Here come the open source culture = piracy articles... from CNN.
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Alexie (novelist and poet Sherman Alexie) added. "It terrifies me."
It's more terrifying when someone groups open source with piracy. In my experience, as an artist at times and helping to run an electronics company, open source and open source hardware actually give the maker more control and more artistic ownership.
Need to cut tiny parts, and don't have access to a commercial wafer dicing machine? So did amateur radio enthusiast Tony, who needed to cut small pieces of 50 ohm microstrip lines for a 47 GHz radio he is constructing. His solution was to build a homebrew diamond wafer saw, using a diamond wheel from ebay, the bearings from a hard drive, and some custom electronics.
We covered Tony's saw back in July, when he put out the first part of his tutorial. Flash forward six months, and he completed a four part (1234) tutorial documenting the project. Well done, and excellent writeup!
Last month we profiled Twin Cities Maker, a maker collective that just rented a small warehouse for use as a communal workshop. One of the clauses of the lease was that they were allowed to rent only part of the warehouse, but if someone came by who wanted to rent the entire space, Twin Cities Maker would be out on the street. Well, guess what happened? They have to lease the entire space or lose it, but that means recruiting a lot more members in a short amount of time.
Here's what we need from you: we need 31 more of you to pay your $50 in dues for the month of January by this Wednesday. Pretty simple, right? Some of you have paid your dues already, and for that we thank you. Others of you intended to pay at our meeting last week, but were stymied by a technical fault, and for that we apologize. But, the long and short of it is we need to KNOW how many people we can expect to pay dues this month, and next month, and the month after that.
If we can't get this member support now, this venture stands a good chance of failing. If you want to see a hackerspace open in the Twin Cities, now is the time to step up and make it happen. We need YOU.
This Wednesday at 7pm, TCM will be having an electronics salvage & share event at the hackerspace. Not sure if you want to join? Show up with a screwdriver and an old printer and make some friends! See Mike's post for more information.
Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643 (died March 31, 1727). While this astoundingly-talented English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and natural philosopher is clearly one of the most influential scientists in human history, most of what's generally known about him is more iconic/symbolic than real (think: countless Saturday morning cartoon depictions of apples falling on heads). In fact, Newton was an extraordinarily complex person with many interests beyond science and Enlightenment philosophy. As readers of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle are well aware, later in life, he became Master of the Royal Mint, and initiated a complete recoining of the nation's currency.
As much as William Blake and others wanted to make him into a poster child for scientific reason and the death of the imagination/magic/spirit (what Blake dubbed "Newton's sleep"), Newton was deeply religious (though, like Blake, unorthodoxly so) and actually wrote more about alchemy and religion than he did about the sciences. Ironically, upon his death, large amounts of mercury were found in his system, likely thanks to his years of alchemical practice. Many people use this fact as an explanation for some of his more eccentric views and behaviors later in life.
Make: Electronics enjoyed some tremendous holiday sales. We're thrilled by the reaction it's gotten so far. It's currently the No. 1 bestseller in three Amazon categories: Circuits, Robotics, and Robotics and Automation, and #4 in the main Electronics category. It got written up on Boing Boing, Wired's GeekDad, and elsewhere, and the Shed ended up selling out of the Make: Electronics Deluxe Toolkit (more on the way!) as a result. We've also been getting enthusiastic email from buyers of the book. Like our Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, it seems to particularly be a hit with homeschoolers who plan on using it in their curriculum.
But the praise we, especially the book's author, Charles Platt, were most giddy about came from Hans Camenzind, the inventor of the 555 timer IC. Charles sent him a copy of the book and he wrote back to say how much he enjoyed it:
"I am very impressed by your writing style and the quality of presentation. This is teaching at its best!"
Nice! As you can imagine, we'll be using this in future promotions for the book and on the cover of the reprint. Mr. Camenzind was happy to grant permission. Congrats to Charles!
BTW: A project from the book, on building a 555-based reaction timer, will be a featured project in the forthcoming MAKE, Volume 21.
In the Maker Shed: Make: Electronics Our Price: $34.99 Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun and experiential way? Start working on some excellent projects as soon as you crack open this unique, hands-on book. Build the circuits first, then learn the theory behind them! With Make: Electronics, you'll learn all of the basic components and important principles through a series of "learn by discovery" experiments. And you don't need to know a thing about electricity to get started.
SQNewton didn't just crack open a bluetooth headset and cram it into a cool retro handset casing; he developed his own hardware to produce a fully-functional, self-contained phone that uses the Ericofon's original rotary dial, gives dial and busy tones, mimics the original Ericofon ringer, and has voice-recognition dialing to top it off. [via Hack a Day]
This guitar pick machine showed up on the site There, I Fixed It. We weren't able to figure out where it is located or who made it, however we do know that it accepts all credit cards. [via neatorama]
Update: The machine appears to be located at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto, CA. They have more photos of it on their website. (Thanks, J!)
At The Math Museum, we are interested in making cool mathematical ideas accessible and tactile. With a good 3D printing machine, you can make beautiful fractal polyhedra clusters like the one below. This nylon model consists of twelve groups of twelve small stellated dodecahedra. Each group is arranged like an icosahedron and the whole is an icosahedron of icosahedra.
It is beautiful to turn this in your hand and see its patterns and structures from all angles. If you have access to a 3D printer and want to make your own copy, you can download the STL file from here.
This delicate pink sculpture illustrates the structure of just one subcluster from the above, but here, each element is a great icosahedron, where above the elements are small dodecahedra.
Five lucky survey participants will win $50 Maker Shed gift certificates (don't forget to enter your contact info so we can notify you if you win)! This survey will help shape Make: Online in 2010, so tell us what you think!
Yesterday, engineer Takuo Toda, president of the Japan origami aeroplane association, set a world flight record for a traditional-origami paper plane of 26.1 seconds. He's had longer flights, but they involved the use of scissors, tape, or other non-traditional materials. [via Neatorama]
Welcome to GML week @fffffat! Graffiti Markup Language (GML) is a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags. Gestural graffiti motion data of a tag created in GML-supported software is saved as a text file with a ".GML" extension…. a new digital standard for tomorrow's vandals.
FAT members have been hard at work standardizing various open source graffiti-related software packages, including Graffiti Analysis, Laser Tag and EyeWriter to be GML compliant.
Please stay tuned to FAT all this week as we publish new GML related projects each day. There will be multiple new free software releases, open data repositories, iphone apps, robots, guest bloggers and more. GML week is now officially open for business.
Skatronix & Olegtron's experimental sound cycle goes for a test ride through the streets of Turku, Finland running almost entirely off of pedal-power -
Some example sound and light projects powered with one dynamo. Our mobile workshop where you can build such projects and much more will circulate Turku city in the summer 2010.
Garrett Mace, aka Macetech, built this LED NYE ball, using his own Macetech LED controller and Arduino shield kits (and a Seeduino). He writes:
I used six Satellite Modules (high power RGB LED arrays), six ShiftBars (three channel LED controllers), a Seeeduino, and a ShiftBrite Shield to build a New Year's ball for our own mini Times Square event. The ball was a "sparkleball" made of about 120 16oz plastic cups hot-glued together. We threw a rope over a branch and lowered it at midnight...it lit up the whole yard!
Matthias' Lego domino row building machine takes the tedium out of laying out lengthy domino runs - and looks pretty smooth doing it. A motor from an old tape deck keeps the little guy moving forward and equally spacing each handmade wooden piece -
The key idea that makes the machine work is that the magazine is just a row of dominoes dragged along the table. This avoids the problem of having to somehow lower the dominoes onto the table. My first unsuccessful attempts back in 1985 involved dropping the dominoes out of the magazine onto the table. But the impact of dropping the dominoes would often cause them to tip over, with ruinous consequences.
Project pics and much more of his process can be located over at WoodGears. [Thanks, Mark!]
Action_owl (awes name!) set up a versatile intrusion detection system using Arduino + Processing -
This instructable will show you how to construct a laser tripwire that can twitter and grab an image from a webcam, as well as execute any command you can put in a bash script. This instructable is actually quite simple and is even suitable as a beginner arduino project. It requires a GNU/linux (or possibly Mac) operating system with the arduino IDE and Processing IDE working properly.
Sounds like a good way to keep an eye on your pad while out and about - check out the full project deets here.
Flickr user j_tenkely wanted to do his own powder coating, so he bought a commercial powder-gun and built a custom oven in his garage. He says, "[t]he entire oven cost about $250, but when it runs about $150 to do a bike frame & fork, it's easy to break-even." [via Hack a Day]
With the new LEGO Photo iPhone app you can convert snapshots into a LEGO photo mosaic. Just take a picture, press a button, and watch the app build an image out of LEGO. Use the resulting image on your favorite social networking site or as a guide for your own layout. [via techchee]
Australian Flickr user Andrew converted a regular flash into a beauty dish by adding a 7" stainless steel dish, a lid from a food tin, a "4n20 Pies giveaway stubby holder" and some pieces of Mechano.
Artist, inventor, and longtime author Rodney Frost is known for wacky and whimsical woodworking books that encourage readers to experiment. With his newest book, Creative Kinetics, Making Mechanical Marvels in Wood, he provides an introduction to the world of kinetic art. Far from a routine woodworking book, Creative Kinetics will inspire even the least craft-minded reader to pick up some scissors and turn a tuna can into a propeller, or use scrap cardboard to make an animated jumping-jack.
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