Four wheel drive robot with dual h-bridges controlling four motors for differential steering. ATmega168 microcontroller running at 16mhz. Arduino shield compatible headers to allow for stackable shields and protoboards. Zigbee socket for wireless bootloading or USB for wired programming. Quadrature encoders on each side for dead reckoning.
Looking to extend the range and flexibility of his netbook, maker Larry Pesce from PaulDotCom modified his Asus EEE 4G Surf with an external RP-TNC antenna connector. His detailed instructions document the process of adding the connector and the last minute ingenuity that delivered a rather clean looking result.
At the beginning of April I was lucky enough to go to New York City to help Mark Frauenfelder, editor-in-chief of MAKE, prepare for his appearance on The Martha Stewart Show!
The show was taped on April 1st, and will finally air this coming Monday, May 18. You can see a quick preview by clicking here, and then clicking on Monday's show at the top.
On an insider's note, being at the studio and taping the show was fun and exciting. The amount of lights, cameras, tools, and other accoutrements was mind-boggling. All the staff were friendly and helpful and very, very competent at what they do.
Even when some of our projects were lost for several hours in transit, everyone was calm, cool, and collected. I, on the other hand, started to run down 20+ blocks, from Midtown to Chelsea, desperately trying to figure out where we were going to find a cigar box, an old VCR, an electric screwdriver, and some lumber at 6 p.m. on a Monday in Manhattan.
Dress rehearsal with the producer and Mark Frauenfelder; the teleprompter proudly displays the MAKE name!
But no need for alarm; the projects were found and worked great on camera, Mark did a fantastic job describing and demoing the projects, and then for the finale, he and Martha made little vibrating robots out of a candy tin, a paperclip, and a motor from a Dollar Store fan. The audience seemed to like it, the staff liked it, and Martha kept one afterward, so I'm guessing she liked it!
Don't forget to watch or DVR Monday's Martha show! Yay, Mark!
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MAKE subscriber Gregg Horton used a Thingamakit along with a hacked karaoke machine to create a rather large area of theremin-esque sound control. Cool - at around 2m30s in it does start working quite nicely! Check out more of Greg's projects on the Groovy Pancakes blog.
The lights illuminate the northwest campus areas around the dormitories and dining hall. The lights, provided by SolarOne® and Hadco, are powered by photovoltaic (PV) panels, making them completely independent of the electric grid. With their own solar power source, the light posts can easily be installed wherever light is needed, without expensive investments in trenching, cabling and repaving. "We now have a beautifully lit walkway students are using extensively, day and night" said Capt. Allen Hansen, who championed the alternative energy project and is Vice President of Operations at the school. The new lights replace an old assortment of low pressure sodium fixtures and overbearing flood lights, the combination of which left the campus spotty, dark and poorly lit. Instead of adding safety, the old lighting created isolated pools of glare between dark areas. With no underground power conduits, the easily installed PV-powered lights were readily and economically placed along walkways and around the dormitories, which previously had no site lighting....The softer, whiter directional LED lamps provide exceptional clarity and visibility on areas that require light, without sending stray light into areas that are best left dark. The result is an enhanced night time setting, with marked reduction in light pollution and energy usage.
In the United States, we generate most of our electricity by burning coal to heat water and use the resulting steam to turn a turbine which generates electricity. There are other sources of fuel in our energy portfolio, but most of it still comes from coal, the most carbon-rich fuel on the palette. We get some of our energy from other fossil fuels like natural gas and oil as well, and it's likely that we will not be able to continue withdrawing from our energy bank forever. Some people believe that we have or about to reach a peak in oil production, meaning that we have taken the easy stuff out of the ground and are faced with the unpleasant and difficult task of chasing the last drop. Whatever your reasons for wanting to see us reduce our dependence on non-renewable foreign sources of energy, it makes a lot of sense for us makers to look at solar energy. Fortunately, the sun still shines on the ground, where its energy can be harvested, used and stored.
Solar Energy is a great way to get us started on the road to becoming a Renewable Energy Island and help us achieve greater energy independence. Generating power and making hot water on island homes and businesses reduces our contribution to Climate Change, particularly when combined with energy efficiency efforts. Energy generated locally is more efficient because there is less transmission loss.
Editor's Note: This post is part of a series of posts sponsored by GE. GE had nothing to do with the content of the article and no control over Make: Online editorial. -Gareth
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The goal was to make a light box for my students to use that didn't cost me an arm and a leg. Went to the second-hand store and found a florescent light... ($4.99 with 50% off) then noticed a suitcase/briefcase ($3.99 with 50% off). I got them both and started thinking of ways to put them together.
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Make some crazy sounds from a teensy-tiny musical instrument. Thanks go to Brian McNamara for the original article in MAKE, Volume 15. View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects you can do over the weekend.
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Flickr member jmsaltzman coded some extra functionality into a basic momentary pushbutton -
To get more functionality out of a single button and to add a "hidden" mode, I extended button debouncing logic to allow for click as well as press+hold. The green LED toggles when the button is clicked, and the red LED toggles on press and hold. In this example, the hold time is 2 sec.
Of course this technique comes in very handy when your project is running low on available pins. Arduino compatible code is available in the comments of his blog entry.
We've seen some projects featuring how to draw with light using your camera's exposure settings, but nothing compares to this. This group goes by the name of Light Art Performance Photography and they use lasers, LEDs, illuminated body suits, sparklers and just about anything else which emits light to construct these incredible works of art.
The XGS PIC 16-Bit Development System is the ultimate fusion of art and science. Developed to be a very competitive entry/midrange development kit for Microchip's new 16-Bit PIC24 processor with 256K FLASH, 16K SRAM, and running at over 40 MIPs. The kit was designed with the philosophy that you don't want to waste time trying to figure things out. This kit takes you step by step, saving you time, so you can learn quickly and have fun doing it!
... well it's certainly some sort of touch-sensitive plantlife with audio feedback. The above seen glimpses were recorded at the Theremin Sensors Orchestra workshop in Munich where capacitive sensors are used with non-traditional objects and later incorporated into group performance. [via Create Digital Music]
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Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to becky@makezine.com or drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!
YMCA summer camp director Don Jennings writes in:
Summer camp runs on signals - bells, bugles, claxons, etc. And though the old-timers grumble, the days of folks pulling a rope, blowing a horn or turning a crank are mostly gone. Camp signals have gone digital, and therein lies the challenge.
Our current system for playing bugle calls is Rube Goldbergian in the extreme. I won't even attempt to describe it except to say it involves an answering machine tape, a PA system, bullhorns, and an entire software suite of home management software. All of this to run 20 seconds of bugle, 8 times each day. It's an embarassment of Byzantine seat-of-the-pants hackery that only works part of the time.
In my 50% geek heart I know there must be an elegant, inexpensive way to play digital bugle calls at specific times of the day, for discrete durations. There just *has* to be. And so my appeal to your readers.
Can you or your communities offer any advice? A solution would garner the enthusiastic gratitude of dozens of summer camp communities.
The camp runs on Windows XP, and a solution would have to be comfortable on that platform. Do you have any ideas?
There are tons of automation programs out there. Mac OS X has Automator which works with AppleScript, you can make cron jobs on a Linux server, but I'm going to suggest you use Windows Task Scheduler for your situation. It's free, already on your camp's Windows XP machines, and should be relatively easy to set up. That said, I'm sure there are free utilities out there you could download to do this as well, but I'm not a frequent enough Windows user to be able to suggest any. If any readers know of something that would work , please post it in the comments!
My main squeeze, Alex Schlegel, helped me figure this one out for you. You can program the Task Scheduler to play a sound file however often you want throughout the day, every day, using Windows Media Player (the older version, mplayer2.exe, because the newer wmplayer.exe doesn't respond to the /close command line argument). You can schedule a task to, at regular intervals, open the media player, play the sound, then close. This does not have to be a dedicated machine, but you'll have the sound hooked up to the PA system, so whatever computer you use should have its user interface sounds (system notifications, etc.) turned off.
You can use anyone of the Windows Task Manager tutorials available online to get yourself acquainted with the program, but since you're 50% geek I'm sure you can play it by ear. Access it through your control panel, and create a new task. Select that you want it to occur daily, with a start time when you want the first call to happen. Then hit "Advanced" to repeat the task throughout the day, with a finish time when the last sound will happen. Alex took a few screenshots to help out.
Once you create a new task, it will open a wizard that will make you pick a program to run from a list (at this point it doesn't really matter what program you pick, but to be on the safe side you might browse to "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe"), and select how often you want it to occur (once per day in your case), but on the last page there's a checkbox that says "Open advanced properties for this task when i click Finish." This will open the screen that allows you to input the command line text to play the audio file:
"C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe" /play /close C:\Windows\Media\tada.wav
Replace the path to "tada.wav" with whatever bugle sound you want (a 20 second mp3, for example). If you want the sound to play at non-regular intervals, you'll have to create a task for each bell throughout the day. Once you get it up and running, though, you should hardly have to touch it.
The photo at the top is the "time for thought" area at the summer camp I attended as a child (Windham Tolland 4H in Pomfret, CT), taken by my camp buddy Natalie Carter.
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This webcast will focus on the last two chapters of iPhone Hacks, involving hardware and software development. We'll focus on some of the hardware and software development you can do without having to go through the app store, for personal or jailbreak community release. You'll learn various ways to get hardware connected to the iPhone, without having to go through the 3.0 approval process. We'll include several specific hacks on how to connect keyboards and serial devices to the phone.
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