 2008. […] It couldn't have happened at a better time. Make magazine, which started in January, 2005, had found an eager audience of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. (The magazine's circulation now numbers 125,000.) Projects involving complex circuitry and microcontrollers were easier than ever for nonexperts to undertake, thanks to open source platforms like Arduino and the easy availability of how-to guides on the internet. As Hackerspaces.org reports of another 27 spaces are currently being planned, we're likely to see/hear more about our growing hacker communities in the press. Check out the full article on Wired's blog. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Safe-T-Flow demo, part deux In this video, Limor of Adafruit Industries shows how she laser-cuts masks for PCBs for easier application of solder paste (think: silk-screen inking) and then uses her reflow robo-skillet, controlled by her new Safe-T-Flow controller, to solder an SMT chip onto one of her Boarduino clone kits. Making the Safe-T-Flow part II - Using it! An arduino controlled robotic skillet for SMT More: Safe-T-Flow, controlling a hot plate for solder reflow HOW TO - SMD soldering (Surface mount devices) Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Modding the DS-1 distortion for extra oomf The Boss DS-1 is a common and in many ways classic guitar effects pedal, but surprisingly enough, it just doesn't sound very good. Because of this, you're likely to find used DS-1s for cheap. Instructable author James Haskin wrote up a step-by-step on how to implement the well-known Keeley Seeing Eye and Ultra mods to enhance the lackluster sound - Every guitarist at some point has at least tried Boss's DS-1 distortion pedal. Most People are immediately disappointed. This over hyped pedal sounds really thin with no punch. Sales people at guitar center will say something like its a "great beginner distortion pedal". Its been my experience that most of the people that work at guitar center are useless. So, always research and get information from multiple sources. The DS-1 is actually used by many artists including Joe Satriani, Kurt Cobain, John Petrucci, and Steve Vai to name a few, BUT most of the big artists don't use the stock one. Why? Cuz it sucks! The good news is this pedal is simple enough to modify!! In this instructable I will show you step by step, with lots of pictures, how to perform Robert Keeley's DS-ULTRA Mod. While not the simplest of mods, the process involves replacing 3 resistors, 4 caps, and an LED - the resulting improvements seem quite worthwhile for pursuers of "ultimate tone". Check out the instructable for all the deets. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Jeff Duntemann's shop tips In response to my Show us your shop! piece (which is a contest, BTW), Jeff Duntemann posted a link to an amazing article filled with great tips on setting up a shop. One of the smartest articles I've seen on the subject. Below is an excerpt about power outlets, followed by a picture of a shelf with cut milk cartoon bins. What a great idea! You Can't Have Too Many Electric Outlets If you're going to work in electronics, you're going to need electricity. Duhh. Actually, you're going to have a whole wall full of gadgets, all of which need their own place at the electron trough. On my bench I have (at last count) thirty-three separate devices with 110V cords. Fortunately, I don't need all of them on at once--and if I did, I'd need fifty amp service, which I don't have in that part of the house. What I do have is dedicated 30 amp service to a 16-foot-long "plugmold" strip on the wall just above the benchtop. The plugmold has its own breaker in the service box, and an outlet every twelve inches, for a total of fifteen outlets. Everything that I use regularly is plugged into the plugmold: Soldering station, oscilloscope, signal generator, high-voltage DC supply, 12V DC supply, audio generator, frequency counter, drill press, belt sander, and Dremel tool. My ham station is housed on a separate Melamine particle board shelf unit that itself has two short plugmolds, one for each shelf. The whole station is plugged into one outlet on the master plugmold. This works well because the way I operate, I rarely have more than one radio turned on at a time, except for the modern 2M mobile, which is on squelch most of the time and draws very little power. I deliberately did not put a plugmold on the wall behind my short bench, because it has a sink and I did not intend to use it for electrical work. There are outlets on the wall, but they are all GFI equipped, as they must be to pass code. I didn't put 220V in the shop, because I really don't use anything big enough to require it down there. I have 220V in the garage for my lathe, and that's the only thing I've ever had that needs that kind of power. If you're a computer guy designing a shop, consider putting network cabling in, at least so that you can have a small computer or laptop somewhere to look things up on the Web when you need them. I arranged it so that the terminus of all the CAT5E running throuough the house is in the shop, along with my cable modem. I built a Melamine board shelf to hold cable modem, router, and a spare computer, as well as my homebrew vacuum-tube stereo amplifier. Jeff Duntemann's Shop Tips Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toolbox | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • The Fuzz box documentary An enjoyble clip from Fuzz: The Sound that Revolutionized the World where Beck bassist Jason Meldal-Johnsen extolls the virtues of sonic chaos intercut with critics of the circuit bent sound. The documentary features countless interviews with boutique pedal makers that started as humble DIY-ers. The above clip also features a peek into the casual labs of Brooklyn stompbox crafters Death by Audio who share details on their production process. I had a chance to visit their Williamsburg HQ a while back and it's plain to see they love what they do. [via Synthtopia] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in How it's made | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Dancebot USB (think: DIY Keepon), new for Trossen When Keepon first debuted, bouncing along to Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On", the tech community went nuts! The simple, cute external appearance of this robot and it's natural ability to bop along with music was an instant hit on Youtube. Unfortunately, beneath that elastic yellow skin was well over $20,000 worth of cutting edge robotic technology, putting this awesome robot out of reach of its fans. We saw this as a problem and answered the call to unite Keepon and it's millions of fans globally! Trossen Robotics established a partnership with Keepon creator Hideki Kozima and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) to develop an affordable household version that captured the feeling and emotion of the original. After many months of painstaking R&D, Trossen Robotics is proud to announce the Dancebot USB! Once only available to universities as a high end social development research robot, we are now offering the affordable yet equally groovy Dancebot USB. This easy to build kit only takes minutes to put together, another minute to put on the Spoon song of your choice, and within seconds your Dancebot USB will be dancing along to the beat. Be the envy of your coworkers with this ultimate desktop gadget! Show off to your friends, amaze your family, and impress your employer! Dancebot USB Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • Upgrade Twitter to 141 characters It's a common problem we've all faced. Sometimes 140 just isn't enough. What do you do when your carefully crafted Tweet is too profound to fit in the infernal 140 character limit? What if nothing short of 141 characters will do? You upgrade your browser to enable advanced Twitter compression, that's what. var trep = [[ "^", "^ " ], [ "with the ", "^wt " ],[ "that the ", "^tt " ],[ "check out ", "^co " ],[ "in the ", "^nth " ],[ "of the ", "^ot " ], [ "at the ", "^at "], [ "isn't ", "^int " ], [ "cool ", "^c " ], [ "neat ", "^nt " ],[ "when ", "^w " ],[ "with ", "^wi " ], [ "that ", "^h " ], [ "this ", "^s " ], [ "the ", "^e " ], [ "day ", "^d " ], [ "are ", "^r " ], [ "and ", "^n " ] ]; function tcomp( input ) {    var temp = input;    for ( var x=0; x    {      temp = temp.replace( new RegExp( trep[x][0].replace(/\^/g,"\\^").replace(/\'/g,"\\'"), "g" ), trep[x][1] );    }    return temp; } function tdecomp( input ) {    var temp = input;    for ( var x=trep.length-1; x>=0; x-- )    {      temp = temp.replace( new RegExp(trep[x][1].replace(/\^/g,"\\^").replace(/\'/g,"\\'"), "g"), trep[x][0] );    }    return temp; } The tcomp and tdecomp functions will transform your Tweet into a highly compressed, but mostly human readable format. It involves a lot of super secret mathematics that I'm not allowed to talk about, but suffice it to say that you can save a whole character or two in most Tweeting scenarios. The best part is that dynamic power carrot coding mechanisms ensure that you'll look good in the process. Trust me. Below are two bookmarklets. Don't click on those here - instead, drag them to your bookmarks bar. In Twitter, type your slightly too-long message and then run the compress status bookmarklet to compress the input field. If you see other people posting compressed messages, either translate in your head, or click the decompress feed bookmarklet to decompress the entire contents of the stream you are viewing. Bookmarklet: compress status Bookmarklet: decompress feed Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • How bi-metallic coins are made Core77 has a neat walkthough of the process required to make bi-metallic coins; how interesting! I agree with the author, I think the mistakes are possibly even more attractive than the originals! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in How it's made | Digg this! • Email to a friend • Related • • More Recent Articles MAKE classified ads and Maker Shed give-aways Giant flame-throwing robo-babies Happy Birthday, Crustaceous Bionaut! Makers birthdays: Robert Bunsen Wire scorpions

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