Tom Buchanan, a retired teacher, emailed to let us know he successfully built Owen Tanner’s solar pendulum, as seen in MAKE Volume 28, Page 146. He writes: I really liked both the look and the function of Owen Tanner’s solar pendulum. My box base was made from 1/4″ poplar and pine (4″x6″x2.5″) with box joints. I milled a 7/8″ depression for the coil done with a Forstner bit, and then stained it cherry. I put some some ball feet on the bottom with removable screws so that the bottom panel could be removed to access the circuit and internal wiring in case I messed something up. I found an old brass plumbing tube for the upright (9″) and some thinner wall 1/4″ brass tubing for the horizontal beam (7.5″). The solar panels are supported by an angled brass music-stand shaped piece attached to some 9/32″ brass tubing that just slipped over the 1/4″ tube, and I found an old lamp bulb-base for the support base which is bolted to the box. The beam, upright tubes, and solar panel assembly were soldered with a low temperature hard solder and then the solar panel holder and 9/32″ pendulum support rings were super-glued to the horizontal beam. Mr. Tanner’s pictorial circuit diagram was both clear and easy to follow. And, as he indicated, getting the wiring through the soldered upright and horizontal tubing was a little tricky; I used a length of thin, strong wire bent into a elongated V-shape to fish the wiring through the tubes and then checked the fished wiring with a meter to make sure I hadn’t stripped and shorted the wires when I pulled them through. After assembling everything, I was getting ready to check the pendulum’s function with a battery when I was happily surprised to see it start swinging all by itself under my shop work-light. We’ll see how long my bearing surfaces hold up (brass rings slightly lubricated). All in all, I really enjoyed putting this together and was very pleased that everything worked just fine as soon as I finished…thanks to the very clear instructions provided. Thanks again for this fun project.
         By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Many science museums feature a Galton board in which balls branch randomly left or right through an array of pegs and end up binned at the bottom in an approximation of a normal distribution. Here is a deterministic variation on that idea, in which there is a two-position gate at each juncture that causes each ball to go the opposite direction from the previous ball to visit the gate. If you use 64 balls, can you figure out how many will end up in each of the bins at the bottom? Karl Sims built this marble run and gives instructions on how to make your own, along with a clear explanation of its operation. 
The side view below shows the tilt of the board and the final distribution of 64 marbles in the seven bins: 1, 6, 15, 20, 15, 6, 1. The mechanism forces each marble to take a different combination of the six left/right choices. 
More:
Catch up with all of George Hart’s Math Monday columns          Raphaël Pluvinage and Marianne Cauvard designed Noisy Jelly: With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board, and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds. Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal. This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
See the photoset and download the press kit PDF for more info. [via openMaterials]          
Looking for a simple, fun way to get your little ones into electronics? Check out the littleBits Starter Kit V2.0 available in the Maker Shed! littleBits are fun, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. Each bit has a simple, unique function (light, sound, sensors, buttons, thresholds, pulse, motors, etc), and modules snap to make larger circuits. Included in the kit are 10 color coded modules (power, input, output, and wire) that connect together to create number of electronics projects. The starter kit includes everything you need to get started, including a custom 9V battery and a screwdriver for adjusting the bits. Each kit comes packaged in an attractive, separated cardboard box with a magnetic (of course!) closure. Features: - A quick-start instruction set.
- A custom-made 9V battery
- A 9V battery connector.
- Custom plastic screwdriver
- Separated storage box.
10 littleBits: - power
- button
- dimmer
- pressure sensor
- pulse
- LED
- RGB LED
- vibration motor
- bargraph
- wire
         
 Stevie Bathiche, director of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, introduces this video from GeekWire by explaining that “it looks like we just took an LCD and took the backlight off, but that’s actually not true. There’s actually been a lot of work that Samsung has done to improve the transmission quality of this display.”
Be that as it may, I can imagine building a fairly cheap DIY version of this device by doing exactly that. The optical transmission quality of your backlight-stripped LCD monitor may not be quite as good as their prototype, but, then, you could always turn on more lights behind it. Apart from the transparent screen, the system uses two Kinects—one to track the position of the user’s head and adjust the viewing angle of the model accordingly, and a second to track how the user’s fingers are “manipulating” the model in the space behind the screen. Move the keyboard behind the screen, as well, and the game gets more interesting, as the system can replace the mouse, and its implied 2D desktop model, with a fully spatial metaphor in which lifting your hand off the keyboard gives instant access to a 3D GUI. The video wraps up by demonstrating some of the possibilities. [via adafruit] Desktop of the future? Microsoft tests transparent PC display with Kinect controls          | |
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