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In This Issue...

MAKE Asks: Tricky Troubleshooting
LED Matrix Glasses
Cool Clothes and Styles of Maker Faire Attendees (Part 2)
Lego Wall and Ceiling Build Area
Space Marines Tower Over Maker Faire
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MAKE Asks: Tricky Troubleshooting

Make: Asks is a new weekly column where we ask you, our readers, for responses to maker-related questions. We hope the column will spark interesting conversation and that we’ll get to know more about each other.

When using an XBee for the first time, I found that if I tried to run the “Hello World” code, I could only get my flashing LED to work if I unplugged one of my indicator LEDs, and vice versa. After going through what I thought was every possible troubleshooting measure, it turned out the culprit was a weak solder joint where the power was coming through. It provided enough juice for just a couple of LEDs, but no more than that. It took a while to figure out but it was one of my most maddening problems to fix.

This week’s question: What was a bug or tricky problem on a project you’ve done, and what did you finally do to figure it out and get it working?

Post your responses in the comments section.

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LED Matrix Glasses

Garrett Mace was rocking a pair of LED matrix glasses at Maker Faire:

The shades are a 20×6 matrix (with some pixels missing of course) driven by SPI from an integrated Arduino-compatible in the right temple. There is a Lithium-Polymer battery on the left temple. You can charge the glasses through USB, and download new code to it over the same connection. A button on the right temple allows switching between modes or auto cycling animated patterns.

[via HaD]

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Cool Clothes and Styles of Maker Faire Attendees (Part 2)

It was fun to see people expressing themselves at Maker Faire with colorful clothes and accessories. (See Part 1)

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Lego Wall and Ceiling Build Area

Found on Totalgeekdom.com: this awesome wall and ceiling build area, which consists of Lego plates stuck onto convenient surfaces.

I'm an avid Lego geek; I love sitting down for a build session whenever I can fit one in. This often means pulling out the bins of Lego bricks and clearing a spot on the floor or a table and having at it. With bricks flying and hands madly building it's only a short time before robots, dinosaurs and all kinds of fun Lego creations are scurrying about. The downside to this fun is at the end of a build session you have to clean up and put away the bin of Lego bricks and even….gasp… disassemble your new creations! The horror.

The solution to this problem seemed simple enough; just build a dedicated area for Lego play and building. Only one small hitch, my house isn't big enough to devote an area for just Lego play. So I started thinking, I needed an area that I could use as a Lego build area and never take it down, but I didn't have any more space. This got me thinking further, what about my walls? Why couldn't I just get some Lego plates and stick them to the wall and build on the wall, seems like that could be pretty cool way to do it. I toyed around with this idea in my head a little bit and eventually decided that if I was going to build a permanent Lego area on the wall I wanted it to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

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Space Marines Tower Over Maker Faire

Master costume maker, Shawn Thorsson, wowed the crowds at Maker Faire Bay Area again this year with his impressive Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine costumes. It was amazing, especially being a 40K player, to see these giant armor-clad, genetically-modified super humans patrolling the aisles of Expo Hall. This is the first time these costumes have been seen in public. I can imagine that the folks at sci-fi and game cons will go nuts over them. During the packing up, I took these pics of the costume parts as they waited to be loaded out.