There was (is) a cupcake fad going around, I'm not really a cupcake person, but I really like all of these... The maker writes -
Every year, we throw a big, game party to ring in the new year. This year (2010) is our house's 100-year birthday, so we celebrated with cupcakes... ...and the cupcakes were a game. Here they are in random order - see how many you can guess! Mouse over the question mark to reveal the answer.
See how many you can guess and post in the comments!
Today I checked in with Make: Labs to see what our faithful interns are working on, and Kris Magri showed me the setup pictured above. A while back she was given a Tomy i-Sobot and tasked with hacking it. The thing she liked least about the i-Sobot is how complicated and clunky the remote control is, namely the fact that the action button sequences are long and not easy to remember.
Given that the Gameboy Advance SP can be found on eBay starting at $20, has a great little screen and buttons, and the link cable connection is actually a serial port, she started working on programming it. Kris built onto an existing program (thanks, Avelino Herrera Morales), hooked 4 LEDs to the port, and got the lights to blink. The next step will be to hook it up to the XBee wireless module, hook another onto the i-Sobot, and get to programming. She intends to make graphics to illustrate the i-Sobots movements. Here's a quick video of her current setup in action:
You can blame it on Chris Anderson's book Free. After reading his book, I started kicking around the idea of what we can do that's 'free'. Sure, we have free bits (open-source hardware designs, available code, etc.), but we don't have free physical widgets. Now combine that with our love of creating shear havoc (AVC, C&D letter, Portable Rotary Phone), and you get Free Day.
Nobody gives away a free physical thing. There's always a catch. So up front: you have to pay shipping. Other than that, it's open season.
$100 max per household
You pay shipping
Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calendar. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calendar!
The Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). Every other Wednesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE, Volume 17
Sorry we haven't run a Lost Knowledge column recently. We had the winter holiday rush to contend with, all those gift guides, etc. And there was a short holiday break in there somewhere. Anyway, we're back on track now and looking forward to a year of lost, nearly-forgotten, or preciously-preserved technologies. If you have ideas for columns (some of our more popular pieces last year came from you, our readers), please pop them into the comments below.
This week's column is on a letterpress printing style I knew nothing about. One of the things I'm most proud of in my life is that I'm a printer by trade, or I used to be. It's actually the only trade or discipline in which I have any formal training. To my over-romantic mind, there's something extremely noble, even patriotic, about being a printer. It's no wonder that William Blake and Ben Franklin are a couple of my heroes. I co-ran a small job shop for about five years in the late 70s, doing everything from flyers for the local supermarket to full-blown newsletters and magazines, even a couple of books. We did offset lithography, not letterpress, but I was basically familiar with letterpress and the techniques and technologies involved. So I was surprised when I came across a book in a paper store (I'm such a printer nerd that I still haunt paper stores) on the Victorian heyday of "artistic printing," something I'd never even heard of. (FWIW: Wikipedia doesn't even have an entry for "artistic printing.")
The book (which I, of course, had to get) is called The Handy Book of Artistic Printing, by Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas (2009, Princeton Architectural Press) and it's a wonder. It covers the history of artistic printing, shows examples of the machines used to create it, and offers dozens of gorgeous examples of the artform, along with thoughtful commentary on each example. The book itself is a lovely piece of bookart (er... offset lithographic bookart).
If you're like me, you may be disappointed to learn that the world's smallest snowman is, in fact, not made of snow at all. It's tin that's been etched with a focused ion beam (FIB) instrument, with bits of ion-welded platinum for the nose and to hold the tin spheres together. I guess it's impractical to work with actual ice when you're at the 10 micrometer scale. For comparison, a human hair is about 50 micrometers across. It's the work of Dr. David Cox and co-workers at the National Physical Laboratory in London.
Eric Ayars needed a complicated alarm clock to match his complicated schedule, and thus was born the Alarm Clock Overkill project. Instead of going off at the same time each day, the wake-up alarm can be set to go off at a different time for each weekday. As an added bonus, it also tells the temperature and alerts him to any 'special events' that might be going on that day, such as birthdays or holidays. With an alarm clock this fully featured, who needs a calender!
The DIY mavens at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories made this tabletop playable Pong game and very thoroughly documented the build and functionality.
What is PONG supposed to represent?
Our answer to this question is a game somewhere between pinball and ping pong: Two players each have a single knob that controls the position of a paddle along a short track. Using the paddles, they bounce the ball back and forth and try not to miss the ball, lest the other player score a point. The paddle surfaces are curved, so that the ball reflects in different directions depending on the position of impact. The paddles are powered, so that the ball keeps a fairly constant velocity between the two sides, and the speed gradually increases as the game is played. The playfield is level and has a dotted line down the middle, and the scores are displayed on either side of that line. There are top and bottom walls of the playfield that the ball can bounce off of. Sounds possible, right? So we built it.
One of the offerings at this year's CES that caught my eye was Oregon Scientific's Advanced Wireless Appliance Manager. This basically works the same as an Energy Logger, but without the disadvantages of only one plug in and having to lean down to your outlet to see your totals (a problem the tweet-a-watt doesn't have, BTW!). Its stand-out feature is that the display can be programed to receive the wireless signals from up to eight plugs throughout your house, totaling up the amounts spent each month. However, it appears to lack the robust logging technology some users may require. For instance, Extech's EM100 has a SD card slot for exporting months worth of data, and comes with analysis software.
Available August/September for a MSRP of $80.
A display that can receive up to eight discrete wireless signals? I'd love to see what hardware hackers will do with this baby.
Master crafter Matthias Wandel (famous for his homebrew pipe organ) made this clever wooden combination lock to demonstrate how combination locks actually work. He has a nice write-up at his site, and is selling detailed plans if you need them. [via O'Reilly Radar]
Brooklyn-based lighting designer Lindsey Adelman has published a great tutorial on the construction of this cool spidery brass light fixture from various commercial bits 'n' pieces. [via Readymade]
For a few dollars, creative and motivated individuals--rather than just corporations or institutions--can make highly intelligent tools, perfectly customized for a particular need.
...large artistic installations used to require multiple programmers and engineers. But now "artists and designers have the ability to do 100 percent of these projects by themselves and have total control over everything," [artist Dan] Rozin says. "The expertise isn't that specialized anymore."
Alex's Emergency Excuse Generator (aka 'EEG") uses custom code fed with random input to determine word choice, resulting in convenient untruths so lifelike - you'll swear it actually happened! ... maybe
the device uses the immense computational power and the 8K words program memory of a PIC16F690 microcontroller to demodulate an advanced lexico-semantical matrix and produce inexhaustible supply of random statements in Professional Business English, such as:
"I had to bring the ROI estimates in sync with our new vertical synergy paradigm shift",
or "I was facilitating our proactive procurement dynamics",
or "My gerbil died".
An unusual strategy, the PIC-based design makes use of the noisy rising signal of a charging capacitor to trigger a pin unpredictably. He was also kind enough to publish a software version on his site. Well, I should get going - there was a vanadium tetrasulfate leak in the cafeteria ... and it's not gonna to clean itself up! [via Hacked Gadgets]
Let's be perfectly clear. We love gadgets here at MAKE. We like technology that works. Technology that expands ones reach and abilities. Technology that's fun, challenging, and rewarding to fiddle with, improve. And technology that's just darn cool. But there are gadget freaks like us, and then there's the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the annual orgy of gadget exhibitionism that's equal parts personal technology uber-convention, PT Barnum-worthy 3-ring circus of silliness, and traveling snake-oil theater (not to mention the black-out Bacchanal that happens after-hours). Fittingly, it happens in Vegas.
Now all that might sound like fun, and it can be, at least the first time or two, and the first few miles worn off the shoe leather. But then the surreality of it all starts to kick in, everybody starts sounding like polyester hucksters (even your blog buddies), and the phoniness of Vegas starts to overwhelm the whole enterprise. It's definitely not necessarily a friendly place for those who prefer their technology... slower, more perennial, more about function than hype, more thoughtfully designed and presented; tech that would satisfy the Maker's Bill of Rights. Technology that doesn't suck, basically. There's a lot of technology there that just plain sucks; gilded techno-turds that consumer electronics companies hope they can put over on you with enough razzle-dazzle and endless swag stuffed into your gimme bags by barely-dressed "booth babes."
Last year, here on MAKE, we started the tradition of covering CES from a safe distance, and a skewed angle. The idea is to train the lens of MAKE onto what's coming out of CES and ask: Would this interest makers? What can makers do with this? Is it hackable? Is it open source? Can it be combined with other technology to create something truly interesting and useful? And CES gives us an opportunity to think about technologies that we really wish were being shown there, technologies that don't exist yet. And, to keep all of our technolust in check, we want to take a giggly little look at technologies of the past that promised us the world, but delivered something that smelled more like, well something far less than the world... and a lot stinkier!
So, over the next week, we're going to be looking at CES through the funhouse mirror-world we call alt.CES. This also kicks off our monthly theme for January: Gadget Hacking. For the entire month, we'll hold our own little gadget gathering, taking a look at the gadgets we love, how we can keep them running, improve them, morph them into other useful gadgets, or short of that, make them into a decorative planter.
If you see anything in the CES coverage that strikes your fancy, or incites your ire, tell us about it in comments. And tell us some of your "jetpack future" wishes, things you'd like to see on the CES showroom floor.
According to Thingiverse user mappum, who recently published an STL version of a similar gizmo, these beautiful do-nothings are printed to test commercial rapid prototyping machines.
A friend of mine claimed you can make a laser from a gin & tonic, and so I had to find out more. It turns out that not only can you make a very poor laser using ethyl alcohol, you can also make one from Jello! Well, not the actual Jello like you'd find in a grocery store - instead it would be a non-toxic variation of the traditional dye laser held in gelatin rather than liquid -- but edible and lasing none-the-less!
It's not quite ready for prime time, but if this video from Adobe is any indication, Flash Player 10.1 on the Nexus One is going to be slick. [via Android and Me]
It's finally time to build the enclosure! The wax finish is fully cured, buffed out, and all the parts are ready for assembly. So, lets get on with the build.
The first step is adding the bearing brackets to the middle panel. These screw on the bottom of the middle layer with the included M3 nuts and bolts.
This fun chess set ostensibly can be printed by a 3D printer, though there seem to be a lot of overhangs to me. Nevertheless it's a fun idea. Basically, creator laird designed each piece to display what moves it can make in order to "make Chess approachable for kids."
The king has the tallest 'body' and has its name printed in large type to indicate its importance. The circle represents the king's ability to move one space in any direction.
The queen is about as tall as the king, with the 'head' indicating that the Queen can move any distance in the eight directions.
The knight is shorter, with cubes arranged around a central diamond indicating the eight squares that the knight can jump to. The arrangement of the cubes on the top and the back, and the angle of the supporting head, are intended to evoke a horse's head.
The bishop and rook are the same height, with 'heads' indicating their ability to move any distance in either the diagonals or horizontal and vertical.
Finally the pawns are the shortest. The 'head' indicates the ability to move forward one square, or capture diagonally. I couldn't think of a way to indicate moving forward two spaces, or capturing en-passent.
The 3Ds are available for download on Thingiverse.
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