2012/03/26

[MAKE Magazine - daily] - MAKE

MAKE

In This Issue...

Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire Call for Makers and Bloggers
MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup
LEGO NXT-ified Friends Robotlab
How-To: LCD Controlled by BeagleBone
More Recent Articles

Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire Call for Makers and Bloggers

Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire is coming on Saturday, April 21st to Carl Shurz High School, with a selection of over 50 local makers, including:

The Museum of Science and Industry – Wanger Family Fab Lab
FIRST Robotics
The Open Organisation of Lockpickers – Lockpick Village
Animal Origami
Seikowave Low-Cost 3D Scanners
Beekeeping
And more!

The Faire is four weeks out, but there’s still room for a few more makers. The Call for Makers is open until March 30th. Please submit a proposal at MakerFaireChicagoNorthside.com.

Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire is being co-produced by Dan Kramer, the new principal of Carl Schurz High School, and Chicago maker Christina Pei.

Kramer had the opportunity to visit the East Bay Mini Maker Faire on the Park Day School campus in Oakland, CA last fall and was inspired to bring a Maker Faire to to his school. Schurz is a large, urban public high school with an incredible campus (see picture!), a background in FIRST Robotics high school teams, and a passion for project-based learning—a perfect host for a Mini Maker Faire.

Christina Pei is a maker of art, music, lockpicking, and mathematics. She has been a maker in every major Maker Faire in the US for the past two years, and wants to bring the event to every other major city in America, starting with the windy one.

Pei and Kramer are pulling this together with parents and staff from Schurz, but they could definitely use more hands. Please reach out if you are interested and able to help with the following:

Blogging (pictures, Meet the Makers, etc.)
Advertising (getting everyone to get tickets to Maker Faire!)
Photography and Video (mostly for the big day)

Contact Christina and Dan directly at ChicagoNorthsideMF@gmail.com, and follow their progress via Facebook.

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MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup

This week in the MAKE Flickr pool we saw…

Headphone Amplifier from 220.

SMT_JouleThiefFinal from alx_chief.

Make Magazine Egg from Pete Prodoehl.

Noctis Labyrinthus Explorer from Tinkerbots.

WCRH – Crimp Tool Holder from oomlout.

Nerd Bird Nest Box from dvanzuijlekom.

In action! from Solarbotics.

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LEGO NXT-ified Friends Robotlab

17 year-old Anika Brandsma, of the Netherlands, (known as Anika Vuurzoon in the LEGO community) built this excellent take on the LEGO Friends Olivia’s Invention Workshop set.

To bring Olivia’s enviable robotics workshop to life, Anika added motors, sensors, and the micro controller brain from a Mindstorms NXT set. She hid the mechanisms below the floor of the lab, making it seem like the tiny robots have minds of their own. She mounted the microcontroller brick on the back wall, and did a very nice job routing the cabling through spaces in the bricks.

Great work, Anika, we can’t wait to see what you build next!

Anika’s MOC page

Here’s an interview she did on the Mindstorms site, describing some of her other amazing creations.

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How-To: LCD Controlled by BeagleBone

Nuno Alves, an assistant professor of computer engineering at Western New England University, has been experimenting with the BeagleBone and posted an excellent how-to guide on getting the ubiquitous Hitachi HD44780 compatible LCD screens working with the embedded Linux platform. He even developed and shared a C library to make it dead simple to print characters and strings to the these displays. Thanks for sharing, Nuno! No doubt that this will be very helpful for those of us building projects with the ‘Bone.