This is one of my favorite stories of an eleventh-hour save of a Maker Faire project. Makers Sophi Kravitz and Ollie Tanner built an 8′ bar graph that indicates the signal strength of nearby cell phones. It worked great at home, but not so much at the San Mateo Fairground: Since the idea of the product is to detect transmitted and received signals from a good distance, I made sure that there would not be any cell towers too close to the Maker Faire site ahead of time. It was fun looking at maps of where cell towers are located!
Unfortunately, since cell service where Maker Faire is located (San Mateo fairgrounds) is poor, a temporary tower was brought in, and placed very close to the building we were exhibiting in. After setting up the exhibit, we realized that it was full on all the time, the cell tower was overpowering the exhibit and we weren't going to be able to show anything except a big, red, bright light.
After a few failed attempts fixing their troubles with antenna design and attenuators, Sophi called in her brother, Lex Kravitz, to build a Faraday cage. 
This allowed Sophi to place her cell phone under the cage, and she asked booth visitors to text her phone to see the gigantic signal strength bounce. It worked wonderfully! It was a real treat to see both the original project in action and the ingenious solution to the last-minute problem. 
Texting Trapper at Maker Faire 2012          
With Michael Colombo as a very recent ITP graduate and me starting my second year there, we’ve been posting our fair share of ITP projects to Makezine lately. A lot of what we do at ITP aligns well with the maker community, but understandably, not everybody is in the position to go to a two year graduate program. But if you’re in NYC this summer and are looking to get a taste of what ITP is all about, take a look at ITP Camp:
Once again this June we are inviting non-student, working professionals to come to ITP on weekends and evenings to make stuff, hear speakers on the cutting edge, and collaborate with people from diverse disciplines. The creative charge of ITP Camp comes from the community of participants sharing their ideas, skills, criticisms and passions with each other in small, informal groups. We're creating a flexible structure, an Un-University, that is responsive and supportive to the group we select. The structure is based on "unconferences" such as foocamp or barcamp, where presentations and discussions form in response to participants' interests and projects.
ITP Camp 2012
June 1 – 30, 2012
721 Broadway 4th floor NYC, Registration required          
 Bill’s back! I am pleased beyond measure to present the first video in Engineer Guy Series #4, in which Bill Hammack and his Engineer Guy production team at the University of Illinois unravel the key technology of digital photography: the charge-coupled device. Most of you will probably have a sense of the CCD as a grid of very many, very tiny semiconductor sensors, each of which corresponds to a single pixel in a raster digital photograph. That’s essentially correct. But my intuition, at least, of the more subtle engineering aspects—How does the camera read information off the grid? How does it detect color?—turned out to be dead wrong on both counts. Watch the video, now, and you too may be delightfully surprised, and in any case delighted. Bill’s work is always a pleasure to behold, even if you already know this stuff. Or think you do. [Thanks, Bill!]
         More Recent Articles | |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.