BuffaloFeeds » MAKE Magazine » February 18, 2010

Hackerspaces: Hive 76 video

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 10:00pm MST

A VIMBY video about hackerspaces, featuring Philadelphia's Hive 76 and Mr. Johnny Hackerspace himself, Mitch Altman.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this!

The Best of Toy Fair - PopSci

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 9:00pm MST

PopSci has a good vide round of the 2010 ToyFair... I like the laser-harp-type thing...

Say the word "toy" to a techie, and his mind will think one thing: robots. But all infrared-loving, artificially-intelligent smart-toy-ogling tech-savvy aside, new toys can instill as much "ooh! shiny!" as even the hottest cellphone. And we're not just talking about robots: This week, the International Toy Fair hit NYC, and PopSci.com found 20 funky new toys with a few tricks up their sleeves.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toys and Games | Digg this!

Glove mouse is perfect wintertime computer peripheral

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 7:00pm MST

From the MAKE Forums:

Forum user thetanktheory built this Glove Mouse to help improve his FPS game skills:

Built from an old laser mouse and some random parts i had lying around. This is a first version and I have quite a few improvements in mind (already working on the next one) but, it functions a lot like I hoped it would. It makes those quick, twitch-reactions in FPS' much easier. Currently I need to move the buttons over a bit and center the laser a bit more. I plan to add a few more mappable buttons, figure out how to implement a scroll-wheel, lower the laser assembly's profile, and cover all the functional parts.

More:

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Computers | Digg this!

Inside the "Magic-1," homebrew CPU

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 5:00pm MST

Phillip covered this awesome homebrewed CPU before, but there's now more info on the builder's site and a series of videos showing it in action. Visitors to the 2007 Maker Faire Bay Area may remember seeing the Magic-1 and meeting its builder, Google engineer Bill Buzbee. The project is incredibly well documented on the site. You can even telnet into the Magic-1, running 16-bit Minix at a scorching 4.09Mhz, to play the original Adventure game, or run classic apps like Eliza and Conway's Life. Retro-geeky good times!

Homebrew CPU

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Computers | Digg this!

Alex Rider Contest Winner: Listening Cup gadget build -- it works!

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 4:05pm MST

By Kris Magri, engineering intern

Thanks again to everyone who entered the Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest! As promised, our team at Make: Labs has built the winning gadget: the super-stealth Listening Cup designed by Grand Prize winner Nic. Check it out!

Amid a raft of great entries that were extremely creative, the Listening Cup was deemed the overall winner because it's stealthy and high-tech, but still buildable. It came with detailed hand-drawn plans, even showing what type of electronic parts would be needed. The original idea was a drinking cup with a false bottom and electronics hidden beneath -- a microphone, an amplifier, and a speaker -- so that a person could put the cup to their ear and eavesdrop on conversations from a distance, or listen through walls.

Results
Using electronics available to anyone, we found that the Listening Cup can easily pick up faint nearby sounds and make them louder, though it couldn't listen though walls unless they were paper-thin. Of course, we figure Alex Rider's employer MI6 could afford some awesome miniaturized circuits, like those in expensive hearing aids, that would boost the Listening Cup's performance tremendously.

Overall, the Listening Cup was a pleasure to design and build. It really put us in the shoes of Smithers, the gadget maker for Alex Rider (though we are envious of his lab).

Building the Listening Cup
After judging all the entries on three criteria (creativity of idea, cool factor, and technical realism), tabulating the results, and choosing Listening Cup as the ultimate winner, our troubles were just beginning. Now, how to build one?

We've published quite a few amplifier circuits in MAKE magazine, and built several more that weren't published, so we had a pretty good stash of circuits to try. We went through the magazines and identified 3 potential circuits that might work. On the first day, engineering intern Eric Chu and I reached for the quick-build to test what it would be like to have a amplifier with its microphone inside a cup. We stole the amplifier module from an existing project sitting on our shelf: the "Covert Wireless Listening" device disguised as a book, from MAKE Volume 16, the "Spy Tech" issue. We cut a hole in an ordinary red plastic Dixie cup and shoved the mic in. This became our tester unit for the next few days...

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

Backwards tower PC case

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 3:14pm MST

backwards PC.jpg

Although this is an old page, it's still a clever idea, and a relatively rare example of a purely practical case mod. Mike Harrison was tired of having to crawl around behind his computer to mess with all the connections, so he turned the case around by mounting all the lights, switches, and drives in what was the back of the case, and using it with that side forward.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Computers | Digg this!

Ask MAKE: Why are some LEDs tinted?

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 2:30pm MST

Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to mattm@makezine.comor drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Jacob asks:

I'm new to electronics, and am interested in LEDs. One thing I can't figure out is why some of them are colored, while others are clear. What's the deal with that?

Hey, good question! I'd never actually thought about it before, and now that you mention it, it does seem a bit confusing. My initial guess was that the coloring might be used as a filter to block out other colors, but that doesn't make sense- in general, LEDs put out a very narrow spectrum of light, so they shouldn't need filters (and it would probably be difficult to build a filter with that narrow of a cutoff range). One exception would be more complicated LEDs such as white ones, which normally start with blue light and then use a phosphor to convert it to white light. It seemed possible that at least for those, the color could be part of the phosphor- except that white LEDs are almost always clear! Besides, the phosphor part turns out to be located right on top of the dye.

So, the best I can tell is that the tinting is added to make it easier to tell them apart when they are off. The clear ones are a pain to sort out, because you have to plug them in to figure out what color they might be. Kind of funny, but I guess that's how it goes!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Ask MAKE | Digg this!

Maker Business: Magnolia Atomworks, part 2

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 1:30pm MST

As we join fair John and Erin for leg 2 of their exciting journey, you will recall that they are in search of an online retailer to sell their delightful and most-puzzling Mystery Boxes. -- Gareth

Magnolia Atomworks, part 2: Kit design and productionBy John Edgar Park and Erin Kelly-Park

While I was busy making lists of possible cool company names and checking to see if the URLs were available, I also began to consider who the Mystery Box customer would be: Geeky? Puzzled? Mysterious? Based on our twenty minutes of "market research," we decided to contact Maker Shed and ThinkGeek, two great stores with what we perceived was the right demographic: customers who were likely to see blog posts, videos, and other buzz that we generated, on sites like Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Wired, and MAKE.

Obviously, we had a bit of an in with Maker Shed, but for ThinkGeek, I literally picked a likely contact name from their website and cold emailed them. We were thrilled when both stores placed orders for the 2009 holiday season! This was great news, but there was no way we could handle cutting hundreds of boxes in time. Outsourcing can be a bit scary. You're trusting someone else to manufacture your product and get it there on time. We were fortunate to find a perfect fit: a contract-cutter who was knowledgeable, super-helpful, and fast.

Making prototypes is one thing, full-scale manufacturing is quite another. We quickly realized that the original design would need to be revised. First of all, those Wikipedia images I used for the original box probably weren't cleared for commercial use. Secondly, due to a wood-sourcing difficulty, I needed to re-draft my design for a different dimension of lumber. Finally, the original design wasn't too easy to put together, requiring some hand-tuning of various parts that hold the box together. The kit version needed to go together right out of the box.

To solve the design problem, we hired a graphic designer friend of mine, Will Weyer, to do custom graphics. Not only were his designs gorgeous, but they etched much faster than the originals. Machine time is money. I re-drafted the slot heights for the new lumber thickness, and came up with a new design for press-fit notches that would allow the boxes to snap together easily.

Since the kit contains small parts that the children of litigious people might decide to choke on, we decided to start a limited liability corporation, or LLC. This keeps your personal and business assets separate from each other. It can also simplify taxes (or make them heinously complex; since we haven't had to do taxes yet, we're still waiting to find which it is!). I was planning to file for the LLC myself, but ran out of time (read: lost interest in researching and filling out forms), so I hired My Corporation to do it.

And so this meant that we had to finally settle on a name. "Magnolia Atomworks" was now official.

Tune in for the thrilling next chapter: Part 3: To market, to market

More:

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this!

Introduce a girl to engineering today

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 1:00pm MST

The 18th of February has been designated as Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, an offshoot of National Engineers Week.

A few days ago we asked Dr. AnnMarie Thomas, a professor of engineering at the University of St. Thomas, to share her thoughts on the occasion. If you haven't read her guest editorial, please do check it out. However, the gist was that it's our responsibility to let girls -- and everyone else! -- know that engineering and other technical vocations are options.

The IAGTED page lists activities going on nationwide. But there are things we can do as individuals to encourage girls to pursue technical careers. As AnnMarie wrote in her editorial,

I challenge all of you makers out there to introduce a girl to engineering- pick up a soldering iron, go on a factory tour, visit a windmill, or share the beauty of Bernoulli's equation. And feel free to include her little brother, father or mother!

So, readers, what are you going to do? Leave a comment.

[Image: Argonne National Laboratory]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Education | Digg this!

MAKE @ Greener Gadgets next week in NYC

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 12:38pm MST

Next week a few of us from MAKE will attend the Greener Gadgets conference in New York City.

For three years, the Greener Gadgets Conference has explored sustainable design alternatives for the electronics we use in our homes and workplace every day.

The 2010 event, held February 25 in New York City, will feature two design keynoters, Yves Behar, founder of the San Francisco design studio, fuseproject, and Robert Fabricant, vice president of creative for frog design inc.

Behar’s design studio was responsible for the design of the world’s first $100 “XO” laptop for One Laptop Per Child, a project aimed at bringing education and technology to the world’s poorest children. Fabricant leads frog’s Design for Impact initiatives, which has harnessed the power of mobile technology to combat the world’s worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Other speakers include visionaries from Green Life Smart Life, Autodesk, LaboGroup, MIT Media Lab, U.S. Green Building Council, Home Automatic Inc., Dwell magazine, Treehugger and more.

The conference closes out with the incredibly popular Greener Gadgets Design Competition, highlighting a new class of sustainable product concepts, from those that create their own energy to those that minimize the need for any electricity at all. Online registration is available until February 19. Readers can use the registration code "BLOG10" for a $50 discount.

More:

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!

Tune your guitar using LEDs

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 11:00am MST

Using the open hardware Stimmmopped, you can tune your stringed instrument using you eye rather than your ear. It works by illuminating a string with two lights, which are flashing at the frequency that the string should be vibrating at. If the tuning is off, the string will vibrate slightly faster or slower, so the illuminated part of the string will appear to be moving (due to the stroboscopic effect). Once the string is in perfect alignment, the lights will appear fixed in position. It's certainly not a new idea, however this version looks like it was designed quite well. Cool project!

I'm also guessing that you could have some fun with it as a musical note generator, if you use some photocells to pick up the frequency of the flashing lights... [via embedds]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

Best warning sign ever

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 10:14am MST

Accidental blindness has never been so funny! You can download a high-res version from the always-entertaining Mike's Electric Stuff. [via Boing, which is to say Boing]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

EKG-controlled Game of Life hoodie

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 9:00am MST

Joe Saavedra writes:

The concept is a wearable version of Conway’s Game of Life, that is controlled by the current state of your life. Essentially, a wearable extension of your heart, externalized in the form of Conway’s Life. A custom circuit includes an infrared EKG monitor that resets the Game each time a heartbeat is detected. Heartbeat data is analyzed by a hackduino which resets an ATMega48 chip, part of Adafruit’s kit controlling Life, which is embedded in the chest of a hoodie. Conductive thread is used to connect the 16 LED matrix to the circuit board which is kept in a pocket towards the bottom of the hoodie.

More:

In the Maker Shed:

Game of Life Board

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Wearables | Digg this!

'Flight of the Bumblebee' on robotic vibraphone

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 7:00am MST

Tim O'Keefe, Michael McIntyre, and Brock Roland of San Francisco State University's School of Engineering created MARV, here. That's "MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," of course. Which is a nested acronym, really. Crank it all the way out and it's "Musical Instrument Digital Interface Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," or MIDIARV, which is not nearly so catchy. Each key has two solenoids--a striker and a damper. Cool stuff. I wonder if you couldn't make one solenoid do both striking and damping? [via Hack a Day]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

Benjolin synth project - intuitive, unpredictable, fun at parties

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 6:00am MST

The latest item of interest presented by Casper Electronics could easily take centerstage at the next hardware hacking social. Casper's Benjolin Light Synth provides an intense show of color as accompaniment for its broad and unpredictable sonic palette -

This piece is built around the 2 Benjolin circuits, which is a complex, analog sound generator designed by engineer/artist/super star Rob Hordijk. I've made a bunch of modifications and added a 3 channel light globe. The globe has three high intensity LED lights in it, RED, GREEN and BLUE. I'm able to grab different signals from the circuit (not JUST the audio signal) and send them to the lights, so each color is fading and strobing in a different pattern. The result is complex color mixing madness.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

Custom billet aluminum iPhone cases

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 5:00am MST

These stylish and attractive small batch iPhone cases from EXOvault are machined from solid pieces of billet aluminum. They add a retro-futuristic charm to something already heavy on the futuristic.[Thanks, Revolverkiller!]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in iPhone | Digg this!

Relief: 3D interactive maps

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 2:00am MST

Called a "scalable actuated shape display", this project by Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf, and Hiroshi Ishii of MIT's Tangible Media Group seems especially suited for displaying terrain.

Relief is an actuated tabletop display, which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. It allows users to experience and form digital models like geographical terrain in an intuitive manner. The tabletop surface is actuated by an array of 120 motorized pins, which are controlled with a platform built upon open-source hardware and software tools. Each pin can be addressed individually and senses user input like pulling and pushing.

[via the Eyebeam ReBlog]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

More on signwriting

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 12:30am MST

In response to my "Lost Knowledge" column on sign painting (aka signwriting), one of our readers, peterman921, himself a signwriter from Southern, Oregon, sent us links to some YouTube videos of the craft. The one above is by Alicia Jennings, aka monkeysign123 on YouTube, a big rig 'striper and signwriter from the Great Northwest. This video of her painting on glass, viewed from the opposite side, so perfectly captures my childhood experience of seeing a signwriter at work while getting my hair cut, as recounted in my piece.

Monkeysign123's YouTube Channel

More:

Lost Knowledge: Sign painting

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!

BuffaloFeeds » MAKE Magazine » February 18, 2010

Feeds

MAKE Magazine (18 unread)

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 10:00pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 9:00pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 7:00pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 5:00pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 4:05pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 3:14pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 2:30pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 1:30pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 1:00pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 12:38pm MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 11:00am MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 10:14am MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 9:00am MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 7:00am MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 6:00am MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 5:00am MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 2:00am MST

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 12:30am MST