A lot of us saw a tantalizing glimpse of EMSL‘s sweet new barbot on the most recent episode of Make: Live, and here it is! Twice the pumps, twice the ingredients and twice the radness of last year’s model. My favorite part are the beakers cut into spouts that dip down to dispense the ingredients into the funnel. This year, we’ve designed a brand new bartending machine, Drink Making Unit 2.0, which we are pleased to unveil today, and unleash upon the world this weekend. Aside from the once-again-apt-but-not-very-descriptive name, Drink Making Unit 2.0 has very little in common with last year’s machine. The mechanism is all new, and features elements borrowed from sources as diverse as pet stores, chemistry labs, and Japanese gardens. It dispenses any six fluids (up from three), in metered and selectable quantities, and also sports an all-new extra-snazzy control panel.
SAMSA is based on the Wiring board, with an ATmega128 microcontroller, and SAMSA II on the Arduino Mega, with an ATmega1280. Both are pretty similar, tough the ATmega1280 has 8 KB SRAM, twice the ATmega128. For SAMSA II the Arduino IDE was not used. The software was written directly in C++, using some libraries from both Arduino and Wiring. SAMSA II has also two additional microcontrollers. One is an old Arduino Mini (ATmega168) located in the head, tasked with handling the sensors. The other is an ATmega8 and is integrated in the display. The firmware in the display was replaced with another one, freeing the main microcontroller from handling the display pixel by pixel, storing the frame buffer, etc. The head's microcontroller is responsible for sampling, filtering and processing sensor's data. The data from the Sharp distance sensor and the lateral IR sensors are combined in a single "super smart distance sensor". This microcontroller also decodes the data coming from the 38 KHz IR receiver, used for the Remote Control. These two additional microcontrollers further reduce the load on the main microcontroller, allowing for more sophisticated behaviors.
[Via the Arduino Blog] 
Julie Scelfo from The New York Times writes about woodworking classes that are geared toward a younger set of children, some even as young as five years old. From Brian Cohen, co-founder of Beam Camp: "My partner and I saw that kids were spending too much time interacting with perfect interfaces," said Mr. Cohen, 45. "We felt that we needed to provide an experience by which they could understand how perfection is achieved — and, more specifically, how that perfection is achieved by working through problems with your hands."
And the kids seem to love it: Louis Hyde, 13, an eighth-grader in Brooklyn, has attended Beam Camp each of the last three summers and plans to go again this year. "I did not ever really imagine there was the potential to make things on the scale that we made them," he said. "When you finish this gigantic thing at the end of camp, it just feels so good. And you know that you were an active contributor to it."
The article includes a nice listing of many different woodworking programs (bottom) and there’s also a great slide show. 
Japanese Maker Satoshi Shibuichi built this impressive looking analog television set (translation), which uses vacuum tubes to display video on a tiny CRT monitor. Schematics and photos of the build are available at the website, however if you’re thinking of building one, you should act fast. As Takumi Funada points out in the original article, analog television broadcasting in Japan is scheduled to end in July. [via Make: Japan] More Recent Articles | |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.