2012/03/19

MAKE

In This Issue...

Hacked Jaminator Band
Makers and Hardware Hackers at PyCon 2012
Ambient Bus Arrival Monitor
MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup
More Recent Articles

Hacked Jaminator Band

Revolution-J features several circa 1992 Yamaha Jaminators that have been hacked with Arduinos and connected to Max/MSP patches. See the making of video. [via IDEO]

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Makers and Hardware Hackers at PyCon 2012

My colleague Julie Steele wrote in to let me know about all sorts of cool Maker talks at PyCon 2012. You can check them out yourself with these video links:

Jason Huggins’ Building a Robot that Can Play Angry Birds on a Smartphone (or Robots are the Future of Testing): BitbeamBot (pictured above) is an Arduino-powered open-source hardware CNC robot that can test any application on any mobile device.
Thomas Smith’s Project Gado: Building an Open Archival Scanning Robot Using Python and Arduino: Project Gado is an initiative which aims to create an open-source archival scanning robot which small archives can purchase for $500 and use to autonomously scan their photographic collections.
Peter Kropf’s Python Meets the Arduino: Learn how to use Python to communicate with an Arduino and interact with sensors, solenoids and motors.
Hugo Boyer’s Python for makers: This talk is a walkthrough from 3D models to machine motion, that shows how we can use Python to write GCODE generators that create endless form.
Kurt Grandis’s Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes: Learn how to use Python to tap into computer vision libraries and build an automated sentry water cannon capable of soaking intruders.
Dino Viehland’s Building a Kinect game with Python: This talk will show you how to develop a game using Kinect from Python.

You can find lots more PyCon video at pyvideo.org

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Check out John Graham-Cumming’s ambient bus arrival monitor that he built out of a hacked Linksys wireless router that pulls data from London’s Countdown service and lets him know how long he has to wait until the next one.

Underlying this is a simple JSON API that, while not public, seems to be usable by the average programmer as long as I’m not abusive. So with its details deciphered (hardly hard since the web site uses the API) I set about building an ambient bus monitor into a model London bus. The idea is that I can glance at the bus and see the times of up to the next two buses that I’m likely to want to catch and know when to leave the house.

JGC, of course, wrote the amazing Geek Atlas and has been dabbling in all sorts of cool projects.