 
 
Click photos to embiggen. My old friend Patrick Young made what he calls the "Poor Man's Flat Screen & Rolling Entertainment System." I asked him to describe it for me. Here are pictures of my Poor Man's Flat Screen & Rolling Entertainment System. Pressured by the social stigma of having to keep up with the Jones's I felt a need to get a flat screen of my own, one more in keeping with my economic crisis budget. So, I headed down to the State of the Art Electronics Department at my local Goodwill and snapped up a nice 27-inch cathode ray tube model and converted it to is flat screen form shown. I've been told that a cathode ray tube holds a charge, as much as 25,000 volts, which is more than enough to blacken your grey matter, let alone kill you. I knew this to be true, when as a kid shooting .22s at old TVs in the dump with my brothers. A good shot would get a spectacular brief moment of plasma glow from the CRT just before it implodes. To discharge the 27" CRT, and keep it operational, I fished through my tool box and came up with a flat head screw driver with a well insulated handle. Then I rummaged through my electrical milk crate for a large gauge wire with two alligator clips on either end. I made sure that the alligator clips were big enough to attach to the metal shaft of my flat head securely. I then clipped the other alligator to the chassis, the metal band that rings the CRT. Then I located the rubber anode cap on the back topside of the CRT. Ensuring that I was only holding the insulated rubber handle of my flathead, I gently forced it under the rubber anode cap till I hit the metal of the anode aperture. Contact was realized with a loud snap as the brain-liquefying charge went to ground. With another flat head (insulated handle) I compressed the wings of the anode aperture clip and removed the cap. I was now safe to disassemble the rest of the TV and reconfigure it, with and assortment of nuts, bolts, threaded rod and screws, atop the repurposed crate which would serve as my Rolling Entertainment System and DVD storage. Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Mods | Digg this!
On today's O'Reilly Radar, Dale Dougherty has posted the full text of the talk Thomas Kalil delivered at a workshop entitled "Innovation, Education, and the Maker Movement," held (at the NY Hall of Science) immediately following World Maker Faire. This speech is quite amazing, coming as it does from the Deputy Director of Policy of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I love that a US government official is talking about hackers/hackerspaces and giving shout-outs to folks like Willow Brugh/Jigsaw Renaissance, Madagascar Institute, and reverse geocaching! First -- what are the key cultural, social, technological and economic dimensions of the Maker Movement? Obviously -- it begins with the Makers themselves -- who find making, tinkering, inventing, problem-solving, discovering and sharing intrinsically rewarding. These Makers have a strong "Do It Yourself" and "Do It With Others" mindset -- and making is an important element of their personal identity. That's why the tag line of Make Magazine is "technology on your own time." Those of you who had an opportunity to wander around the Maker Faire saw the dazzling array of Maker projects and Maker communities -- like the Madagascar Institute's 360 degree Swing of Death and jet-powered carnival rides or the cellphone-based sensors for carbon dioxide and ambient noise. We saw Makers like the chemist working to create some of the capabilities of a $10,000 Scanning Tunneling Microscope for a few hundred bucks, or the engineer who had the inspired idea to use reverse geocaching to design a wedding present -- a puzzle box that only opens on one spot on the planet. It's work done in many different mediums, including electronics, open source hardware, Howtoons, metal working, DNA, medieval weapons, wood, arts and crafts, robots, rockets, quadrocopters, Diet Coke and Mentos, and fire and other dangerous things. From a social perspective, vibrant communities are organizing around projects, technologies, and physical places. For example, one community called DIYDrones has developed a $500 unmanned aerial vehicle using open source chip sets and gyroscopes. Hacker Spaces and Maker Spaces are springing up around the country -- like Jigsaw Renaissance in Seattle, which seeks to encourage: Ideas. Unfiltered, unencumbered, and unapologetically enthusiastic ideas. Ideas that lead to grease-smeared hands, lavender sorbet, things that go bang, clouds of steam, those goggle-marks you see on crazy chemistry geeks, and some guy (or girl) in the background juggling and swinging from a trapeze ... Walk through our door with an open mind, and you are liable to be whisked off your feet and into a project you'd never have thought up. We encourage communal learning, asking questions, and pushing that red button. Go on. Do it. If you stick around long enough, you'll end up being the one creating projects and doing the 3-2-1 countdown for some new toy. Which is exactly what we hope will happen.
Technologically -- we are moving towards what MIT's Neil Gershenfeld has called personal fabrication. Consider how Moore's Law has enabled the transition from the expensive and remote mainframe to the personal computer to the smartphone that fits in your pocket to the Internet of things. We are seeing the same phenomena with the dramatic reduction in the cost of the tools needed to design, make and test just about anything -- including $1,200 3D printers, CAD tools, machine tools, sensors, and actuators. Remember the replicator from Star Trek? It's rapidly moving from science fiction to science fact. What will happen as we continue to democratize the tools needed to make physical objects that are smart, aware, networked, customized, functional, and beautiful? I have absolutely no clue -- but I am confident that it will be awesome. As one maker put it, "The renaissance is here, and it brought ice cream." Economically -- we are seeing the early beginnings of a powerful Maker innovation ecosystem. New products and services will allow individuals to not only Design it Yourself, but Make it Yourself and Sell it Yourself. For example, Tech Shops are providing access to 21st century machine tools, in the same way that Kinkos gave millions of small and home-based business access to copying, printing, and shipping, and the combination of cloud computing and Software as a Service is enabling "lean startups" that can explore a new idea for the cost of ramen noodles. Makers are also becoming successful entrepreneurs. Dale just wrote a compelling story about Andrew Archer -- the 22-year-old founder of Detroit-based Robotics Redefined. As a teenager, Andrew started off entering robotics competitions and making printed circuit boards on the kitchen table. He is now building customized robots that transport inventory on the factory floors of auto companies. With more entrepreneurs like Andrew -- we could see a bottom-up renaissance of American manufacturing. Read the full speech here. Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this! 
And we're back with our sixteenth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Make: Online, our Facebook page, and Twitter. 
MadRat speculates about what the creators think of people making fire with Ikea products:
I always wonder what the owners, designers and factory workers think when they see their creations go from say a coffee table into an electric guitar or fire made without matches. Very interesting video, I've always wanted to be able to do that. Mike Hord weighs in on the potential dangers of the IC squisher built from skate bearings, acrylic scraps:
I worry about this damaging parts with static electricity. You're basically taking one plastic (the IC) and rubbing it over another plastic (the acrylic)- there WILL be a static charge built up. Whether it is to a damaging level or not, I can't say- but MOS structures (such as those found in most modern microcontrollers, like the Atmel part in the pic) start to get antsy at a few hundred volts. Something like this moves from the human-body model to the charged device model- which usually increases susceptibility by a factor of 10. On your home bench, this may not be a problem- you have only yourself to hurt. If you're going to be running dozens or hundreds of parts through this, and selling them, that's a different story. Tim is the proud owner of one of the parts featured in the triubute to kludges:
That's my old 200 in one electronics board there! I had _so_ much fun with it! Ah the memories. Chris Walker of Secret Labs responds to some criticism about the Netduino:
Good questions. Secret Labs LLC is a small private company so we don't publish financials or such. But let me give you a few insights... To clear up the first question, Microsoft did not know about Netduino until I showed them the hardware a few months before launch. Secret Labs LLC does not have any outside investors (Microsoft or otherwise); we're internally funded. Netduino is a project we started to try to bring open source hardware to a wider audience. While Netduino and Netduino Plus are nice "upgrade" boards, they're also a great way for software developers to get into electronics. The money for the project came from our R&D budget. We were prototyping some other products using .NET Micro Framework and decided to build Netduino as a contribution to the open source community. Sales from Netduino will help pay for continuing enhancements to the open source codebase, the hardware, etc. As a company, we'll continue investing in the open source platform and the community as well (similar to how Arduino LLC operates). As far as contributing to Arduino, I personally consider the Arduino LLC team members my friends...and we are working on at least two products for the Arduino community as well. With Netduino, the goal was to create a whole new generation of open source electronics--but we regularly recommend Arduinos as well. They're great boards...and king in the 8-bit open source electronics world. I hope that helps clear things up a bit. "Secret Labs" is meant to be a clever name (think "skunkworks" or "batcave" or "why do we even have that lever?"). For our other projects, we work on really tough engineering problems--so the name makes sense there as well. Anyway, we love open source and we're very excited to work with other open source companies (including Arduino LLC) and the existing community...in an effort to promote open source electronics. Let's see how many new members we can welcome into the open source electronics world together... And thank you for your enthusiasm about open source electronics! Chris Secret Labs LLC RocketGuy is impressed with the Robotic swarm over Switzerland:
Every facet of this project just has awesome just oozing out: Drones: Awesome Linux SBC: Awesome Aerial communications network: Awesome Flying wing: Awesome Evolution engineering: Awesome Switzerland: Awesome (both landscape, chocolate, and the LHC). I'm (very slowly) building a rather large single flying wing drone, but now I'm wondering about making smaller siblings for it... DustynRobotics explains the reasoning behind the Water analogy illustrations:
I totally agree this isn't a perfect analogy, and thanks for your suggestions! I scoured books and the internet for water analogy pictures that covered ALL these elements, and most either do capacitors OR everything else, not try to combine them. And now I know why! It's tricky to get them all right in the same diagram. So this circuit isn't meant to be practical, just to stick in people's brains of what water analog components are to the electrical components. On Facebook, Larry James was inspired by the Bronze-casting coins from 3d-printed parts:
man they look cool! and it goes to show that if you have an idea you shouldn't sit on it too long or someone else will do it first... I'm even in a bronze casting foundry, just hadn't gotten around to coins yet. will have to now... did I mention how cool they look... wow. Also on Facebook, Jennifer Eagen didn't fancy the DJ battle hoodies:
i think it's creepy looking. Jillian Strahler, however, was impressed:
you gotta see the video! this is MORE than an quirky knitting project. it is a fine piece of performance art combining craft, technology and sound manipulation (and video production!). Like these comments? Be sure to sound off in the comments! You could be in next week's column. Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Online | Digg this! 
I have written before of the dangers of arming children with powerful engines of destruction because it's "cute." You mad, mad fools. In point of fact, this "Kid's Walker" from Japanese firm Sakakibara Kikai, like most real-world mecha prototypes I've seen, is considerably more impressive when standing still than when in motion. There's embedded video here. If you are actually concerned about the possibility of the world being stomped to rubble beneath the armored galoshes of a Pokémech revolution, you should watch it and put your mind at ease. If, like me, however, you were excited by the photo and are enjoying dreaming about buying or making one of these for your own outer or inner child, you may want to keep that dream alive and pass on the vid. [via gizmag] More: Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Toys and Games | Digg this! 
The latest high altitude weather balloon video making the rounds is from the father and son team of Luke and Max Geissbühler of Brooklyn, NY. Their setup included a 19-inch helium balloon with a payload consisting of a camcorder, GPS enabled phone, and a couple of hand warmers inside a polystyrene container. What sets this project aside from similar attempts is the quality of the images obtained and the ease with which the payload was retrieved using GPS coordinates sent from the the device. [Thanks, Gabe!] Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Flying | Digg this! More Recent Articles | |
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