My former employer who does audio tours is emptying out their warehouse and is throwing out a couple hundred walkmans. They are already in a dumpster by their office and will probably be picked up sometime tomorrow. I send you this information in the hopes you know someone close to Marin (Sausalito) who might have interest enough to dig them out and save them from the landfill for mello-tronic projects and the like.
They're located out at Fort Cronkhite in the Marin Headlands.
Congratulations to the Ann Arbor Mini Maker team for a successful Faire! Over 1100 attendees blew smoke rings, rode the worlds largest (claimed) bristlebot, piloted robots, made music, silk-screened t-shirts and had a great time! Missed it? Be sure to check out the Flickr pool, or read the excellent writeup at the Ann Arbor Chronicle!
These days, companies are losing hard drives and other storage media packed with tons of recoverable data. Well, here's one way to keep that from happening: nuke 'em. Concord, NC maker Brian Little and some friends stacked up hard drives recovered from Davidson College machines and melted them with thermite. Brian described the project:
Four guys and one intrepid GF use roughly 40lbs of thermite to incinerate (most of) a stack of used hard drives. The results weren't quite what we hoped for in terms of destruction, but for sheer pyrotechnic effect, a big bucket o' thermite is hard to beat.
Note: Thermite "recipes" are available online for the googling. I'm lazy, and also not stupid, so I just bought mine. Again, Google is your pal here. Also note: Thermite is relatively dangerous. It is intensely energetic and burns out around 2500°F. Once it starts burning, it is going to finish, and will laugh wickedly at your pitiful attempts to extinguish it. I can play with it because I am an adult with insurance and a healthy sense of self-preservation. If you elect to play with this stuff and burn down your parents' home, land yourself in the hospital with third-degree burns or incinerate your grandmother's car, that's your own lookout. I'm not responsible for you.
There's plenty of fun to be had with ham radio even if you don't have a license. You can get a handheld radio to listen in on what's going on while you are out and about or get a base station/desktop radio. You can listen to activities on local repeaters. Repeaters allow ham radio operators to talk locally, they send a signal to a repeater and it transmits the signal to other radios in the area. You can listen in to their conversations or to Nets, regular ham meet us on repeaters that discuss a certain topic. A larger desktop radio with a longer antenna will also be able to receive amateur HF communications sent directly from ham radios around the world, you can listen to conversations from places like Germany, Kazakhstan, or Japan.
1. Local repeaters can be found by location at this website, tune the frequency of your radio to the output. Even though the repeater is on, it might not be in use meaning that you might not hear anything. You can program several frequencies into your radio, then tune the radio to the different frequencies until you catch a conversation.
2. You can find a schedule of nets and their frequencies on the ARRL website which lists all nets registered with the ARRL. If you have a handheld, select "local nets" and select 2m or 70 cm for the frequency. You will find nets discussing topics ranging from emergency safety (ARES, RACES) to women in ham radio (YL).
3. If your radio can receive HF (high frequency) communications, you can tune around to different stations to listen in. Or you can check DX clusters online which spot operators from rare locations and post their frequency. The call signs of operators from rare locations are listed under "dx". You can mouse-over the call sign to see where the operator is located.
When you are listening in on ham radio, chances are you will hear a lot codes such as 73, cq, qsl, these are abbreviations that were originally used in Morse code and are now used when speaking. You can find a list of them here.
Most ham radios can tune in to frequencies that aren't on the ham bands. At the airport you can listen to air traffic control. In the subway, you can listen to the local transit station and hear what is going on behind the scenes. A lot of handheld radios are waterproof so at the beach you can listen to lifeguard stations or the coast guard. You can listen to Nascar raceways and speedways, zoos, police stations, fire stations, short wave radio, subway and public transportation radios, space shuttle reentry, weather, etc.. All you need is a radio and a guide to the frequencies to tune in to.
2. Airport frequencies Type in the airport code (i.e. JFK) and learn the frequencies for control tower, approaching flights, departing flights, pre-taxi clearance, etc.
5. Space shuttle frequencies are only transmitted locally. But you can find retransmissions on your local frequencies toward the bottom on the page.
A handheld radio is a really fun thing to bring out with friends to a bar or party. There's always something interesting happening on the radio sure to spur conversation and help you meet new friends. Just program some frequencies into your radio and you will be all set to go. I've found that the police and fire station radios are most exciting to listen to. You can bring earphones and a splitter if you are going to a quieter place like a coffee shop where you might disturb the other patrons.
Mike Daugherty asked his 11-year-old son Logan what he wanted for his birthday. The boy said, "I want a cannon." Dad didn't scoff at Logan's request by saying, "How about a hippopotamus instead," as a Christmas song from another era lamented. No, Daugherty is not that kind of guy. He granted his son's wish and built him a Civil War-era cannon not a model, the real deal. The howitzer fires and rivals anything seen at Civil War reenactments across the country. He said it took him about two weeks to build and is worth about $6,000. "It looks like something right out of the battle at Gettysburg," Daugherty said. The cast iron and steel 4-inch gun barrel is 36 inches long. It is mounted on a wooden gun carriage with two 36- inch diameter wheels. The cannon weighs about 700 pounds, so it is not something Logan will be able to carry to school in his backpack.
These tiny I-Swarm (Intelligent Small-World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation) robots are incredibly neat! They move by using a piezoelectric transducer to vibrate across a surface in a manner similar to a bristlebot, only controllable. Because they are vibrating at audible frequencies, they also produce pleasant sounds as they move about. Someone should choreograph a tiny performance for them! [via hizook]
An in-house fave here @ Make: Online, Rock Band 2 for Xbox360 will soon be opening up to independent developers à la iPhone's App Sore. Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music gives an in-depth look at the what it will take to make your own music playable on the upcoming Rock Band Network. The process will require a licensed copy of Reaper audio software ($60, easily worth it on its own), a membership in Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club ($100), plus of course an Xbox360 & copy of Rock Band 2. The Network is currently in closed beta, with a launch planned for October. More details over at CDM.
Back in March, Becky posted a link to a lampshade I made using this technique. Instructables user quixotiCfluX has posted a great tutorial showing the details of the process. He uses a cool trick with a staple remover to make sure all the tabs have exactly the same bend, which results in very uniform maille.
Creme DeMentia of GetLoFi shares the steps he took to turn a pair of common plastic maracas into piezo-powered electric maracas! Scroll down for details here.
Please join me in welcoming John Baichtal to Make: Online! Let him tell you a bit about himself:
I'm a nerd interested in electronics, games, building sets, art and design, toys, hacking and writing. You may have seen my posts on the GeekDad blog, where I've been a contributor for over two years. I reside in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota with my lovely wife and three kids.
You'll be seeing more from him this week, and if you can't get enough, you can also follow him on Twitter. Welcome, John!
Flickr member kc6qhp created this impressive enclosure for an Arduino Pro -
I made this housing for an Arduino Pro that will control my waveguide relay in my 47 GHz radio. This housing is made from 6061 billet aluminum. The cover is held on with a dozen 0-80 screws. There i a cutout for the programming connection and a filtered DC feedthrough. Later I will add other connectors for the servo and transmit/receive switch, etc.
David over at Boing-Boing spotted this jaw-dropping video of an experimental robot arm doing things that scare the bejeesus out of me. David writes:
Researchers from the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo presented this incredible video of a high-speed robotic hand at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The laboratory's Web site has many more videos related to this project, called Sensor Fusion. Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots
For my money, the most impressive stuff is around 2:22, near the end.
Wikitude Drive is an AR navigation system for the Android platform. Originally developed as a proof-of-concept, the app is a fully-functional navigation system that draws turn-by-turn directions over the live camera. [via AndroidGuys]
Using a couple computers, a PhidgetInterfaceKit with RelayBoard, and a bevy of client/server software, Matthias Wagler and friends from Intuity Media Lab built a Rube Goldberg XMPP messaging system to frob a light using an Andorid-powered mobile device. Check out this behind-the-scenes video detailing set-up.
A few weeks ago I made this get well gift for a good friend of mine, Gareth Branwyn. I took a few pictures, and a quick video, just to document it prior to shipping it off. I wasn't sure if I should blog it, but then I talked with Gareth today and he asked me to post it up on MAKE. So here it is! I hope you all like it as much as I liked making it.
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