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More tiny trailers

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 10:00pm MST

In response to my posting about the teardrop trailer, several people pointed us to the T&TTT Forums (for "Teardrops & Tiny Travel Trailers"). Thanks for the link!

Teardrops & Tiny Travel Trailers

More:
"Cutest trailer in the known universe"

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The Buckminster Fuller Institute study center

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 9:00pm MST

Studycenter1
In the NYC area? Like Bucky?come Celebrate with BFI, Feb. 3rd!...

Throughout the past six months BFI volunteers have worked to redesign our office space in Brooklyn, NY and install a BFI Study Center, open to the public. The center includes rare and out of print books, articles, magazines, photographs, posters, videos, and various artifacts by and about Buckminster Fuller’s life, work, and ideas.

The center also contains the installation of the Dymaxion Timeline, a curated collection of images from the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller, and the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, M1090 R. Buckminster Fuller Collection. Organized by Bonnie DeVarco, Shoji Sadao and Beth Stryker, graphic design by Project Projects. The Timeline was presented previously at the Center for Architecture NY (2008) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2009) in the context of the Dymaxion Study Center (curated by Beth Stryker, organized by the AIA New York Chapter and the Center for Architecture Foundation in association with the Buckminster Fuller Institute).

The Study Center will be open to the public during set hours and by appointment following the official opening party:

February 3rd, 6-8 p.m.
The Buckminster Fuller Institute
181 N 11th Street, #402
Brooklyn, NY 11211

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Permalink for 'MAKE_Magazine/2010/02/02/DIY_watch_winder'

Mechanical watch enthusiast Jake Bordens wrote in to share his latest project, the Arduino Watch Winder. Wanting to keep his watches on display, he needed a solution that could automatically wind them so their time would be accurate. The (expensive) commercial device that he had worked well when he only had one watch, however it couldn't support winding two watches at different rates. Instead of purchasing a more complicated model, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and used an Arduino, Ardumoto motor driver shield, and RTC module to run the winding motors independently. It's a bit of an obscure problem, but a nice hack, and it could come in handy if you have a task that needs to be repeated each day at a specific time. Full source code and explanation is available at his site.

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Family

Make: Arduino

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Nokia-based Rubik's Cube solver

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 6:00pm MST

Mindstorms Rubik's Cube solvers are a dime a dozen, but David Gilday's bot offers two cool twists (sorry) -- first, it solves a 4x4 cube rather than the classic, ordinary 3x3 cube. Second, and cooler, rather than relying on the NXT Intelligent Brick to do the heavy lifting, it uses a Nokia N95 mobile phone that sits in a cradle above the cube, scanning it with its camera and solving the puzzle.

More:

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"Art rocketry"

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 5:00pm MST

All card-carrying members of the NAR may want to look away now. The West Oakland Rocketry Club, based out of West Oakland CA, breaks pretty much every rule in the NAR Handbook. This is not rocketry for kids, or those who are particularly safety-concerned. Dubbing what they do "art rocketry," the group (a lot of the same folks associated with the Raygun Gothic Rocketship and the Steampunk Treehouse projects) has built rockets out of everything from frozen turkeys to snow men; Slinkies to Chinese food containers. (How cool is that "nuclear football" style launch control briefcase?)

(see more pics after the jump)

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Obscura Day, March 20, 2010

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 4:30pm MST

In the early 90s, I ran an art/science/tech "salon" here in DC, called Cafe Gaga. One of the more fun things we did was dérive, or the act of purposeful drifting through a city to discover forgotten, interesting, strange places. There as so many weird, wonderful, unique locales in every city that we overlook in our day-to-day.

Obscura Atlas is organizing a global day to celebrate "wondrous, curious, and esoteric places" in cities around the world. See if your city is included, and if not, how you can set up your own Obscura Day event.

Obscura Day, March 20, 2010

More:
O'Reilly donates £1000 to Bletchley Park
Coding your own urban renewal

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Making walls invisible with augmented reality

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 3:00pm MST

Carnegie Mellon's Dr. Yaser Sheikh has developed a prototype augmented reality (AR) system that combines images from two or more cameras to allow drivers, for instance, to see around blind corners by making intervening structures "invisible." In the simplest case, the image from a camera on the blind side of an obstacle is mapped, with appropriate foreshortening and in real time, onto the visible surface of the obstacle in the display from a camera at the user's position.

The concept reminded me of a brainstorm I had during my last commercial airline flight. Crammed into a middle seat on a crowded 747, feeling claustrophobic and a bit airsick, straining to get a look out one of the distant porthole windows, I longed for a pair of AR glasses that would make the plane invisible so I could look freely around the sky. The video feeds from panoramic cameras mounted above and below the fuselage could be combined and processed through a head-tracking system so that passengers could have an unimpeded external view in any direction they cared to look--the ground, the clouds, the night-time stars up above. Such a system would have no clear commercial purpose other than passenger comfort, but think how much more enjoyable those long-haul flights could be if you were soaring through the wild blue yonder instead of staring at the back of the seat in front of you.

[via Boing Boing]

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Hacking a Digital Bathroom Scale

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 2:00pm MST

Micah Dowty is at it again, only this time he is hacking a digital bathroom scale rather than a sewing machine. Rather than taking the 'easy' route of just using the original electronics, and decoding what it output to the LCD display, he took the time to reverse engineer the analog components of the scale so that they could be interfaced directly. Nice project, and a fun read if you are interested in the process of reverse engineering things.

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Oxygen-tubing-legged robot walker

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 12:00pm MST

Another walking robot today! This one walks on 24 pneumatically-powered legs made from oxygen tubing, by Monica Anderson. [via BoingBoing]

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Easy multithreading on Arduino with Concurrency

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 11:00am MST

Enjoy programming microcontrollers, but frustrated about how difficult it can be to get them to do more than one thing at a time? Well, then you might be interested in Concurrency, an open source programming language and environment specifically designed with multithreading in mind. That means you can write programs that do multiple things at the same time, without interfering with each other. Of course, you could achieve the same things using a stock Arduino with some crafty coding or timer interrupts, however using a purpose-built language such as this could be a great way to get your feet wet in threaded computing. Check out their website for source code and Creative Commons-licensed tutorials!

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Gorgeous little needle-felted skull

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 10:00am MST

From Japanese crafter うろね, who is also Flickr user urone317. [via CRAFT]

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Young Makers at the Exploratorium

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 9:30am MST

Last Saturday, we had the first Open MAKE day at the Exploratorium as part of the Young Makers program. The day's program focused on hands-on activities for building circuits.

The program also featured BlinkyBugs and Bristlebots and welcomed their makers, Ken Murphy of Blinkybug.com, and Windell Oskay and Lenore Edman of Evil Mad Scientists Laboratories.

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Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything?

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 9:19am MST

Pt 2516
Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything...

Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.
The liquid glass spray (technically termed “SiO2 ultra-thin layering”) consists of almost pure silicon dioxide (silica, the normal compound in glass) extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of the quantum forces involved. According to the manufacturers, liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.

Liquid glass was invented in Turkey and the patent is held by Nanopool, a family-owned German company. Research on the product was carried out at the Saarbrücken Institute for New Materials. Nanopool is already in negotiations in the UK with a number of companies and with the National Health Service, with a view to its widespread adoption.

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Crawling crochet earth

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 9:00am MST

I should start considering more fiber enclosures for electronics, look how awesome this soft crawly earth robot is! However, creators Osamu Iwasaki and Hanakomet still call it RobotKnit, despite the fact that it is clearly crochet. After watching the video on repeat for the last fifteen minutes, I think I can forgive them. [via Fashioning Technology]

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In the Maker Shed: Conductive booster pack

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 8:15am MST

MSCBP-2 2.jpg
The Conductive booster pack is the perfect companion for our Fashioning Technology book by Syuzi Pakhchyan. The kit contains a collection of conductive materials that are often only available in much larger quantities, making it a more affordable way to sample various materials.

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Mercury "beating heart" works with gallium, too

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 6:47am MST

So it turns out, happily, that the mercury beating heart demo I wrote about a couple days ago can also be done with molten gallium, which is vastly less toxic than mercury and requires only slightly higher temperatures. The chemists at the University of Nottingham who produce The Periodic Table of Videos made this very informative footage demonstrating the process, which is slightly different from the mercury beating heart demo in that there is no iron nail present. The gallium blob "beats" anyway, but much slower than the mercury with the nail. I bet using a nail would make the gallium version beat just as fast. [Thanks Filip!]

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All radio united under autotune

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 6:00am MST

Tim O'Reilly points out this hypnotic demonstration by Lucky Dragons - "PEACE ON EARTH" brings all radio stations together via frequency modulation -

two radios with home-made autotune on every signal received. every station is in tune with every other station. even static is in tune. peace on earth.

If current trends are any indication, mainstream radio will soon sound similar to this without modification (zing!)

Related:
Lucky Dragons' homemade sound device

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OS X on Nokia N900

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 5:00am MST

If you thought running Android on a N900 was a nifty hack, you should check out this video of OS X 10.3 running in emulation on the N900. It's dog-slow, but it does boot and goes to show that you'll want a better interface when you start using smaller screens.