Our Maker Faire team is feverishly burning the midnight veggie oil to get this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area (May 19 & 20) up and running, and they need YOUR help. They’re looking for folks to join the Maker Faire Bay Area Street Team. This is your chance to get involved with the Faire, help us spread the word, and snag two adult day passes to the Faire in the process! They sent me this note to pass along to you. To join the team, send an email to Streetteam@makerfaire.com with your name and snail mail address. We’ll send you a Maker Faire Street Team Kit which includes: - 25 Fliers
- 75 Postcards
- 10 Business Cards (both our Bay Area and New York Dates are listed!)
- 5 Buttons
Please do your best to post the Maker Faire materials in high traffic venues (and please be sure to ask for permission when appropriate, as we definitely want to respect others property.) Here are some great places to post flyers and place postcards: | Bookstores | Coffee shops | | Cafes | Toy Stores | | Hobby Shops | Craft Stores | | Restaurants | Scrap Stores | | Community Centers | Hacker Spaces | | Tech Shops | After School Programs | | Garden Centers | Thrift Stores | | Schools | Churches | | and more….. | | When you have completed your Street Team Marketing efforts, please email us: 1) Three pictures of locations where you placed Maker Faire flyers and/or postcards (email to: streetteam@makerfaire.com )
2) Let us know where you posted the materials (city/store/school/café/etc.)
3) YOUR MAILING ADDRESS SO WE CAN SEND YOU YOUR TWO ADULT DAY PASSES!!
And, please send us all the above information by Wednesday, May 2nd so we can get your tickets in the mail in time for the event! Thanks in advance for your help and support, and see you at Maker Faire! Best, The Maker Faire Team          
We’ve long been able to get Arduino and Android to talk to each other over Bluetooth (for example, see the Android Controlled 3D Printed Slalombot), but doing that with an iOS device has required you to be enrolled in Apple’s MFi program or you to jailbreak your device. That seems to have changed with the addition of Bluetooth 4.0′s “Bluetooth Smart Ready devices”. Alasdair Allan [via Tom Igoe] clued me into this really interesting development. Dr. Michael Kroll is working on a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Shield for Arduino based on the Bluegiga BLE112 modules: Right after my first contact with BLE technology I was thinking of a BLE Shield for the Arduino. I really liked the Arduino BT of the Bluetooth Shield from Seeed Studio, but since these boards are not "Made for iPod", they are not connectable to iOS Devices. The idea I had in mind was to create something similar to the Seeedstudio Bluetooth Shield where the Arduino's Serial RX/TX pins or Pins 2/3 (with SoftwareSerial) can be used to read data from and send data to an iOS device. That said, I started a first prototype of an Arduino Shield using Bluegiga's BLE112 Bluetooth 4.0 single mode Development Kit. Once Bluegiga's firmware was finished and my first sketch could read and write to my iPhone 4S, l then I created my first real Arduino Shield PCB. …
Dr. Michael Kroll: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Shield for Arduino No word on pricing, but the modules it’s based on don’t look that expensive, nor do similar modules from BlueRadios. Even without a breakout board, you shouldn’t have much trouble connecting an Arduino to the UART on either of these modules; all you need to do is figure out what to say to them. Tom covers Bluetooth/Arduino communication in his book Making Things Talk, and Alasdair’s looking at getting some coverage of these modules in his upcoming book, iOS Sensor Programming (you may also want to look at his shorter book iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino, which will be updated and incorporated into the larger work iOS Sensor Programming).          
Want to build the ultimate human-machine interface? Get rid of the buttons, joysticks and triggers, and let your nerves do the work. That’s exactly what electromyography (EMG) interfaces do. As Robert Armiger and Carol Reiley describe in MAKE 29, the “DIY Superhuman” issue, when muscles move they generate small electrical signals that can be traced with electromyography. After someone has lost a limb, those electrical signatures of specific muscle movements can still be detected. To help farmers in the developing world who have lost their arms, I’ve sought to collaborate with colleagues at MIT to develop a simple EMG interface for controlling actuators at the end of Agricultural Prosthetics. Basically, I just needed a switch — a problem that’s too easy for the experts, too hard for the novice. The project got stuck in DIY stagnation until MAKE’s “Air Guitar Hero” article broke the process down into 5 mini-projects that explain how you can control a video game from electrodes attached to your forearm. This article was a breakthrough for us, and we are using it as a reference for our Agricultural Prosthetics that use power. Using the same architecture that allows someone to play The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” could also drive a power tool, a remote control for your television, or a toy car. In our case, the MEDIK project’s Agricultural Prosthetics, it could control a Dremel or a gardening tool. The Air Guitar Hero project reminds me of the fabulous work of Human+, a group of designers who correctly point out that Superhuman augmentation can be about accessibility, but it can also be about fun.
 We have the technology (to quote The Six Million Dollar Man), but commercial tools for exploring, assisting, and augmenting our bodies really can approach a price tag of $6 million. Medical and assistive tech manufacturers must pay not just for R&D, but for expensive clinical trials, regulatory compliance, and liability — and doesn't help with low pricing that these devices are typically paid for through insurance, rather than purchased directly. But many gadgets that restore people's abilities or enable new "superpowers" are surprisingly easy to make, and for tiny fractions of the costs of off-the-shelf equivalents. MAKE Volume 29, the "DIY Superhuman" issue, explains how. BUY OR SUBSCRIBE!          Yesterday I went to The Creators Project in San Francisco. Held at Fort Mason, The Creators Project was a free two-day music and digital art festival. On Sunday there was no music, so I checked out the art. Most of it was interactive in some way, and there were some neat projects. 
Octocloud was one of the first pieces I came across. It’s a sculpture that visitors can interact with using their smart phones. They fling arrows using a virtual slingshot, and up to eight people at a time can compete to trigger different animations. There were a lot of people surrounding this one – it was popular. 
Process 16 (Software 3) was fun to watch. It is a piece of art projected on the wall that is continuously being added to via Processing code. Casey Reas, the artist, set up a series of logical rules, or processes, for the software to follow. 
My favorite installation was Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, a magnetic board filled with lit pixel squares. The color of a square can be changed by touching the face, and even cooler, you can “copy and paste” a color to another square by holding your finger on the face on a pixel until it blinks, then touching another pixel. After waiting in a short line, I was able to play with them, and it was mesmerizing. I want a set for my fridge!
The Treachery of Sanctuary was the biggest spectacle in the main building. Three gigantic floor-to-ceiling projection screens filled the end of the hall, and there were long lines to participate in this interactive piece. Kinects are set up to pick up the shape of the user, and each triptych had a different program running, but all were bird-related. The first one locked on to the user’s profile, and then proceeded to disintegrate the body by turning it into dozens of birds that fly away, reducing your silhouette to nothing. The next one had birds landing on the silhouettes and attacking them, à la The Birds. The last one picked up on arms, and turned them into wings. 
Outside was Origin, a large metal cube with LEDs lining the beams of the piece. There is also an ethereal audio track playing, and when I walked through, it was unclear to me whether it was all pre-recorded or whether there was some real-time input that was affecting the audio-visual output. The description of the piece was somewhat vague, but it did use the word “responsive,” and after researching it, I see that the ambiguity was intentional. United Visual Artists, the group that created it, writes, “While it remains purposely mysterious, it's clear that its mood changes are triggered by people moving within the structure; while you're queuing and watching the people inside try to discover 'how it works', you're also forming your own hypotheses.” I could tell a lot of people loved this one, but I really wanted to know more about how it worked. The ambiguity caused me to write it off as interesting, but pre-recorded, and I wonder if others had a similar reaction. I do think this would look amazing at night, since the daylight made it hard to see the LEDs. 
Meditation was another movement-triggered piece, with three red projections that are highly reactive. Move your hand in front of one and it ripples out red concentric circles that quickly distort and twist, depending on the direction and speed of your gestures. 
Overscan was interesting. I would describe it as remixing television. The piece is comprised of five television screens. The far left displays the original TV footage, and each of the other four screens riff on that feed using visual and verbal data gathered. For example, it might analyze the closed caption script and pull out certain words to display, crafting a sort of automated poetry from the evening news. Or each screen might show a more pixelated version of the original feed. This was probably my second favorite piece, next to Six-Forty by Four-Eighty. It was a fun day, and it was enjoyable to watch people interacting with the digital art.          By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Frabjous is a sculpture that consists of thirty identical parts which are assembled into a geometric star with twelve spiral vortices. A few years ago, a MAKE post showed how to make a cardboard version that requires many hours of hobby knife cutting. Should you prefer a cool-looking acrylic version, made from laser-cut components, there is now a kit sold by the Museum of Mathematics. It is a tricky puzzle to assemble, but when done, you’ll have a lovely, seven-inch diameter sculpture to enjoy. 
Or if you want to spring for a fancy acrylic version with an iridescent coating that changes color as you move around, that is available, too. 
More:
Catch up with all of George Hart’s Math Monday columns          | 
I’m hopeful that the enduring legacy of Tron: Legacy will not, so much, be the meh-OK movie itself, but a sweeping wave of physical Tronification that leaves our world decidedly more awesome than it was before. And Becky Stern is leading the charge. This project video, her first since taking up a new job at adafruit, shows how to electrically connect, and physically attach, EL accent wire to a sectional sofa. It recalls the 
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