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How ball bearings are made

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 7:30pm MST

Alan at Hacked Gadgets found this neat video that shows how ball bearings are made. All of that work to make what seems like a simple part! [via Hacked Gadgets]

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Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition, THIS weekend!

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 4:30pm MST

More info on their website.

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Smallest zine in the world

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 4:00pm MST

Last year, I gave family members letters from the World's Smallest Postal Service for Christmas. They are awesome and make a fun gift.

Spotted on the MAKE Flickr pool is this professed "smallest zine in the world," an art "zine" done with eraser-carved stamps. I love the idea of doing eraser carvings on pencil heads. I've done them using art gum erasers, but never tried pencils.

Smallest Zine In The World

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Awesome ultra-low-tech DIY movie making method

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 2:55pm MST

This minute-long short by Mindfruit Studios is called "Memoirs of a Scanner," and was made using only a scanner, plus software to stitch the still images together into a movie. It has characters, special effects, and a coherent plot that tells the story of an episode in the life of a business office. From the copier's perspective. [via Neatorama]

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In the Makers Market: Build-Your-Own Ratmobile kit

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 1:30pm MST

Xylocopa Design just added a Build-Your-Own Ratmobile kit in their Makers Market store. Keep in mind the ratmobile pictured above is a fully painted version. Your kit will arrive unassembled, and unpainted, but that's half the fun!

Construct your very own ratmobile in minutes with this easy-to-build kit by Xylocopa Design. Your friends will be envious, and your enemies will flee (or is it the other way around?) when they see the glory of this fantastic little vehicle. Comes as an unpainted, unfinished kit. Just add glue (and, for the adventurous, paint, ornamentation, accessories, etc)!

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Synchronous hackathon March 20-21

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 1:00pm MST

The cats at Hackerspaces.org are calling for a worldwide hackathon in hackerspaces the weekend of March 20th, 2010. These events are the third weekend of every month, with the inaugural event held last November.

Hackerspaces participating in past events have included Chicago's PS1, Luxembourg's Syn2cat, Ireland's TOG, France's Tetalab, Saint Louis's Arch Reactor and a bunch more besides. Most spaces share ustream feeds during the events.

Might be a good opportunity to work on your Robot Build projects? Is your hackerspace participating? Does a monthly event have value? Leave your thoughts in comments.

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April Fools' Day preview: A printer that shreds

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 12:00pm MST

Tired of an old, clunky printer destroying more paper than it prints? Instructables user laxap helps along a printer aspiring to be a shredder by gutting it and installing an actual shredder. Almost as fun as smashing the thing to bits, like in Office Space.

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Back in stock: Gakken SX-150

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 11:30am MST

The Gakken SX-150 is one of the most popular kits in the Maker Shed, and we just got a fresh new supply! We have posted a lot of projects that involve hacking and modifying of the SX-150. We've see Arduino controlled versions, fooling around with plasma, incredible analog cassette hacks, button mods, and more! Collin did a really nice video review too! Did you hack and mod your SX-150? Are you planning on it? Let us know in the comments. Thanks!

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Cardboard horse to hide paper tiger

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 11:00am MST

Artists Juniper and T.J. Tangpuz built this paper horse out of cardboard and wire ties. Most impressive! [via boing boing]

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How-To: Collect whale snot using an RC helicopter

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 10:15am MST

Lately we've had lots of folks writing in seeking practical advice on collecting tissue samples for use in studying whaleborne disease. I had no idea there were so many amateur cetopathologists out there!

Anyway, as you folks know--all too well, I'm sure--it is extremely difficult to collect blood from a wild whale without injuring or killing it in the process. However, and as even a child can tell you, the next best thing to live whale blood is live whale snot. Turns out it spews from their blowholes when they exhale, so the process is really very simple:

Find whale.
Hold petri dish over blowhole to intercept spout.
Return to lab, enjoy sample.

Step 2 is actually the hard part. And although your first instinct may be to just jump in your rowboat, paddle out to a whale pod, lean way out over the side with your sample container, and wait, that's actually not as safe as it might sound. Each year, untold millions of scientists die attempting this maneuver. Their sun-bleached bones litter beaches all along the Pacific coast.

Enter Dr. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, of the Zoological Society of London. Her recent paper in Animal Conservation (abstract), irresistibly entitled "A novel non-invasive tool for disease surveillance of free-ranging whales and its relevance to conservation programs," introduces the ground-breaking methodology of strapping a petri dish to a toy RC helicopter and flying it into the spout. This landmark work stands not only to revolutionize our understanding of whale disease, but to save countless lives, and establishes Dr. Acevedo-Whitehouse as a serious contender for this year's (Ig) Nobel Prize.

[via The Thoughtful Animal]

P.S. Dr. Acevedo-Whitehouse, you are made of awesome. And although I have never met you and probably never will, I love you with all my heart.

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How-To: Toddler's Guitar Hero controller

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 9:01am MST

What do you do when your toddler's having trouble reaching the buttons on the guitar for Beatles Rock Band? Why, modify it and make an Instructable, that's what!

Toddler's Guitar Hero controller

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Gear up for the Make: Robot Build, sponsored by Jameco

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 7:30am MST

We here at MAKE are thrilled to have teamed up with the fine folks at Jameco to bring you The Make: Robot Build. Over the next eight weeks, we'll be featuring a series of tutorials here on the site about the basics of robot building, from overall design considerations to mechanical construction, electronics, and programming. The information in these tutorials and the build contest are designed so that anyone can participate, even if you don't know anything about electronics or robots! On March 27, we'll officially launch The Make: Robot Build contest, and over the ensuing weeks, each week, we'll cover a different subsystem of robot construction (drive train, controllers, sensors, etc.) and help contestants in building these subsystems on their bot. Builders will post progress images to the MAKE Flickr pool and we have a topic set up in the MAKE Forums for discussing your project.

The Goal: Build a CoasterBot!
The goal of this series and the contest is to teach you how to build a simple robot and for you to learn all of the various aspects of design and the mechanical and electronic systems used in robots. Contestants will build "CoasterBots," mini robot development platforms, made using CD/DVD media as the main body components ("coaster" being slang for a dead/damaged CD/DVD). Your goal is to create a CoasterBot that can navigate a space on its own, avoiding obstacles, and that is designed so that additional sensor systems (proximity, heat, light, sound, etc.) can be added "on top" of this obstacle-avoidance behavior. Contestants are free to use the CD/DVD media in any way they choose. Extra points will be given for creativity and innovation in the overall design.

We will have a two-week prep phase where we'll post overview articles here about basic robot design and construction and to allow time for readers to start planning out their design and to gather needed parts and supplies. Then, each week, we'll cover a different build phase, from design and chassis/drive train, to microcontrollers and sensors. The final two weeks will be devoted to finishing up the bots, fleshing out your documentation, and submitting your project(s). Please see the timeline and further details on The Make: Robot Build contest page. You can enter as many bots as you like, but you can only do a single entry for each one.

The Contest and Prizes
The contest will begin at 12:01am PDT on March 27, 2010 and will end at 11:59 p.m. PDT on May 7, 2010. Winners will be announced on May 14th, 2010.

Judging Criteria
The robots entered into the contest will be judged on the following criteria:

50% Overall Robot Design
20% Creative Use of Materials and Innovation of Design
20% Project Documentation
10% Degree of Improvement (from early phases of the competition)

The Prizes

The Grand Prize is $500 Cash (in the form of a pre-paid credit card) and a free ticket to Maker Faire Bay Area 2010. The $500 can be used towards travel to the Faire, as the winning robot will be featured at Maker Faire. The Grand Prize winner will also receive a Jameco jacket.
Second Prize is a Parallax Stingray Robot and a Jameco T-shirt.
Third Prize is a $100 Jameco gift certificate, along with a Jameco T-shirt.

Every contestant who finishes the robot build and documents his or her finished project will receive a Maker's Notebook from the Maker Shed.

The Robot Build Newsletter
We'll be mailing out a newsletter each week of the contest with the latest contest details, tutorials, images from contestants' designs, build tips, technical advice, and more. We'll also be sending out word of the final contest submission form through the newsletter, so if you want to be a contestant, you need to subscribe. All we need is your name and email address (which we'll keep confidential):

Name:

Email:

The Jameco Robot Build Kit Bundle
Jameco has put together a core parts bundle to make it easy to gather the necessary parts for the contest. It includes a Solarbotics Ardweeny Arduino microcontroller, a Solarbotics Breadboard Voltage Regulator, an L293D motor controller, two Hi-Tec HS-322HD servomotors, two Parallax BOE-BOT/Sumobot wheel/tire sets, two lever switches, a breadboard, battery holders, wire, hardware, all sorts of goodies for building your coasterbot. You do not have to buy this kit to participate, and it won't be counted in the judging, but we at MAKE and the folks at Jameco put it together to make getting started in this contest as easy as possible. You can purchase your Jameco bundle and other parts here.

BTW: In the Jameco parts bundle above, the "Ardweeny kit" is the Solarbotics Ardweeny Arduino, the world's smallest Arduino microcontroller, and the Solarbotics Breadboard Voltage Regulator is also included in the kit (parts no. 2115750 on that list).

Check out the Make: Robot Build contest page for more info, the build timeline, and full contest rules. Matt Mets and I will be heading up the project/contest. We think this is going to be a whole lot of fun and we hope you'll join in!

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How-To: Buy sustainably-managed lumber

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 7:00am MST

FSC plywood pic.JPG

Photo courtesy Coastal Treated Products Company.

In a discussion in the comments on yesterday's "plastic plywood" post, I mentioned that I was often reluctant to buy plywood and other "new" timber products at the hardware store because I didn't know how to tell if I was buying forest-friendly wood or not. A kindly gent named Hank responded to tell me that it was as simple as looking for the seal of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and supposedly that even the big orange store "is surprisingly good at stocking FSC certified lumber." I haven't verified that last bit for myself, but I did spend a long time googling around yesterday afternoon and satisfied myself that these FSC folks are on the level. That's their "tree with a check mark" seal in the photo, above. Now I know what to look for. And so do you. [Thanks, Hank!]

More:

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Weekend Project: Making the Weekend Projects

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 6:00am MST

Enclosure: [download]

Take a look "behind the scenes" as Kipkay shares what goes into shooting the Weekend Project videos and shares some tips to help you be a better movie maker. To download the Making The Weekend Projects video click here

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Giant 3D printer can print buildings (theoretically)

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 2:00am MST

Blueprint Magazine describes a very neat machine:

In a small shed on an industrial park near Pisa is a machine that can print buildings. The machine itself looks like a prototype for the automotive industry. Four columns independently support a frame with a single armature on it. Driven by CAD software installed on a dust-covered computer terminal, the armature moves just millimetres above a pile of sand, expressing a magnesium-based solution from hundreds of nozzles on its lower side. It makes four passes. The layer dries and Enrico Dini recalibrates the armature frame. The system deposits the sand and then inorganic binding ink. The exercise is repeated. The millennia-long process of laying down sedimentary rock is accelerated into a day. A building emerges. This machine could be used to construct anything. Dini wants to build a cathedral with it. Or houses on the moon.

What do you think, readers? What would you build with a giant 3D printer that lays down sticky sand?

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