Maker businesses are all about the people, and these guys are two of my favorites. Adam and Matt of Wayne and Layne rock. They are incredibly bright engineers and hilarious dudes whom I think should have their own podcast in order to crack us up year round.
Tell us about yourselves: how did you get started building things? Any memorable maker moments from your childhoods?
We've been friends since middle school. Sometime in that timeframe we bought a Basic Stamp 2 in parts form, and had Adam's dad solder it up. We didn't do much with it, but we had a relay and some LEDs and some buttons on a breadboard. I can't even imagine what we could have accomplished if we would have had access to the community that's available online now.
Tobias Muthesius of Paris, France sent in this installation by French interactive designers Lab212 designed for Morocco's FICAM animation festival. It was hard for me to scrounge up technical details but it looks like an Arduino and XBee were involved.
Be sure to check out our main contest page and join our Flickr group, and also sign up for the Save My Oceans contest newsletter (there is just one issue remaining, but it will have some really great stuff from Maker Faire) for your chance to win an iPad.
One of my favorite drummers, Brian Viglione, of Dresden Dolls, posted this brief video tour on his Facebook page of a drum kit he built from junk. He was kind enough to post it to YouTube so that I could share it here. This was the kit he used on the tracks he worked on for the NIN Ghosts I-IV project (Dec 2007). Brian writes:
I showed up at Trent's house for the first day of recording and said he thought a "fun art project for the day" would be to have me build a drum kit out of found objects and whatever I could piece together that afternoon and then improvise on it that night. I spent the afternoon on the hunt and put it all together that evening. When it was all ready, he gave me the headphones and a tempo to follow, and said, "just play what comes to you..."
My accidental discovery, ten years ago, of the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants (commonly called "The Glass Flowers") on the Harvard campus, remains one of the most magical experiences of my life. I was visiting Cambridge with a friend, and while we were poking around Harvard we happened to wander into the Peabody Museum which, at the time at least, was housed in an unassuming brownstone that gave no hint of the rabbit warren of wonders that lay inside. We wandered around in there the rest of the day, our jaws agape at all the amazing stuff. The original coelacanth specimen caught in 1938 (before which it was thought to have been extinct for 80 million years) is there, floating in a tank of preservative. There was a room full of gorgeous iridescent metallic jewel beetles, arranged taxonomically on the walls, and a solid jade funerary mask recovered from a tomb at Chichen Itza I had visited only the year before. But the Glass Flowers topped everything.
In the late 19th century, when biologists and botanists from Harvard were sailing all over the world taking specimens of every living creature they could find and sending them back home for study, a very serious problem arose in the accurate preservation of those specimens. There was no refrigeration and no practical color photography, and fresh plant and animal specimens rapidly decayed into colorless blobs of mush in jars full of alcohol or formalin. So then-director of the Harvard Botanical Museum George L. Goodale commissioned German father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka to create photorealistic replicas of fresh specimens in solid glass. The Blaschkas would go on to spend the next 50 years creating more than 3,000 such models, which are still on display at Harvard today. It's a thing not to be missed in your time on this Earth.
Re-writable solid state memory may be the best thing since diced wafers, allowing us to re-program our microcontrollers and store tons of music on our cell phones, but it isn't without it's faults. Though (mostly) immune to the bumps and jolts that would trash a comparable hard drive, Flash and Electrically-Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) memory does suffer from one issue. They only are only rated to stand a limited number of writes before they stop working.
Fortunately, this number is in the millions or tens of millions, so you can continue to safely flash the latest programs into your Arduino for the foreseeable future, however if you plan to use your EEPROM to continuously record sensor data, you might find yourself running up against the limits of your hardware. The folks at Dangerous Prototypes decided to take things into their own hands, and built the Flash Destroyer project to test just how long it would take to drive a Microchip 24AA01-I/P to failure. Source code, schematic, and kit are available at their website. Note that they are aware of the fact that they are testing an EEPROM, not a Flash device, but that 'Flash Destroyer' just had a cooler ring to it.
To add to the gratuitous drama of the experiment, they are live-streaming the whole endeavor. Anyone want to take a bet at how long the poor memory chip will survive? [via Hacked Gadgets]
I've been following Barcelona maker Abraham Neddermann's Dicecreator blog for a while. True to the blog's name, he dabbles in creating his own tabletop gaming dice, machining them out of aluminum or printing on blank dice. This time he's outdone himself, building a laser engraver out of junk parks, a couple of stepper motor control boards, and a 250mW laser that only works on black dice because other colors are too reflective! My favorite detail is the wingnut heat sink sitting on top of one of the motors. Great job, Abraham!
Austin band ArcAttack! performs with musical tesla coils (in a chain maille "Faraday suit") and a robotic drummer. From their Maker Faire profile:
ArcAttack! employs a unique DJ set up of their own creation to generate an 'electrifying' audio visual performance. The HVDJ pumps music through a PA system while two specially designed DRSSTC's (Dual-Resonant Solid State Tesla Coils) act as separate synchronized instruments. These high tech machines produce an electrical arc similar to a continuous lightning bolt and put out a crisply distorted square wave sound reminiscent of the early days of synthesizers.
ArcAttack! is an Austin born, high tech performance group. They've been working together since 2005. The group members are Joe DiPrima, Oliver Greaves, Tony Smith, John DiPrima, Patrick Brown and Craig Newswanger.
The Make: Robot Build crew poses with the Jameco team in front of the winning robots during Maker Faire. (Fourth place entry, Tortellini the Turtle Bot, is on the far left in display case.)
Whew! That was fun. We've had a great time with the robot contest, and judging from the creativeness and quality of the entries, are guessing that you did as well! 8 newsletters, 22 posts, countless forum discussions, and 25 outstanding entries later, we're a little sad to call the Robot Build a wrap. Now that we've had a little time to recuperate from all the excitement of judging the contest, here is a more detailed look at the 'bots:
Four legs! curly toes! six CDs! kindly face! LASER nose! multi-chromatic mouth! stereoscopic ranging vision! bias for action! protective headgear! Jartron the robot seeks distant places, but will take momentary interest in very close things. He is known to spontaneously perform LASER light shows and draw on the wall.
Bill of Materials:
6-CDs
1-Arduweenie
1--PC Board--RadioShack part #
27 pin headers (3x 5 servos, 3x2 three wire connectors)
1-28 pin IC socket
2--servo connector wires, 3 wire double female
5 standard servos
2 infrared rangefinders
1 laser pointer
1 PNP transistor
11 150 ohm resistors
1 270 ohm resistor
3 tricolor LEDs (RGB) common cathode
1 LED any color
1 plastic jar--the kind that once held 5 lb of liquid barley malt for making beer
1 one inch by 2 feet (or more) strip of aluminum
double sided foam tape
2 three AAA battery holders
6 AAA batteries
1 on off switch
3 5v Voltage Regulators
Don't miss the excellent plans that describes how he was constructed using Imprecision Engineering.
This is for those who appreciate the beauty of a simple design that is efficient, beautiful and graceful in performance. The UFO (Unidentified Floor Object) is my first creation ever with a DVD Disc and the results were quite amazing as I designed it to be capable yet still holdable within one hand. It is a sporty obstacle avoiding creation that runs along the ground at a good speed with the impression of almost hovering as it moves. A Red-Green-Blue LED flashes to give it some life as it traverses or glides from side-to-side and makes it's way around the course. The sensor is only a couple of millimeters from the ground and yet the UFO is fully aware of it's surroundings and finds it's way through it's most challenging corners. A design that is not only beautiful to look at but also great to watch in action. All hardware is perfectly mounted right beneath the Disc and the battery I chose was a Lithium Cylindrical design which has a whopping 2600maH rating for runtimes in excees of 1 hour! So if it's built right it will not only look good but will surely be at the finish line..........
HUL-10 is a coasterbot that uses two infrared sensors for obstacle avoidance and two photoresistors for phototropic behavior. We built the coasterbot in two versions. Since this is our first robot, we weren't sure what we were getting ourselves into, so we wanted to keep things simple for the first version, and use the second version to try out some of our crazier ideas.
Laura Haaker's Cone Light is another gem from Inhabitat's second annual Spring Greening creative reuse contest, although I have to say, for the record, that those are way smaller than any actual traffic cone I've ever seen, and are far, far too clean to have ever seen any real use on a street. I'm pretty sure reusing real traffic cones would result in a lamp that was both way too big and way, way too beat-up / nasty-looking to make acceptable furniture. Still, clever idea, and a straightforward re-make.
A lot of people, especially elderly people, take a lot medication on a daily basis to stay as healthy as possible. Some of that medication needs to be taken on a exact time, or they don't function as well. So I decided to make a machine that automatically gives the right pills at the right moment and also sounds an alarm so that the person who needs those pills knows it's time for his or her medication.
This YouTube 'commercial' for the unreleased Parrot AR.Drone quadricopter has 'maker' all over it. Get an idea, shoot a slick video, throw in a funky beat, share on the web. Is this the future of maker businesses? The idea is neat -- RC that you don't have to control via IR; as long your phone and the drone are in wifi hotspots, you can control it. [via Beyond The Beyond]
Aw, man, this is almost too good to be true: Makers Market seller LTL PRINTS, a Philadelphia, PA startup company, has scored a license to reprint every card in Topps' famous 1962 trading card series Mars Attacks. LTL has a novel full-color print-on-demand process using environmentally friendly inks, at 1440 dpi, on a 10 mil self-adhesive "fabric paper" substrate that can be removed and repositioned over and over again. He'll sell you any card in the series at your choice of six sizes ranging from one foot to six feet on the long edge, with prices starting at $15. He's also selling complete sets at a steep discount over the per-print price.
In the first article of this series, I introduced Polaris, my mobile lab, a distillation of the huge and inefficient shop building that I've been using for over a decade. This new system is allowing me to haul a fully functional workspace to a marina, where I'm immersed in a geek sailboat project that requires extensive fabrication and tinkering facilities. And it's also accompanying me to Amateur Radio Field Day, and (hopefully), next year's Maker Faire Bay Area.
There are so many applications for portable workspace that I'm writing a book on the subject, as well as guest-authoring a series here on MAKE.
Let's start by taking a look at some of the specifics for creating your own mobile lab. The harshness of life on the road requires attention to issues that don't arise in traditional structures except perhaps briefly, during earthquakes; vibration and lateral acceleration can destroy cheap furniture and make a gumbo of your parts inventory.
Fraudsters rack up millions of dollars in merchandise using fake credit cards with legit numbers hacked off the Internet. Detective Bob Watts of Newport Beach PD shows how it's done.
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