2012/03/12

[MAKE Magazine - daily] - MAKE

MAKE

In This Issue...

MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup
How-To: Maker Faire Booth Design
XIG Update Pushes Wireless Data to Projects
More Recent Articles

MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup

This week in the MAKE Flickr pool we saw…

POW! from lookseeseen.

Creeper from adopt-a-bot.

The Whisker – firefighters gasmask project from KoeneoK.

corner joint from davidrockdan.

2nd-order Voltage-Controlled Filter from johngineer.

Friday Night Drawbot at the Art Jamboree from Pete Prodoehl.

Uber Tripedo Rides Again! from whymcycles.

• Email to a friend • View comments • Track comments •

•

How-To: Maker Faire Booth Design

From the workshop put on by the Mini Maker Faire Seattle team (hey, that includes me!):

On March 3rd, we hosted a workshop to help local makers design their booths and get ideas for interactive exhibits and hands-on activities. We will repeat the class in late April or early May. Here are some highlights from the workshop:

Part 1: Meet the Team and General Booth Design

Key points: A few signs will help attendees understand your project, but don't let the signs form a barrier between you and the public. Open shelving gives you more vertical space to display parts, projects, tools and components. Practice setting up your exhibit at home and test your hands-on activities with friends and kids.

Part 2: Examples of interactive exhibits

Key points: Let people see and touch. Show some interesting raw materials, show what things look like in-process, half-way done, and parts that broke during your design trials. Let the public experience the process of making with all of their senses! Great hands-on activities are ones that simplify the process to their essential components or symbolize complex things with simple analogs, for example make strings of beads as an analog for protein chains.

Part 3: Hackerspace Booths and Group Exhibits

Exhibit what a group of geeks can accomplish with a little sharing of ideas, tools, and space.

• Email to a friend • View comments • Track comments •

•

XIG Update Pushes Wireless Data to Projects

I’m a big fan of the XBee Internet Gateway. I used it for The Networked On Air Light and a personal project called the Ego Ticker. XIG lets you use XBee radios to wirelessly connect your projects to the internet. Previously, your project would request a URL via serial to the XBee radio and the response (i.e. a webpage’s HTML) would be returned via serial. It works for a lot of different types of wireless projects, but it means that you sometimes have to poll for data, which you don’t always want to do. It’s like asking over and over again “are we there yet?” instead of saying “let me know when we get there.”

The latest version of XIG lets you communicate in both directions with your wireless project, meaning you can do away with the pesky polling. Check out the video above to get a quick demo of how to set up XIG push serial data to your project using the iDigi Cloud and also take a look at the project’s wiki to see a few other ways of communicating with your project from the cloud. According to Jordan Husney, iDigi Solutions Architect, the XIG creates a persistant outbound connection to the iDigi Cloud, so you won’t have to monkey around with your router’s settings to get data from the internet to your projects. I have a few projects in mind that this update is perfect for.