This is the fourth installment of my series on building the MakerGear Mosaic 3D printer. This part wraps up assembly of the Cartesian robot with the Z-axis mechanics, including installation of the two precision ground linear rails and the PTFE-coated lead screw. Each week, I keep expecting that this will be the stage of the build where it starts to get difficult, tedious, and/or fiddly. In fact, so far no part of the assembly has been difficult, and the only even slightly tedious job has been installing all the captive nuts in the frame back in Part I. With this guide, I’ve just passed the halfway mark. Next week, I’m assembling the extruder, then the build platform itself, and finally, the electronics. With any luck, I’ll be printing my shot glass on or about New Year’s Eve! More:  
Best routes found to self-assembling 3-D shapes. Researchers at Brown and Johns Hopkins universities have found optimal configurations for creating 3-D geometric shapes — like tiny, highly simplified geodesic domes that assemble by themselves. The Brown team developed the algorithmic tools, and the Johns Hopkins team tested selected configurations. The research may lead to advances from drug-delivery containers to 3-D sensors and electronic circuits.
There are “geometric analogies between natural assembly of proteins and viruses” and these polyhedra. Read more.  
Cyril Ebersweiler says: HAXLR8R is a 111-day accelerator program providing hardware-focused startups from all over the world with the appropriate support to deliver their concept into a competitive reality. The program will help teams transform into functional companies by providing mentorship, seed funding, office space, hardware-related services and tooling, plus immersion into an intense startup community of like-minded entrepreneurs in China and the US. HAXLR8R will run from March through June 2012, with a first stop in Shenzhen, where startups will either start building their first prototype, iterate on it, or work on scaling their businesses if they have a working unit. Each week, startups will meet mentors with experience in inventing, product design, sourcing, manufacturing, supply chain, packaging, distribution, financing, marketing or fund raising. The final week of the program will be spent on getting startup pitches awesome, as they will be heading to the Bay Area for a big show: the HAXLR8R Day. The program boasts an impressive roster of mentors including Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Mitch Altman (TV-B-Gone), Bill Liao (Xing/SOSventures) and Bill Warner (AVID/Warner Research) and has been created by Cyril Ebersweiler (Chinaccelerator), Eric Pan (SeeedStudio) and Sean O'Sullivan (Mapinfo/Avego). 10 startups will be selected and applications are open until the end of January!
HAXLR8R: First International Incubator Program for Hardware Startups  
  Our awesome new Managing Editor, Melissa Morgan, wasn’t involved in the online team’s Secret Santa drawing, but I didn’t want her to feel left out. She and I had an email exchange recently about rubber stamps and how much we both like them. That made me think how much she might enjoy the stamp set that Chronicle Books released in support of John M. Carrera’s highly-recommended Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary (which I wrote about here last year). Along with the review copy of the book, Chronicle sent me this set of stamps and I’ve been using and enjoying them ever since.  The original hand-bound, letterpressed edition of John M. Carrea’s Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary (from which the Chronicle edition and these stamps were derived) The set includes 14 rubber stamp versions of the wooden “cuts” from the Pictorial Dictionary. Flora and fauna themed, it includes a red deer, tiger swallowtail, owlet, hare, mushroom, radish, and a seahorse. The stamps are high-quality and the resulting impressions are very detailed. As you would expect from Chronicle, everything about the product is tasty. The box is handsome and sturdy, each stamped image, common name, and scientific name are printed in the bottom of the box, and the box, plastic lid, and title sleeve are designed to make it easy to keep the stamps stowed and organized. Rubber stamps and stamp sets are surprisingly expensive, so $19 is a great price for this inspiring and fun set. It’s so great having you on our team, Melissa. Happy holidays to you and yours! Pictorial Webster’s Stamp Set More:
See all of the MAKE team’s Secret Santa exchanges  
This piano is just one of a number of similar pieces from Miami artist Augusto Esquivel. He works by arranging lengths of dangling fishing line in a grid from an overhead support, and then carefully stringing them with variously-colored sewing buttons to create space-filling forms. It’s kind of like one of those mosaic beaded curtains, but in three dimensions. [Thanks, Matt!] More:
Diaphanous multicolor thread windings   We’re giving away amazing kits from our new Make: Ultimate Kit Guide EVERY DAY — thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, including MakerBots!
To celebrate the release of our latest publication, the Make: Ultimate Kit Guide 2012 (and its companion website), we’re giving away at least one of the cool kits reviewed in the issue each day during the holiday season. Today’s giveaway is a threefer, and a great way to get on-board with Arduino and to have some scientific [hick] fun (or to gift same). We’re giving away a Brooklyn Brew Shop Beer Making Kit, Arduino UNO R3 microprocessor, and the DrinkShield for Arduino (a combined $103 value!). So you, or your recipient, can start the beer, and while it’s brewing, you can assemble the DrinkShield, learn Arduino, and by the time the beer is ready to hoist, you’ll be able to tell how potent it is with the DrinkShield. It’s science! Like all of the other kits in our giveaway, the Beer Kit and DrinkShield are available in the Make: Ultimate Kit Guide 2012 and reviewed on the companion website: Brooklyn Brew Shop Beer Making Kit review on Make: Kits
DrinkShield for Arduino review on Make: Kits The non-kit Arduino UNO write up can be found in the Maker Shed To be eligible for today's giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment below in this post. The entry period for today's prize will be until 11:59pm PST tonight. We'll choose one person at random, you'll be notified by email, and you'll have 48 hours to respond. The Winners List is kept on the Giveaway landing page. That's it! No purchase necessary or anything else to do. Please leave only one comment per post. You can enter as many giveaways as you like until you win. This giveaway is for US residents only. You also must be 18 years old to enter (Kids: Ask your parents to enter). See the Kit-A-Day Giveaway landing page for full sweepstakes details and Official Rules. Important Note: If you enter this drawing, when it’s over, please check the place where you registered to comment (eg. Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter). Some people are winning these kits and then not responding when we send them a message using the available means of contacting them. We want to make sure you get your giveaway!  
Legos are the building blocks of makers. I imagine most of us have fond memories of Lego growing up. Enhance those memories or give new ones with Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 available in the Maker Shed! This awesome Lego set combines the versatility of the LEGO building system with an intelligent microcomputer brick and intuitive drag-and-drop programming software based on LabVIEW. The 2.0 toolkit features everything you need to create your first robot in 30 minutes and then thousands of other robotics inventions that do what you want! The intelligent NXT LEGO brick features 32-bit microprocessor, a large matrix display, 4 input and 3 output ports. It connects to your computer using Bluetooth or USB. - NXT 32-bit microcontroller with 256k memory
- 3 interactive servo motors with built-in rotation sensors
- 1 ultrasonic sensor
- 2 touch sensors
- Color sensor with triple functionality: color sensor/light sensor/color lamp
- Support for Bluetooth, USB 2.0
- 619 pieces
 
I love this video of Lego builder Warren, who has built working models of farm equipment since he was 12. [Via ThinkGeek and Rach!]  
To make capacitive touchscreens work through gloves, you need a conductive pathway between the screen and your finger(s). Commercial touchscreen-friendly gloves made with conductive fabric at the fingertips are available, and if you’re handy with a needle you can use special thread to sew conductive stitches into the fingertips of a glove you already own. If you’re not handy with a needle, this no-sew “hard” method, using the button or “cap” half of a snap fastener, may be more your style. Depending on your skills and personal tastes, it may come out better- or worse-looking than the “soft” method. In any case, it will certainly be faster, and, applied to a nice pair of new gloves, makes for a useful gift with a personal handmade touch. You can, of course, add snaps to as many of a glove’s finger- and/or thumb-tips as you please, which may be useful for multi-touch displays. No-Sew Touchscreen Gloves The round lip of the snap socket inside the glove makes it very easy to index your fingertip with the “sweet spot” on the outside of the glove, and the hard, rounded surface of the button means the actual point of contact with the screen is small and precise. There’s no “fat fingers” effect with these gloves, and I’ve found that they require almost no mental adjustment to go back and forth between gloves and bare fingers. Finally, I should mention that the brass and/or nickel these snaps are made of should pose no risk of scratching even the softest glass.  | |
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