Makers
Adafruit 6-Second Electronics Film Festival
I’m totally doing this. Call For Entries: Announcing The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! Share your cool project in 6 seconds of video and win up to $600 at the Adafruit store, with six runners up winning $60 store credit each. In a 6 second video, we want you [...]
The World’s First Solar Powered Quadcopter
Building your first quadcopter is almost a rite of passage for anyone interested in DIY drones these days, mainly due to the availability of boards like the Ardupilot making it a lot easier to get started. However seven Masters students at Queen Mary University of London just raised the bar for the competition. They built a solar powered Quadcopter, which they dubbed Solar Copter.
3D printing some sweet music
If you don’t mind ending up with oddly shaped 3D printed parts you can get your printer to sing to you. The exhibit shown above is doing just that. The Lulzbot is being driven specifically to produce a certain frequency of sound with its stepper motors. The results of a few different songs are what’s hanging on the wall to the right. You can hear it printing Bizet’s Carmen in the clip after the break.
[Rickard Dahlstrand] hacked together a Python script capable of parsing a MIDI file and outputting a G-code equivalent that will produce the frequencies and durations necessary to hear the audio on a stepper motor. As we mentioned, he uses a Lulzbot but the script appears to include setting for Cupcake, Thingomatic, Shapercube, and Ultimaker. The parser script as well as the example G-code files for a library of classical music can be downloaded from his repository.
Now if you’re looking for some other crazy CNC music ideas you can’t beat this wineglass music hack.
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, musical hacks
MAKE at RoboGames: Highlights
I've already shared some images of combat and humanoid robots from RoboGames, but there's a lot more to see than just that. Here's a slideshow of "the rest", which there was quite a lot of.
Mood lamp/notifier uses neat modular PCB design
Not only does this mood lamp which [J. Sutton] built look great, but we love the modular design he adopted when building the circuit boards.
If you’re building something that is going to sit on your desk for some time it just has to look good. We think that he achieved that, using a small block of oak as the base, and a cloudy white cube of unknown origin as a diffuser. Notice that the different colors are not mixed. There’s a baffle inside the diffuser that keeps them separate as early testing showed any combination of intensities was resulting in nearly the same shade of color.
The part we really like is the modular design of his circuit boards. The project is based around a Teensy++ 2.0 board. He first built a PCB baseboard which feature two SIL sockets to accept the legs of the Teensy. There is a third SIL socket which accepts some long legs from the LED host board, letting it perch on top of the Teensy.
Filed under: led hacks
Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione
The video below is a lengthy but insightful interview with legendary Italian maker Enzo Mari. His 1974 manual Autoprogettazione offered nineteen designs using readymade cuts of timber, to build tables, chairs, bookshelves, and even beds. He essentially open-sourced the home furnishings industry. His designs usually required nothing more than a [...]
GUI window manager on an AVR chip
This project is reminiscent of the old days when window managers were an amazing new idea. The difference is that this window-based GUI is running on an ATmega1284 microcontroller. But the behavior and speed of the interface is pretty much exactly what you’d expect if working on an early 90′s home computer. It even uses a mouse as input.
So how is this even possible? The key to the project is a serial to VGA module which handles the heavy lifting involved with generating a VGA signal. We featured one of [Andrew's] past projects which used an AVR chip to generate the VGA signal. But that doesn’t leave nearly enough cycles to implement something like a window manager, not to mention the fact that it got nowhere near the resolution shown here.
He uses a serial mouse with an RS-232 converter chip to interact with the windows. This is best shown in his video after the break. He’s able to generate and interact with new windows. He even implemented a set of rudimentary controls which allow him to adjust the theme of the windows and drive the audio playback feature included on that VGA controller he’s using.
Filed under: Microcontrollers, video hacks
MAKE at RoboGames: A Discussion with Lem Fugitt about Humanoids
Humanoid robot competition is one part of RoboGames that seems to be dominated by Japanese roboticists. Lem Fugitt, who runs Robots Dreams, has been involved with the humanoid robot scene in Japan for a few years, and tends to bring a few "professional" Robo-One players with him on his annual trip to RoboGames. We spoke with him about how he got involved in the Robo-One scene and how 3D Printing has started to benefit the builders.
Teaching 3D Design Thinking with The City X Project
"Humans have just landed on an Earth-like alien planet. They’ve staked out an area for the capital, City X, and have sent back a 3D map of the location with many challenges to be solved by their engineers on Earth, a vast team of young designers all around the world."
The Reinvention of the Wheel
Arguably after the club, and possibly fire, the next thing to be invented was the wheel. In any case it's been around, almost unchanged, for a very long time. Like the mouse trap it's notoriously hard to reinvent. 
This piggy bank is our stock broker
[Johna and Justin] are working to take the emotion out of playing the market. They built this piggy bank which automatically purchases stock when your coinage totals the cost of a single share. That’s right, just turn the selector to one of your three chosen stocks (Google, Facebook, and Apple are used in this example) and plug in some coins. The bank counts your money, compares it to the current online stock price, and pulls the trigger if you have enough dough. You can check out a demo clip after the jump.
The hardware is rather simple thanks to Adafruit’s programmable multi-coin acceptor. It handles the cash and it’s pretty easy to interface with the Arduino which handles the rest of the work. It connects to a computer via USB, depending on a PHP script to poll the current price. We dug through the code repository just a bit but didn’t find the snippet that does the actual stock purchase. Whether or not they actually implemented that, it’s certainly an interesting concept.
Filed under: lifehacks
Mobile Surfboard-Building Classroom
Maine-based Grain Surfboards is a small maker-run company on the coast that hand-makes sustainably cut, locally milled white cedar wooden surfboards. Aside from their dedication to environmental responsibility, what sets Grain apart is that they also offer DIY surfboard kits and a variety of surfboard-building classes. Their newest undertaking is [...]
MAKE at RoboGames: Robot Combat
Despite the large number of categories of robots here at RoboGames, the resounding sounds of metal on metal and cheers from the crowd keep drawing us back to the combat arena. We were immediately surprised by the variety of locations and backgrounds these teams come from, whether it's a High School from across the country, a local engineer working in his garage, or a robotics team from Brazil.
The Internet of Things: What is the IoT Toolkit?
This is the second of a three-part series on the Internet of Things with Atmel’s Tom Vu and Internet of Things Council member Michael Koster. Today: What is the IoT Toolkit?
How-To: DIY Bioprinter
Interesting Instructable from Dr. Patrik D'haeseleer, Harvard-trained computational biologist and denizen of Sunnyvale biotech hackerspace BioCurious. Bioprinting, which is basically 3D printing with living cells, has been much in the news lately, with breathless tales of fully 3D-printed living organs and replacement body parts. There is of course a fair bit of hype going on here, but also, at the core, a body of very interesting applied research.
Dale Dougherty Hosts Final “Open MAKE” Event Tomorrow
The season's final Open Make @ the Hall ends on a tiny note. Bring your little things and get inspired by the big impact your mini-creations can have. The fun starts tomorrow, April 20, and runs from 10am-2pm.
Maker Pro Newsletter #9
“To not be amazed is to be numb to the technology of our day.” From the editors of MAKE magazine, The Maker Pro Newsletter is about the impact of makers on business and technology. Our coverage includes hardware startups, new products, incubators, innovators, along with technology and market trends.
DIY.org Loves Cardboard
DIY.org is an online community for young makers to share their skills and projects, and to be inspired and learn to make new creations. This year at Maker Faire Bay Area, they will be providing the supplies and space for Cardboard Village, a place where kids can collaborate to build their own community using cardboard. If you're planning to attend Maker Faire, stop by and check out the progress!
The Biblio-Mat: A Random Book Dispensing Machine
The Monkey's Paw is an antiquarian bookstore in Toronto that now also houses the world’s first randomizing vending machine for old books — the Biblio-mat.
MAKE at RoboGames
Imagine the carnage that ensues when you pit two 200+ lb. robots against each other, often with weapons that spin at around 3500 rpm. The noise level and adrenaline both run high as they bang away at each other. Intern Coordinator Sam Freeman and I are at RoboGames to witness not only the combat, but all sorts of other robotics events as well. We only got here a little while ago, but have already been fascinated by the great stuff we've seen.
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