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Nicely done, Modified easy bake oven. Jeri writes - Part of the home chip bath project, fiber optic manufacturing.
This was an attempt to make a small furnace that could be used for semiconductors and fusing fiber optics. It didn't work so well, but it might be worth trying again in the future.
Back in January, when we were kicking around ideas for monthly themes, and the movie making theme, Statff Editor Arwen O'Reilly Griffith sent out the following email about a great "maker scene" in a film. This got me thinking. There are probably a lot of such moments in films, some in movies otherwise best forgotten, of characters showing cool hacks, making-something-from-nothing MacGyver moments, and the like. When I was a kid, movies like The Great Escape, Swiss Family Robinson, and wacky TV fare like Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island, and Wild, Wild, West fed my maker fantasies. In honor of tomorrow night's Academy Awards, what are some of your favorite "maker scenes" in films? Post 'em in the comments. -- Gareth
Arwen writes:
The film Sahara (it was lousy) has some awesome scene in it. The main character and his sidekick have managed to escape their shackles in the back of a pickup truck and have trekked across the desert. Just as they're about to give up hope, they crest a sand dune and discover the ruins of a crashed plane. The hero says: "I bet you $100 there's a toolkit somewhere in there..." His sidekick says, "I hate to burst your insane bubble, but I don't think we're going to get this thing to work."
Then there's a glorious scene of the two of them racing across the desert in the jerry-rigged plane. They use the one remaining wing as a sail and balance in on one working wheel. It's awesome!!! Makers at their best, and ALMOST worth the rest of the film :-)
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Inspired by a heating pad they purchased, Windell and Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories show how to make a fake seven segment display. Using a carefully constructed plastic bezel, a potentiometer, and some regular LEDs, they were able to create a faux digital dial, with a way cooler color scheme than one would find on regular seven segment displays. Nice hack!
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From the MAKE Forums:
Hobby servos are great for quick jobs, but if you attempt to do very precise work with them, their limited resolution quickly becomes an issue. Forum user came up with an elegant solution, using a high-resolution magnetic sensor to detect the rotation:
Modified continuous-rotation servos are used extensively by roboticists due to their small form-factor, enclosed motor-gearbox, ease of mounting and high-availability. Some users keep the original drive electronics and the potentiometer feedback element but this approach allows for limited position control and velocity control / profiling. Others tend to remove them and use external control/drive boards and custom-made encoders. Ideally one would prefer to have the feedback element and the new drive electronics enclosed inside the servo. Unfortunately hacks involving optical devices and code-wheels have very limited resolution and require a lot of precise work.Magnetic encoders use spinning current Hall technology to measure magnetic flux distribution across the surface of the chip. They typically come in high resolutions and require very few external components. The operational setup requires a small disk magnet with circumferential field distribution to be attached on the rotating element whose angular deflection is to be measured, and in close proximity to the sensor IC.
This hack utilises Austrian Microsystems' sensor IC as feedback element for a modified servo. The servo to be hacked is the popular Hitec HS485 HB.
Of course, you could probably just buy a higher resolution servo, but where's the fun in that?
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Sunlight Labs, known for opening America's government, had a problem when they recently moved facilities. Creating new keys for team members was becoming costly, so they figured out an alternative method of providing secure access using a WRT54GL, easily sourced components, and a trusty copy of Make: Electronics. [Thanks, Nicko!]
With the firmware installed, I was able to SSH into the router and perform some simple manipulations of the system's GPIOs -- General Purpose Input/Outputs. These connect to things like the system's LEDs and switches, and can be controlled in software. I selected a GPIO that didn't seem to be used by OpenWRT -- it illuminates the "DMZ" LED on the front panel -- and wrote a very simple script to control it. I could now flip a tiny light on and off from a network connection.
In the Maker Shed:
Make: Electronics
Our Price: $34.99
Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun and experiential way? Start working on some excellent projects as soon as you crack open this unique, hands-on book. Build the circuits first, then learn the theory behind them! With Make: Electronics, you'll learn all of the basic components and important principles through a series of "learn by discovery" experiments. And you don't need to know a thing about electricity to get started.
I just love watching the inspired tinkerings of sleep-deprived Club-Mate-swilling hackers. Readers, have you participated in an all-night hackstravaganza? Was it a good experience? What did you work on?
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CDM sends word of a call for works utilizing the simplest of all interfaces -
CALL FOR WORKS – KOKOROMI’S ONE-BUTTON GAME OBJECTSThe submission guidelines are rather broad including "games, toys, interactive artwork, musical instruments – any self-made device that provides game-inspired user interaction". More details over at Create Digital Motion.
DEADLINE: MARCH 1 (receipt)
What can you do with one button? In an age of ever-more-complex touch interfaces, we’d like to imagine what a single, tangible, hardware button can mean for a design.
To celebrate the arrival of their Gamma game event in San Francisco, art game collective Kokoromi is teaming up with Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion to launch a call for ONE-BUTTON OBJECTS. This call seeks to inspire unique hardware/software hacks that integrate playful, one-button interaction within a standalone machine or device. The curators are seeking circuit-bent gadgets, retro-fitted consoles, mechanical constructions, custom electronics, and other one-off creations. During the week of the Game Developers Conference, the Game Objects will be featured in an exhibit at the Gray Area Foundation, a new collaboration and exhibition venue near the Moscone Center, in the Tenderloin. A selection of these Objects will be shown at the opening night Gamma party, alongside the software-based Gamma4 one-button games, on March 10th at the Mezzanine in SoMa.
Here's an interesting idea by Kenyan maker Dominic Wanjihia. By taking the rim from a Sufuria cooking pot, flipping it upside down, and attaching it to a slightly smaller pot, he was able to more efficiently capture heat from a fire. The result should be that less fuel is required to cook a meal, which is both an economic and environmental win.
This might actually solve a problem that I've had at home. One of my cooking pots has small plastic handles on it's sides instead of a single long one. So much heat escapes from my gas range around the side of the pot that it heats up the handles, making it difficult to pick up. Of course I could just use a pot with a different handle, however Dominic's device makes me wonder if that heat would be better captured if the pot had an oversize bottom to completely cover the burner. Think it would work? Does anyone sell them? If not, I might have to break out the welder and do some experiments... [via afrigadget]
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The 50-cent word here is "steganography," which per Wikipedia is "the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message." You may have heard, for instance, that you can encode a hidden message in, say, an image file, in such a way that no one who wasn't looking for it would know that it's there.
Well, this morning Danger Room linked to a post at IEEE Spectrum to the effect that Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is particularly susceptible to steganographic hijinks. Wired's David Pierce put it this way:
There's only the smallest possible time for interception to happen since all data is stored locally rather than redirected through a central server. Plus, since so much data is being sent back and forth, large messages can be sent without causing any alarm. Unlike an image or video, which can be downloaded and analyzed at anytime, there's no way to get at and store files sent with VoIP.
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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If you redesign or remake gadgets for your own use, Sunyoung Kim and Eric Paulos want to hear from you.
Do you have any obsolete electronics that you remade or redesigned for difference purpose of use than originally designed? We want to hear about your experience of DIY remaking or redesigning of an obsolete electronics. Please share it with us for us to further research on sustainable design by completing the survey located at the website below:
[www.wonderment.org]
We are researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studying creative reuse of domestic e-waste for sustainability. This study is intended to explore the experience of green activists of how they reuse, redesign, and remanufacture their obsolete electronics for purposes than originally designed.
Pleo photo by Jeff Keyzer
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Griffin I'Net has a nice story with pictures about hacking a Kindle DX to add Bluetooth support! [via RuutAckses]
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From the MAKE Flickr pool:
Flickr user rtadlock made this stylish panning timelapse camera using an old kitchen timer, and it came out beautifully!
If you need inspiration on how to make your own, check out the Time-lapse panning article in MAKE, Volume 15, page 159. Happy snapping!
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We've seen plenty of human-powered fair attractions, however most of them make use of pedals, levers or perhaps re-purposed bicycles as their interface for locomotion. This one is a bit simpler than that, as the operator just grabs onto the guard rail and pulls, kind of like a vertical roundabout. Scary, but totally fun looking. I'd love to see these in playgrounds! [via boingboing]
More:
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The latest crop of high-end DSLR cameras are capable of shooting beautiful video, however they can be difficult to use because they cannot autofocus while in movie mode. It turns out that film movie cameras work the same way, and the solution is to have really accurate manual controls that you can use to make sure that the camera is always focused to the correct position. Of course, really accurate manual controls also means expensive, so it's nice to see this hack by Mac user slerman, a follow and rack focus rig. He used the gears from an old hand drill to make a focus lever for his Canon camera, which allows him to change camera focus by turning an easy-to-use crank. [via Gizmodo]
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Follow along with Android hacker Taylor Wimberly as he roots a Nexus One "Superphone". Amaze your friends (and perhaps cause seizures) by strobing the LED flash. Overclock the CPU for a modern twist on the classic parlour game Hot Potato. Remember folks, if you can't open it, you don't pwn it. [via Android and Me]
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Spotted in the Make: Forums:
Need to do some heavy lifting of the physical kind, but only have some wimpy servo motors on hand? Why not follow Antonb's directions to Hack your Servo, and turn it into a powerful linear actuator. The instructions are a little tricky to follow, however the basic idea is to use the servo motor as a high-torque gearbox, which is then used to turn a screw to raise or lower your load. Using this method, he claims to be able to lift a 10kg load, which is pretty impressive!
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This morning's post about remote controls prompted Austrian maker Markus Hirsch to send a link to a project he's working on: a GameBoy Advance remote control.
The project, which is still in development, calls for adding an ATMEL AVR tiny44 microcontroller, an IR diode and an IR receiver to a GameBoy. Basically, the tiny44 and IR diode/receiver would be soldered to a card and the card is inserted into the unit's game port.
The ATtiny44 converts the received IR data into serial data that can be read by the GameBoy Advance. And vice versa the GameBoy can send data to the module. The data is converted into pulses and modulated to the carrier frequency of 37KHz. This is compatible with all 38 and 36 KHz devices.
More:
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I love these makeshift hidey-bars people make in offices...
Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to get up to go do something, but didn't want to leave a game for fear your system would go to sleep while you were away and you couldn't use a software hack to nudge the system? Maker Todd Harrison had a similar issue and decided to build a device that closes a circuit every 25 seconds inside a Wiimote shaped candy tin.
It's just a simple timing circuit made of discreet elements that engages a reed relay ever 25 sec. This relay in turn closes a circuit in my keyboard for the left arrow key. Being this external circuit is self powered I can simply turn it on when I want a game or application to think I'm at my computer when I'm not. I know there are software hacks that can do this and I did try a lot of them but this particular on line game I play had a way to block such software hacks. I had to go old school, which is not hard for an old guy, and do it with hardware.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gaming | Digg this!
Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calendar. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calendar!
Coming up this week:
Open Hack Session @Baltimore Node
Baltimore, MD
Thursday, Jan 7, 2010, 7pm - 9pm
HamCram: Earn You Amateur Radio License in a Day
San Francisco, CA
Saturday, Jan 9, 2010, 8am - 5pm
CMOS Music I // 1-bit chiptunes w/o programming @NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Jan 9, 2010, 1pm - 4pm
Using Transistors @Metrix Create:Space
Seattle, WA
Sunday, Jan 10, 2010, 2pm - 4:30pm
Arduino Night @Vancouver Hacker Space
Vancouver, BC
Tuesday, Jan 12, 2010, 7pm - 11:45pm
GO-Tech (Ann Arbor) January Meeting
Ann Arbor, MI
Tuesday, Jan 12, 2010, 7pm - 10pm
Project Lab with Expert Included
Berkeley, CA
Tuesday, Jan 12, 2009, 3pm - 6pm
Drop-in Arduino and Electronics classes
Berkeley, CA
Tuesday, Jan 12, 2009, 7pm - 9pm
Start planning for:
Introduction to Electronics Workshop @Metrix Create:Space
Seattle, WA
Thursday, Jan 14, 2010, 6:30pm - 9pm
Thursday Talk on Twilio at HacDC: Build your own Dial-a-Song!
Washington DC
Thursday, Jan 14, 2010 7pm - 8:30pm
Motor Control Lab @Willoughby and Baltic
Somerville, MA
Saturday, Jan 16, 2010, 10am - 4pm
Solder Your Own Freeduino Workshop @LVL1
Louisville, KY
Saturday, Jan 16, 2010 1pm - 4pm
Arduino Night @the Transistor
Provo, UT
Saturday, Jan 16, 2010, 1:30pm - 4pm
Fun Kits @HacDC
Washington, DC
Sunday, Jan 17, 2010 - 2pm - 5pm
PULSE: Art and Technology Festival
Savannah, GA
Wednesday, Jan 20 - Sunday, Jan 31, 2010
Mechatronic Art, Design and Fabrication @Willoughby and Baltic
Somerville, MA
Thursday, Jan 21, 2010, 7pm - 9:30pm, then repeats
Rockland Robotics Club Meeting
Nanuet, NY
Friday, Jan 22, 2010, 7pm - 9pm
In these budget conscious times, schools who want to integrate modern interactive technologies have a choice, buy a SmartBoard , or build your own for a fraction of the cost. Johnny Chung Lee has done some of the groundbreaking work with the Wii, the build instructions and downloads can be found on his site. In addition to the Wiimote, you'll need an infrared light emitting pen, which you can build yourself for short money.
Since the Wiimote can track sources of infrared (IR) light, you can track pens that have an IR led in the tip. By pointing a wiimote at a projection screen or LCD display, you can create very low-cost interactive whiteboards or tablet displays. Since the Wiimote can track upto 4 points, up to 4 pens can be used. It also works great with rear-projected displays.
Rather than spending thousands of dollars per classroom, students and faculty could make them in-house while helping to transform the school into a more technology-rich learning environment. With a project like this in your school, it could be a great way to do some electronics, system design and get a taste of mass production of the components. While this may not fit in to your current curriculum to have students build these systems, it could be a great way to collaborate across subject areas, or it could provide a great after school club activity.
Has your school built one of these $40 smartboards? How well do they work in comparison to other interactive display systems? Let us know about your experiments and experiences in the comments. [Thanks Rachel!]
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If you've got a jailbroken iPhone and want to use a bluetooth keyboard with it you can now download BTstack Keyboard in the Cydia Store. [via theiphoneblog]
More:
It's been out less than a week and the Barnes & Noble Nook eBook reader has already been rooted. Interestingly enough, it would seem that the eBook reader's default custom Android system is installed on a MicroSD card. Upon gaining root access applications such as the terminal emulator have been successfully run on the e-ink display. For a detailed teardown check out the nookdevs wiki. [via AndroidandMe]
This neat video about "Radio Hams" from 1939 has recently been circulating on the ham email lists. It's neat to see the excitement and sense of adventure that people had for hacks or "kinks" as they called it way back when...
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Coins to Frequent Flier miles "hack" via DF.
Enthusiasts of frequent-flier mileage have all kinds of crazy strategies for racking up credits, but few have been as quick and easy as turning coins into miles.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this!
At least several hundred mile-junkies discovered that a free shipping offer on presidential and Native American $1 coins, sold at face value by the U.S. Mint, amounted to printing free frequent-flier miles. Mileage lovers ordered more than $1 million in coins until the Mint started identifying them and cutting them off.
Coin buyers charged the purchases, sold in boxes of 250 coins, to a credit card that offers frequent-flier mile awards, then took the shipments straight to the bank. They then used the coins they deposited to pay their credit-card bills. Their only cost: the car trip to make the deposit.Richard Baum, a software-company consultant who lives in New Jersey, ordered 15,000 coins. "I never unrolled them," he says. "The UPS guy put them directly in my trunk." Patricia Hansen, a San Diego retiree who loves to travel, ordered $10,000 in coins from the Mint. "My husband took them to the bank," Ms. Hansen says, and she earned
Most of the iPhone controller hacks I've seen tend to use the accelerometer along with on on-board camera. Walky is a bipedal walking robot that's controlled using a natural gestural interface. [via GeekyGadgets]
Yuta Sugiura and his colleagues at the Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University, have developed a new control scheme for robots and virtual characters called Walky for the iPhone. Rather than using a cumbersome game controller or keyboard, which may pose a problem for novice users, they can use Walky to control walking, turning, jumping, kicking, and other actions through simple finger gestures on the iPhone's touch screen.
Last month I posted about SoundCloud's slick music sharing site, really the best I've seen. David Noël from SoundCloud posted in the comments about one of their hacks from London Hack Day called CitySounds.fm. I've been tuning into the site a lot for a bit of the unexpected and to gain exposure to artists I may not have discovered on my own. The site pulls tracks and sets uploaded to SoundCloud in real time according to location. The homepage (The Board) looks like the screenshot above and represents the most active cities. Click on a city and hear a stream of the latest music uploaded from that location. Alternately, the popular chart represents the 32 most popular cities according to tweets put out about those cities. If you make music, you can sign up on SoundCloud for free, upload tracks, and see them appear on CitySounds.fm right away. There are also individual city pages, like this one for Chicago, which list stats and most popular genres coming out of that city. Getting bored with your music collection? Check it out.
I love "lazyweb" sites, Q&A sites, and other crowdsourced resources that deal in instant-gratification content. I especially like them when the signal-to-noise ratio is high; when a lot of really smart, inspired people come together to share their expertise.
As of a few weeks ago, O'Reilly now has its own such site, O'Reilly Answers, a place where O'Reilly authors, editors, conference speakers and goers, readers, i.e. the O'Reilly community, can share knowledge and ideas. Some have asked: how is this any different from StackOverflow? StackOverflow is about programming. O'Reilly Answers is about anything its community of users wants it to be about. The site's tagline is: "Clever Hacks. Creative Ideas. Innovative Solutions." If that's what it turns out to be about, it'll definitely be a place where you'll want to hang.
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Eric Lowry built this sweet WoW magic-user costume for his son. It has LED health and mana bars, LED magic power in the gloves, and an LED, er, "touch-sensitive fairy companion." There's one Arduino for the gloves and status bars, and another for the companion.
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MAKE columnist and Boing Boing super-blogger, Cory Doctorow, has just released his latest novel, called Makers(!) I just got my copy and tucked into it. So far, so awesome. Cory's books always crackle with such amazing ideas, technological and cultural hacks, that seem just over the horizon, or already in some sketchy warehouse or nerd's basement, just on the other side of town. Makers is no exception.
Cory says, of his latest effort:
Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.
As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions.
Publisher's Weekly writes:
In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale.
Congrats, Cory!
Here's the book's website.
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Check out this cool Android-based head mounted display. Andrew Lim of recombu.com used an HTC Magic running Google Street View, safety goggles, and some cardboard to fashion one of the coolest HMD this side of Lawnmowerman. [Thanks, Andrew!]
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The "tools" section of media artist Karl Klomp's website documents an impressive amount of bent, hacked and homebrew hardware for video manipulation. Devices such as the Failter (seen above)series go through a number of incarnations while Karl experiments with different hardware and uncovers its glitch-ability. The retro-simple feel of the enclosures give give it all a nicely 'scientific' almost medical feel. Be sure to check out his device gallery/ project list for more examples. Thanks to Becky for pointing this one out!
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It's tricky getting a keyboard working with an iPhone. Why is that? Does Apple go out of their way to make the two incompatible? It sure seems like it. With such an awesome touch interface you'd think they'd have the keyboard thing figured out. Luckily there are folks like maker Ben Kurtz who go out of their way to scratch an itch. Using an Arduino Diecimila, breakout board, female PS/2 connector, and sundry components Ben has built an interface to connect a full-sized keyboard to his jailbroken iPhone. It's a bit circuitous, but it gets the job done using easily resourced parts.
How To Connect a PS/2 Keyboard to the iPhone [via hackaday]
If you're interested in building a jailbreak-free keyboard interface for your iPhone, check out chapter 12 in iPhone Hacks.
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Motorola's new Android UI has been ported to the HTC G1. The accompanying video of the unofficial build shows off many of the user enhancements shipping with the newer Motorola Android based phones. [via Android and Me]
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Circuit-bending/music machine-building maestro Gijs Gieskes has posted the details of his latest creation, a synth that uses the SEGA video RAM as an audio source (after it's been slowed down via a binary counter).
Check out his use of magnetic patch bays to switch up the sounds. His tutorial on how to make the patch cords can be found here.
More:
Make: Online's coverage of Gijs Gieskes' instruments
Hawking now Director of Research at Cambridge... Steps down as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University...
A transcription of physicist Stephen Hawking's audio message to Newsnight in which he explains why he is standing down from the prestigious academic title of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Previous holders of the position include Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Babbage.
Ok gang, PREDICTION TIME who will be the next Lucasian Professor of Mathematics? Post your prediction(s) up in the comments, winner will gets a copy of Astronomy Hacks.
So far it's been...
1664 Isaac Barrow
1669 Sir Isaac Newton
1702 William Whiston
1711 Nicholas Saunderson
1739 John Colson
1760 Edward Waring
1798 Isaac Milner
1820 Robert Woodhouse
1822 Thomas Turton
1826 Sir George Biddell Airy
1828 Charles Babbage
1839 Joshua King
1849 Sir George Stokes
1903 Sir Joseph Larmor
1932 Paul Dirac
1969 Sir James Lighthill
1979 Stephen Hawking
In 2395 it will be Data, but that won't happen for awhile.
Got an awesome idea for a cell phone project, and wish you could get it funded? Then you might want to check out Nokia's PUSH N900 contest. They're accepting proposals until October 11th, and the contest winner will receive funding and N900 devices to build their project. From their website:
The brief is simple: tell us how you would hack and mod the N900 & Maemo to connect the N900 to something you love. An expert judging panel will be selecting winning submissions and the groups behind them will receive N900 devices, funding and support to develop their PUSH idea. And once they're complete, we'll share them with the rest of the world with a series of installations in Nokia Flagship Stores across the globe.
To help get your imagination going, check out these N900-based hacks that we covered earlier.
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Michael Linnell e-mailed us these shots showing a clever hack he uses to bend small plastic strips at his soldering station. The soldering pencil is reversed in the holder to position its barrel near the surface of the strip held in the "helping hands." Radiant heat from the barrel softens the plastic along a parallel line for folding. Michael adds, "Just make sure you leave about 1/4 to 1/8 inch of air space between the pencil and the plastic. Both of the items used for this bender are standard Radio Shack items."
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A Personal Perspective
by Robert Bruce Thompson
Bob Thompson is our Science Curator at Make: Online and in the Maker Shed. He's the author of numerous O'Reilly and Make: Books titles, including Building the Perfect PC, Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders, Astronomy Hacks, and Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. I asked if he would write a little bit about his take on the Make: Science Room and why he thinks it's important. Here's his response. - Gareth Branwyn
Like a kid in a candy store. That's how I felt back in April when I joined the MAKE team as Science Curator, tasked with building out the science content and the Make: Science Room microsite. Our goals were and are ambitious: over the coming weeks, months, and years, to produce and publish a huge, freely downloadable collection of hands-on, how-to home science articles and videos for DIY science enthusiasts and home schoolers, and to support those articles and videos with high-quality home science equipment, chemicals, and science kits at competitive prices, in the Maker Shed.
Here we are six months later, and thanks to a massive effort by the entire MAKE team, the plan has become a reality. The first couple of dozen chemistry and forensics articles are posted in the Make" Science Room, with dozens more in the pipeline that we'll roll out in batches every week. We'll eventually expand to cover astronomy, biology, earth science, physics, and other sciences. We've shot the first half dozen videos (although my inexperience with video production and editing means those aren't quite ready to roll). We have more than 150 lab equipment items in stock at Maker Shed--everything from beakers and test tubes to balances and thermometers to microscopes and calorimeters-and about the same number of specialty chemicals. Maker Shed also has some serious science kits in stock-everything from lab glassware and hardware kits to chemical kits, from microscope starter kits and staining kits to specialty kits for lead testing and fingerprinting and bacteriology-with many more to come!
For the past few days, I've been sidelined by an attack of vertigo, which has given me some enforced downtime to think about what all this means to me. The Science Room is the culmination of things that have been important to me since I was in junior high school more than 40 years ago. I built my first home lab at age 11, and I've been an amateur scientist ever since. For a while, I flirted with becoming a professional scientist, majoring in chemistry in college and grad school. But, as much as I love science, I eventually decided that I didn't want to devote my life to working with just one aspect of it. Instead, I've made science in one form or another my primary hobby ever since.
Ironically, when I took the Kuder Occupational Interest exam in high school, the top three occupations it recommended for me were High School Science Teacher, University Chemistry Professor, and Research Scientist. The focus on science was obvious, but I somehow missed the focus on teaching science. So, forty years later, things have come full circle, and I'm now devoting most of my attention to teaching people, particularly young people, about science. It looks like the Kuder results had me pegged all along.
When someone asks me why I believe so strongly in the importance of teaching science, and in particular why I emphasize home science, my reply is simple: science is important-critically so--and our schools are, with a few exceptions, doing a very poor job of teaching and encouraging it. It's not that I expect (or even want) everyone to become a professional scientist (although we certainly need more young scientists to replace the legions of scientists my age who are nearing retirement). It's that universal basic science literacy--a general understanding of science and the scientific method--is as important to society as universal general literacy. In an increasingly technical world, it's crucially important that we educate our children--the future voters and politicians--and ourselves to have a basic understanding of science and the ability to think critically and evaluate issues based on understanding rather than emotion.
If the schools can't or won't teach science, there's no real alternative but doing it ourselves. Let's face it, not a lot of kids are going to sit spellbound reading a science book. Some, but not enough. The way to get kids (and adults) interested in science is to encourage them to do real science -- hands-on, practical, and fun stuff. Things that let them get their hands dirty, exploring science up-close and personal. And that's what the Make: Science Room is all about.
I'm honored to have been given the opportunity to help get the Science Room up and running, and I can't wait to see how it develops and grows. We don't know exactly how things will develop, because that will in large part be determined by you, our readers. Please visit the Science Room often. Comment on the articles. Tell us what you like and don't like. Give us your ideas and suggestions. The idea of the Make: Science Room is to build a community, and we can't do that without you.
This way to the Make: Science Room >>
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Introducing the Make: Science Room
Zipit hacker Hunter Davis runs through installing Linux on the low-cost WiFi connected IM device in his latest tutorial. Complete with Fluxbox window manager, mouse, audio and wireless, the Zipit can be transformed into an inexpensive Linux mobile device that begs further modification.
[via hackaday]
This project began when I read the following entry [#274] in Volume 1 of Popular Mechanic's 1913 The Boy Mechanic:
The round lead weight for shot-putting or hammer throwing can be cast in a hollow cardboard or pressed-paper ball, sold in department and toy stores for 10 cents. Cut a 1/2-in. hole in the ball as shown in Fig. 1 and place it with the hole up in damp sand and press or tamp the sand lightly around the ball as shown in the section, Fig. 2. Cover over about 1 in. deep. A wood plug inserted in the hole will prevent any sand falling inside. When the sand is tamped in and the plug removed, it leaves a gate for the metal. Pour melted lead into the gate until it is full, then, when cool, shake it out from the sand and remove the charred paper. A file can be used to remove any rough places. The dry paper ball prevents any sputtering of the hot lead.
This idea of a hollow card or paper form buried in plain sand as a sacrificial mold for poured metal parts interested me. As the internet papercraft explosion has taught us, paper is really not a bad medium for 3D design, especially for the cost. Software like Pepakura Designer will convert any 3D digital model into a papercraft one that can be printed out, cut out, folded up, and glued or taped together to make a reasonably accurate real-world replica of the original. What if, instead of using the paper as a positive representation, one were to use it simply as a negative space--a volume, supported by dry sand, that would survive just long enough to impart its form to molten metal poured inside?
As a first experiment, I designed a paper template for the pieces of a classic put-together puzzle often called "The Four Piece Pyramid." The challenge is to use the four identical pieces to form a symmetrical three-sided pyramid. I chose this prototype form, first, because I think the puzzle is elegant; second, because all four pieces are identical so only one template design is required; and third, because the pieces are fairly simple, geometrically, and thus so are the templates.
Tools
Check out this triple tall MakerBot, and its maiden print, the Statue of Liberty!
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A German hacker named Ray has printed a working handcuff key, to the Dutch national pattern, on his RepRap. You can download the .STL file here. Not that we encourage that sort of thing. <SUBLIMINAL>Do it do it do it do it.</SUBLIMINAL> [via Boing Boing]
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Tinker.it! recently teamed up with Hyper to create a series of projects that are all based on hacks of the Nokia N900 & Maemo. They range from an Arduino powered Viewmaster that generates 3D images, to the Talk & Text which is a hacked Speak & Spell that sends SMS messeges. They even posted a Hackers Guide to the N900.
Tinker.it! built 4 discrete interventions, using the theme of much-loved 1980s toys and products, to highlight the new and impressive functionalities of the N900 and encourage a wider audience to take part in that conversation with the PUSH competition.
In the Maker Shed:
Make: Arduino
Watch a man use the Unbreakable Walking-Stick Umbrella to chop through a watermelon at 1:12...
The Unbreakable Umbrella works just as well as a walking stick or cane but does not make you look funny or feel awkward. Whacks just as strong as a steel pipe but it weighs only 1 lb. and 11 oz. (775 g).
* Legal to carry everywhere
* Never raises suspicions
* Does not make you look silly (no strange looks if carried by an able-bodied person)
Our Unbreakable Umbrella has no unusual parts, no more metal than an average umbrella, it does not arouse suspicion, can be carried legally everywhere where any weapons are prohibited, unlike a walking stick it does not cause strange looks if carried by an able-bodied person, and it does protect from rain. Anyone who can use a stick for defense can use this umbrella.
[via Core77]
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Poking a hole in his commercial iPhone window mount with a Dremel tool was all it took for Tim Cox to be the proud owner of a brand new dash cam. Goes to show that not all good hacks need to be complicated. Sometimes all it takes is finding the right spot and poking a hole to see what's on the other side.
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If you're thinking of taking a MAKEcation (learning to solder, hacking your cooler, or building a trebuchet), this weekend is your last chance! The long weekend will give you plenty of time to do a project, with time left over for the BBQ! Documentation is due next Wednesday, September 9 in the MAKE Flickr pool (tagged "MAKEcation").
Top prize in each category: $100 Maker Shed Gift Certificate
Runners up: The Best of MAKE or The Best of Instructables
Teach your family to solder:
Cooler hacking challenge:
Family trebuchet challenge:
Central Florida firemen Jeff Ponds and Jimm Walsh have an ongoing section of their site vententersearch.com called "What's in your Pockets?" where they showcase some of the more interesting improvised tools of the trade sent in from readers.
[via Matt Billings]
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So you know how people say "Don't try this at home?" Yeah. Don't. HOWEVER: It's pretty cool. Ariel Schlesinger replaced the compressed air canister of a hand-held air horn with a butane canister. [via Hack a Day]
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We've covered some other innovate uses for a cdrom drive, but this one surely takes the cake! This would be a great way to teach young children about re-purposing obsolete technology. If you want to try it for yourself, here is the script (written for a Linux machine) that is used to keep opening and closing the door:
#!/bin/sh
while [ 1 = 1 ]
do
#eject cdrom
eject#pull cdrom tray back in
eject -t
done
Back to school is fast approaching, so it's time to get in one more family project before the summer's over. We've extended the MAKEcation challenge deadline to September 9, two days after you're done enjoying your Labor Day weekend. We have $100 gift certificates to the Maker Shed just waiting for you to come and grab them when your family (we use the term loosely) learns to solder, hacks a cooler, or builds a backyard trebuchet. All you have to do is add photos of your project to the MAKE Flickr pool tagged "MAKEcation" to enter! If you get stuck, have questions, or just want to chat, email campcounselor@makezine.com. What are you waiting for?
Top prize in each category: $100 Maker Shed Gift Certificate
Runners up: The Best of MAKE or The Best of Instructables
Teach your family to solder:
Cooler hacking challenge:
Family trebuchet challenge:
OK, if you have your cooler but are already cold enough or don't plan to take it anywhere, here are a couple more ideas for what to do with it:
Having a party at night? Make it easy to find the right beverage by following vader119's directions and add a light to your cooler!
Trying to maintain an outdoor worm composting bin in the Texas heat? Instructables user coopdaddi shows how he added a water chiller and a fan to make his cooler a perfect place for worms!
Have the opposite problem, and need a way to keep your resin/RTV project warm while it cures? Why not convert your cooler into a low-temperature curing oven by following idmains instructions? Bonus points for adding a mechanism to control the inside temperature.
So, that's just about everything I can think of to do with a cooler. Have any last-minute ideas? Be sure to share them in the Comments for a chance at a prize!
More:
Congratulations to the MFA 2009 crew!
From the Maker Faire Africa Flickr pool
Sitting here in our un-airconditioned hackerspace after a long bike ride has got me thinking about how to cool off, and what better way than to make your own air chiller? It turns out there are a number of different ways that makers have figured out how to do this. I wish I had one of these here with me now!
Pete H. made this cool-looking device that uses cool water pumped through copper tubing to chill the air being blown by a fan.
And here's a more advanced, radiator-based design that should be more efficient than the copper tube version above.
Finally, here's an Instructable about how to make a battery-powered version for when you are on the go.
Any other ideas about making a portable air chiller using a cooler? How about a portable swamp cooler that has an icy reservoir of liquid to keep you cool? A portable mister that uses gravity or compressed air to keep an area cool? An astronaut helmet that keeps your head in a cool bubble? Share your ideas in the Comments.
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Flickr user Streetwalker credits this elegant handmade tool to Mr. Norberto Arriagada, a Chilean plumber.
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This quick and dirty improvised iPhone flash/video light from Andreas Ødegård consists of a 3V battery and a high intensity Cree emitter. Sure, it's just an LED flashlight with a doc connector mount, but then again it was built in under 10 minutes with electrical tape, spare parts, and a hot glue gun. The result seems to knock the socks off your run-of-the-mill super bright LED mini-array.
A similar hack that pulls power from the iPhone dock connector can be found in the book iPhone Hacks.
In the Maker Shed:
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I've seen plenty of hacks based on the iconic Etch A Sketch, however this one may take the cake. Andrew Sliwinski has added a third wheel (and a bunch of electronics) to the traditional toy design, allowing users to make drawings in three dimensions! An Anaglyphic display is used to present the image. A remake of this would be a fun way to really get started with Arduino + Processing!
[via Gizmodo]
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Because of its affordable price and speedy framerates, Sony's PS3 Eye camera has become a popular choice for hacking by interactive video experimentalists. Creat Digital Motion posted a nice feature on modding the device, highlighting several video tutorials by Peau Productions for IR filtration and even adding a custom enclosure. Read the full article over at CDM.
Hi everyone! It's me, your friendly MAKEcation camp counselor Matt. Have you started your cooler hacking project yet? If not, here are some ideas to help get you started. Be sure to post your own ideas in the comments. We'll be giving away a Maker's Notebook and The Best of MAKE or Best of Instructables to the one we think is the most interesting. If you have any questions about the challenge, don't hesitate to send them to me at: campcounselor@makezine.com.
Temperature Monitor: Add a temperature display to keep you informed about how cool your refreshments are. If you plan to store perishable foods inside, how about an alarm to alert you before they spoil?
Increased Efficiency: Or, avoid the whole problem of heating all together by making your cooler more efficient. Going somewhere without shade? Try building in an umbrella holder, to keep those hot sun rays away from your vittles.
Solar Cooling: Instead of diverting the sun's rays, why not catch them with a solar panel and then use the energy to drive a thermoelectric cooling unit?
Mobility: Having trouble getting your cooler to your picnic location? Adding a motor so that you can drive it might be a bit extreme, but a simple set of wheels and a hitch would allow you to tow your cooler behind a bike. Don't feel like getting up to fetch your next drink? Cannibalize a toy car and finally build that remote controlled cooler.
Ok, now I want to go camping so I have an excuse to try all these things out!
Here are some other possibilities:
And here are some previous hacks for inspiration:
Youth Family Films share their Cooler Kart
David Calkins explains how to make an RFID-protected beer fridge
Simon Jansen shares his jet powered beer cooler
The prototype iPhone payment system Square, currently in testing at a trendy clothing store in NYC, has been generating a lot of buzz for the past couple of days. What caught my attention was its use of the mini jack as a communication port. Often overlooked as a means of transferring data, the microphone/audio port on the iPhone is accessible from the standard iPhone SDK. If you're curious about using the mini jack port, the hardware chapter of the book iPhone Hacks has a number of hacks that utilize the the mini jack for uni- and bi-directional communication.
In addition to magstripe readers, IR remotes, modems, and keyboards, the mini jack is suitable for building almost any low-speed peripheral requiring bidirectional communication using inexpensive components. Since the release of the v3.0 SDK the iPhone development community has been excited about the possibilities of the iPhone doc connector. However, using the mini jack over the doc connector not only shaves off some manufacturing costs, but by using a standardized connector the peripheral can be used by other devices like, for instance, the OLPC XO.
[via mobilewhack]
In the Maker Shed:
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Whew! All of that soldering and kid-wrangling worked up a powerful thirst. So, you drag over the ol' Coleman and crack open a few cold ones. Sitting there drinking your beers (be they root or hops) with your newly-trained team of solder-droids, you all start contemplating that old faithful camping cooler. Maybe it needs some EL wire highlights around its edges, or an entertaining LED display, or how about some solar-powered, active cooling? Or heck, maybe some wheels and a motor so you can drive that sucker around the patio.
Okay, maybe that last idea is too silly, but you get the idea. It's summer, you've got the family itchin' to do something with their new-found geek cred, why not take our MAKEcation Cooler Hacking Challenge? Trick out any beverage cooler however you like -- the sky's the limit (hey, sending a cooler into space on a weather balloon -- now there's a challenge...), upload the images to the MAKE Flickr pool, and tag them "MAKEcation." As with the Soldering Challenge, you're eligible for a $100 Maker Shed Gift Certificate and some other cool prizes.
For the Soldering Challenge, we brought on Dave Hrynkiw from Solarbotics as our beloved Camp Counselor. He wasn't called out of his virtual cabin very often, but he was dutifully at the ready... and remains so. The Soldering Challenge will continue until the end of the month, so there's still plenty of time to submit your MAKEcation photos to Flickr.
For the Cooler Hacking Challenge, we want to introduce you to our latest author-addition to the site, Matt Mets. He'll be starting off his stint with us as your next Camp Counselor. Matt is an electrical engineer who loves creative repurposing of electronic junk, hacking open source software, and photography. Besides now working for MAKE, he's also currently an artist-in-residence at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. He's in the process of designing a ferrous wheel and an emotional typewriter. No, really. Matt will be here to help brainstorm cooler hacks, to answer any technical questions, consult on your hack ideas, and to help us judge the entries at the end of the month. If you have any questions for Matt (or for Dave), send them to: campcounselor@makezine.com.
We'd also love to get your help in brainstorming ideas for cooler hacks. Post your ideas in the comments. We'll pick our favorite one and you'll get a Maker's Notebook and your choice of The Best of MAKE or The Best of Instructables.
It looks like the Wii Motion Plus has been hacked so you can read the data via an Arduino. The build only requires about $4 in parts. Now that's cheap! Check out the website for the schematics, code, and more information.
Alright, one great aspect about the Wii Motion Plus is its pass through port for other extension controllers such as the nunchuck. Unfortunately, no one has been able to read both an active motion plus and any other controller at the same time because they are all on the same I2C address(smooth nintendo). This is creates a large hurdle to people like myself who bought the WM+ to create a low cost IMU with it and the accelerometer in the nunchuck. After a good deal of digging and very little luck, I did find a way to use both at the same time(though not through the pass through port). And best of all its cheap!
More about Motion Plus and Nunchuck together on the Arduino [via Arduino.cc]
In the Maker Shed:
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DJ Josef Průša, the author of the iPhone/Arduino/MaxMSP/OSC hack from iPhone Hacks, just let me know about this great project he made from a spare MSI Wind battery; a nice and juicy battery pack for USB devices. He was originally looking for something to power his Monome 128, but it ended up being great for his iPhone as well. And the battery can still be used in the Wind, apparently. He uses a 7805 for this; it would be interesting to see another kind of voltage regulator in a future revision to this.
USB iPhone battery pack from MSI Wind battery
In the Maker Shed:
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Follow this excellent step-by-step instructional video by Minimak and you, too, can have a blindingly awesome infrared LED sombrero. It may not thwart the sneaky paparazzi, but at least you'll look out-of-sight in all that convenience store surveillance footage.
[via WonderHowTo]
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We asked our MAKEcation Camp Counselor, Dave Hrynkiw, to share with us some of the common mistakes he sees newbies making when learning to solder. He shares some of his thoughts below.
Dave is the geek behind the woman (hey Cheryl!) who runs the Solarbotics and HVW Technologies. He's our virtual Camp Counselor during "Teach Your Family to Solder" week. If you have any questions for Dave related to soldering, send email to campcounselor@makezine.com.
Using Too Little Heat: This is an issue when you're using those wimpy 10- or 15-watt pencil-type soldering irons. They're usually purchased as part of a set which includes some murky solder, a useless soldering-iron "stand," and a "what is this thing for?" mini-wrench, used for replacing the tip (trust me, the iron ain't worth that effort). The idea behind soldering is to heat the item, and then melt the solder to the item. In most electronics situations, that item will likely be a wire, or an electronic component. When you have an iron that generates wimpy amounts of heat, trying to heat up the item will take longer than it should, which will usually lead to damaged components from excessive heating, or a messy solder job (because the builder got impatient and melted the solder to the tip and tried to "paint" the molten solder to the joint). Either situation is bad. Save those wimpy irons for burning your name into a piece of wood, or roasting marshmallows from the inside-out (but don't eat them! - bet that iron isn't lead-free/RoHS compliant).
Using Too Much Heat: We often see kits come in for repair that have been scorched like they've been soldered with a butane torch! Sometimes they have! Or with one of those huge pistol-grip soldering guns designed for soldering 12-gauge car trailer connections in mid-winter Alaska. A printed circuit board's copper traces are barely more than glued onto the phenolic or fiberglass substrate we call a PCB. Too much heat kills this adhesive layer, making traces and pads lift from the board like a bad sunburn two days after that bender on the beach (sorry for that imagery, but it's pretty accurate). Go easy with the firestick, chief. The boards and components are made to withstand a certain amount of heat in the soldering process, not the heat of a solar flare.
Painting: This is the most common newbie mistake. As mentioned under "Too Little Heat," soldering is the process of heating the items you want to solder together, and melting the solder to those items, using the heat in the items (as transfered by your iron). It's the reverse of painting. The (wrong) painting method is melting solder onto your iron, then trying to smear it onto the item you're soldering. What you end up with is a solder job that will most likely flake right off. You want to paint? Try the Bob Ross-style class at the local community college (Jeez, I miss that guy -- and his tremendous hair). Think of the soldering iron as a gravity gun for solder. Stick the iron where you want the solder to go, and when you apply it, the solder will naturally flow towards the heat. You can't convince solder to go where there's no heat. It's kinda like a retired Canadian that way.
Appriopriate Tools, Equipment, and Supplies: I bet you think I'm going to suggest getting the best soldering iron you can afford, right? Nope. A decent low-cost iron is fine. If you stick with electronics long enough to thoroughly wear out a medium-quality 20-to-30 watt pencil-type soldering iron, then go ahead and buy something fancier. Spend about $25 on a iron (not a kit!) and you'll be all set.
Solder comes in many types and flavors, the most common being "Lead-free" and "Lead/Tin." Given a choice, I'll take leaded any day. There's a reason all military-grade electronics are still done with lead-based solder. It's just better. It melts at lower temperatures, flows better, and ends up looking shiny when applied properly. The other stuff looks like crud, even when it's done correctly, which is especially troublesome for beginners looking for proof of a healthy join. Yes, there are lead-based dangers, but use some common sense, good ventilation, and don't eat while you're working (solder/fingers, fingers/sandwich, sandwich/brain, brain/dumb), and wash your hands well with soap when you're done.
Secondary to the leaded/non-lead solder issue, there's the decision of "no-clean" vs. "rosin" flux. OK, there are more types, but those are the main types. Flux is a chemical paste that's usually in the core of the solder you use. When you melt it, the flux cleans the surfaces and "lubricates" the soldering, making the metals bind correctly. If you have a choice, get a "no-clean" flux, as the other types will make your solder joints look like burned sugar.
In short, get a $25, 20-to-30 watt pencil-type soldering iron, a $12 1-lb. roll of no-clean lead/tin solder (that's lots - share with family and friends), don't floss with the solder, and don't paint it onto your projects.
Bonus Tip: Get a container of Multicore "Tip Cleaner." Best $3 you'll spend on a soldering accessory. It will triple the life of your solder tips, and make almost any gungy tip look clean and shiny again. Just don't breath the fumes when you push a hot dirty tip into this pumice-like substance.
More:
Toolbox: Soldering Essentials, Part 1
Toolbox: Soldering station tools and hacks
Wireless keylogger via HaD...
Familiar with the concept of hardware keylogging? A hardware keylogger is a perfect solution for monitoring user activity, at very low risk of disclosure. A hardware keylogger is a purely electronic device, so no access to the operating system is required, no traces are left, and software has no possibility of detecting such a device. However, the hardware keylogger concept inherits one weakness: physical access to the keylogger is required for retrieving captured data. This problem has finally found it's solution: a Wireless Keylogger.Next project, how to make a wireless keyboard jammer :)
KeeLog has already released one open source PS/2 hardware keylogger design to the public. Now, we are doing it again with the DIY Wireless Keylogger. This design is fully free for private and commercial use...
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