MAKE is a quarterly publication from O'Reilly for those who just can't stop tinkering, disassembling, re-creating, and inventing cool new uses for the technology in our lives. It's the first do-it-yourself magazine dedicated to the incorrigible and chronically incurable technology enthusiast in all of us. MAKE celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend technology any way you want.
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Question: What's got four 7-segment displays (and driver), a temperature sensor, a PWM RGB LED,
and plugs into an Arduino? Why it's the Arduino 7-Segment
Shield! This is a 7-segment shield for Arduino NG/Dicimila/Duemilanove and many Freeduino
boards. It has tons of cool features! Fully assembled and tested! NOTE: Does not include the
Arduino board.
Features:
I2C 4 digits 7-segment driver
I2C temperature sensor
I2C EEPROM
PWM RGB LED
Blue PWR LED
Reset button
All pins breakout
With the ability to read temperature data and display it on its four digits, this could be just
the shield you need to push your kegerator
project over the top.
Thingaverse user Skimbal designed and printed this Gothic cathedral play set on his Makerbot. The design
is actually modular, so you can build as little or as big of a set as you want. I love the
description:
Have you ever wanted a Gothic Cathedral of your very own?
Are you intimidated by the centuries long construction schedule, and the punishing job
requirements of being a European Bishop during the Dark Ages?
At the MIX10 conference this past week, MAKE had a booth
embedded inside the Coding4Fun exhibit. We showed off MAKE magazine, some of our Make: Books, and a few kits. Our Coding4Fun neighbors had a
lot of great projects on display, including their Coding4Fun Cannon, which was a robotic t-shirt
launching platform with two barrels. What's more, it was controlled by a Windows Phone 7 app, and
they completed it in two weeks. Here's how Clint Rutkas of Coding4Fun described it:
Mid-February, we were asked to build a t-shirt shooting robot for the Mix conference on March
15th, 2010. This required us to pitch our vision and then research, build, test, and ship our
project--all in about 3 weeks. After Scott Guthrie gave us approval based on our SketchFlow demo,
we had to divide and conquer the application with only 2 weeks left to build the physical robot,
the server software, and the phone software. And on top of all that, since we were consuming an
unfinished product, everything had to have backup plans.
Beekeepers in New York City no longer have to keep the honey of their labors a secret. The
city's Board of Health decided Tuesday to allow beekeeping in the city after a long ban. Some New
Yorkers have secretly tended beehives on rooftops and in backyard gardens for years in defiance of
city regulations. The health code had placed honeybees in the same category as other creatures that
are deemed too dangerous or venomous for city life, including hyenas and venomous snakes. And more
@ the NY Times... New
York City is among the few jurisdictions in the country that deem beekeeping illegal, lumping the
honeybee together with hyenas, tarantulas, cobras, dingoes and other animals considered too
dangerous or venomous for city life. But the honeybee's bad rap -- and the days of urban beekeepers
being outlaws -- may soon be over. Read more |
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Notice tarp taped to the ground, stocking
feet, and cotton gloves, all used to keep the fragile balloon intact. Bright tape on the
camera-carrying cooler helped them recover the balloon rig.
To the left can (barely) be seen
cellphone and handwarmers, to the right (under the bungies) the camera and handwarmers. The
warmers are used to keep the equipment from freezing.
That's Long Island to the middle-left,
the Hudson River, bottom-middle, and Jersey, middle-right.
And it's just that easy -- or at least the folks at Island Labs make it seem so. John
Abella sent us these pics of their recent camera balloon launch. Great job, guys!
Ad agency GGRP recently built this cardboard
record player. The record player is built into the dust jacket for the record, and you play
it by turning record with a pencil. It's a neat idea, but it turns out that there is some prior
art here. There is an earlier version of the same thing called CardTalk, which was
produced by Global Recordings Network to spread their missionary messages in the 20th century:
Cube.ly appears to be a 3D printer that uses 80/20 girders for the
2'x2'x2' chassis, with all electronic components identical to those used in the Makerbot and
Mendel. The project's charter describes the project's goals:
Provide a fully capable 3D printer which can be used to directly manufacture or can be used to
easily create the precursors to large volume traditional manufacturing including vacuum forming,
injection molding, casting and others. The core device must be buildable using standardized,
commodity components that are widely available and under $1,000 USD. The core device must not
require any other device as a prerequisite to build it (other than identified tools). The core
device must be able to be completed by typical implementers in 30 hours or less including time to
purchase components and assemble The core device must be able to be finished and assembled with
only a modest set of tools including screw drivers, a drill press, a collection of drill bits and a
circular or table saw. The primary goal of Cubely is to get 10,000 Open Hardware 3D printing
devices in the hands of 10,000 people worldwide by Jan 1, 2013.
It looks awwwwwfully preliminary but fascinating and ambitious nonetheless.
It's about time somebody made a media award that actually does something other than serve as a
impromptu murder weapon. At this years SXSW festival, the Web Awards were built around Bleep
Labs' Thingamagoop 2, the analog synth toy (which now has digital/Arduino-control capability).
In the Maker Shed: Thingamagoop
2 Our Price: $100.00
Make, mod, hack, and bend your own analog noise monster! Great for beginners with its detailed
instructions and photos of each step. Advanced users can taking advantage of Arduino integration,
control voltage in and out, or just bend it like crazy! Choose from 3 colors!
ASPEX, a company that makes desktop scanning electron microscopes (SEMs), is running a promotional
campaign under which anyone can mail them a sample, which they will then image under one of
their SEMs. The results will be posted on their webpage, and all for free! Challenge: Take
advantage of their offer to produce publishable data! [via Boing
Boing]
Musician, artist, engineer and programmer Eric Singer is
starting an interesting project, called the hacker helpline. For a few hours a week, he'll be
taking calls on Skype to help answer your questions about building physical things:
Hacker Helpline is a new service from Eric Singer of the League
of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. For a few hours a week, Eric will be on Skype, ready to
answer your questions about projects, electronics, software, robotics, physical computing, etc.
To contact the Hacker Helpline, open Skype and add contact "hackerhelpline". Then look in the
Mood section to see dates and hours. During those times, you can chat in and get help (or get
queued up for help if a previous chat is active). A/V chats are supported (even preferred...it's
nice to see who you're talking to).
Hacker Helpline launches on March 23rd at 10 am EST.
Peter Atwood of Turners Falls, Mass. makes his living as a
knife- and toolmaker. He produces limited runs of unique items every few days, which he then
posts on his blog, Planet Pocket Tool. The name
of his blog indicates his focus: small wrench-like tools. However, Atwood creates a wide variety
of metal items like rulers, steel shot glasses, whistles, prybars, ring tools, and so on.
in 2000 I discovered the world of custom knives and I was instantly hooked. When I realized
that I could actually make my own knives and gadgets, it got even better. And so it continues to
this day. This is what I truly love to do and I hope I can do it for the rest of my time on this
earth. I specialize in small pocket tools and key ring knives although I have made many folding
knives and even a few larger fixed blades over the years. But my main love is for the small stuff.
I'm constantly working on new designs for gadgets, prybars, small edged tools and unique hand
tools. My philosophy is if you aren't carrying it then it isn't going to be there when you need it.
Hence the obsession with small tools that pack a big punch. Let's face it, they are the ones that
are more likely to be in your pocket or on your keys rather than languishing behind the seat in the
truck or stuck in your toolbox in the garage. Read more |
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A couple of us from MAKE attended an inspirational meeting on Wednesday at
Eyebeam in NYC with the most influential people in open source hardware including Limor Fried,
Bunnie Huang (Chumby), and the Arduino team. Legal counsel from Creative Commons brought answers
to many of our questions, and we discussed the future for open source hardware:
We all agree open sourcing hardware is important, and as practitioners, many of us have been
involved in work, research and talks about it. To date, no universal "right solution" exists.
While Creative Commons licenses are widely used for software, there is a growing number of groups
using the licenses for hardware, without necessarily accounting for the difficulties and
restrictions hardware imposes. In short, open source for hardware is not like open source for
software, and thus cannot use the same legal tools.
The purpose of this workshop is to create a direct dialogue between Creative Commons and some of
the most significant players in the Open Source Hardware Community . CC representatives will be
sharing their perspectives while listening to the needs and perspectives of this community, in
order to help form more appropriate licensing options for open hardware.
Thanks to Ayah Bdeir and Eyebeam for organizing/hosting. Pictured above is the group, and the
FIRST ARDUINO EVER MADE, toted
around in a box of prototypes by Massimo Banzi himself. Check out PT's Flickr photos.
Wish you had access to tools like milling machines, 3d scanners, and laser cutters, but don't
have the budget or space to keep them at your home? Well, if you are a resident of Manchester,
you might be in luck. The Manchester FABLAB, an
open workshop with all of the aforementioned tools and more, will be opening up next week. They
aim to provide a free place for people to build noncommercial projects:
The Manchester fablab is a creative workspace in Manchester where you can pretty well make
whatever you can think of. When we say anything we do mean pretty much anything. There's about 35
fablabs (fabrication laboratories) around the world so far and people have made all sorts of things
from T-shirts to robots. The fablab is open for use by individuals, community groups, schools and
companies.
The Manchester fab lab will be equipped with many different machines including laser cutters,
milling machines, 3D scanners, embroidery and sewing machines which are mostly controlled by
simple computer programmes, so you don't have to be an machining or computer expert to use them.
We are going to be open for use at the beginning of 2010. As always there are a hundred things to
think of and a few more we haven't thought of.
Fablabs Basics:
The fablab is free to use for non-commercial use. (A small charge applies if you are a
commercial company)
We aim to provide free basic materials like wood, plastics and electronic components for
non-commercial use (Not gold or diamonds!)
We have lots of different machines to use and don't worry we'll help you learn how to use
them
Personally, these laser-cut plastic end tables by Israel's Studio Groovy (Fair warning: I couldn't actually find them on
their Flash-y website) are not to my taste, but I really like the fact that that they put some
old vinyl records in their laser cutter and managed to make something fairly cool out of them.
Bonus: The table on the left uses the cut-out from the table on the right as decoration, so
there's very little waste. [via Recyclart]
The Arduino random() function can be used to easily generate a seemingly unpredictable series of
numbers. The only problem is, from the first time it's used in a sketch, random() actually begins
spitting out the same series of seemingly random numbers. The standard solution to this conundrum
is to start (or "seed") the formula with a noisy reading taken from an unused analog pin like so:
randomSeed(analogRead(0)); But for some the data returned by that little trick may still not be
random enough, and that's why Tinker.it created an extra randomy randomabration by the name of
TrueRandom -It is hard to
get a truly random number from Arduino. TrueRandom does it by setting up a noisy voltage on
Analog pin 0, measuring it, and then discarding all but the least significant bit of the measured
value. However, that isn't noisy enough, so a von Neumann whitening algorithm gathers enough
entropy from multiple readings to ensure a fair distribution of 1s and 0s.And if you're left
wondering what all that random is good for, think - games, cryptography, generating serial
numbers and similar. Swing by the TrueRandom code repository to download
the library.
This is the fanciest first aid kit I've ever seen! MacGuffin
Films made this one up with everything they might need for a location shoot for about $235
total, not including the $55 Husky case. In addition to bandaging cuts and scrapes, this kit can
ease almost any ailment that would delay filming. Parts list after the jump. Photos by Nathan
Rosenquist.
Inspired by the late great American composer and experimental-instrument-maker Harry Partch
(Wikipedia), Makers Market seller
Johnson Arts created
this gorgeous hardwood frame and hung a beautiful glass bell in it. Where'd they get the bell? In
a former life it was a glass sink! Check it out, along with other cool handmade one-offs from
Johnson Arts, in their
Makers Market store.
Depending on where you live, this may be old hat for you, but I've lived 30 years on this earth
and never seen a rope bannister before. And I just finished remodeling my staircase too.
Besides being less expensive, easier to ship, easier to install, and way more interesting than a
rigid handrail, a rope bannister is an awesome excuse to do some classic knotwork and play with
giant-gauge rope. I'm pretty sure that's a Matthew Walker knot (Wikipedia) there in the end of that one.
Got some strange screws that need unscrewing? Want to get in there and modify some gear the
manufacturer didn't trust you to open? Maybe you need to pick up the new 54 Piece Bit
Driver Kit over in the Maker Shed.
This kit includes a magnetized driver with metal shaft, swivel top, and rubberized grip, a 60 mm
extension, a 130 mm flexible extension, and 54 bits. By iFixit.
Repurposing a leftover CO2 cylinder and regulator, maker Joel Miller assembled this DIY home carbonation unit after a
quick parts run.
The carbonating process is simple. Fill an empty bottle with the liquid of your choice and
refrigerate it. Replace the cap with the special one you made and attach the quick-disconnect hose
to it. Make sure the shutoff valve on the regulator is closed, then slowly open the main valve on
the tank until the regulator shows pressure. Adjust the output pressure to about 45psi and open the
shutoff valve, pressurizing the bottle. Now loosen the cap on the bottle just slightly while
squeezing any air space out of the neck of the bottle, then tighten the cap. This will purge any
air from the bottle and replace it with CO2. Now shake the bottle vigorously for about 20-30
seconds; this will help dissolve the CO2 into the liquid faster. Shut off the CO2 at the regulator
and disconnect the hose from the quick-disconnect fitting. You can now remove the special cap
(slowly, the contents are now carbonated!) and replace it with a regular cap.
So on the first day I made seltzer water. On the second day I carbonated apple juice, grape juice,
and Gatorade, and ended the evening with a carbonated vodka martini (nice!). What else can I
carbonate?
Just to be on the safe side, Joel also mentions:
VERY IMPORTANT: Apparently there is a chemical reaction between the CO2 dissolved in water and
copper (or copper alloys like brass) that creates a toxic substance that will make you sick. Never
use brass or other copper-based fittings with seltzer! All of these fittings (or at least the ones
that will be in contact with the seltzer for any length of time) are either zinc-plated steel or
stainless. Read
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I love this panoramic series of photos of Matthew Good's workshop. He
describes the contents:
Ohm's Law Medicine Man balsa wood glider (half finished) Make:Electronics book, Maker's
Notebook Woolly Mammoth clone guitar pedal, nearly done 2.5 gallon fishtank, testing out
temperature logging via LM34 and Arduino There are no less than five computers on/around my desk.
Not all are visible. Small cheap telescope Printing plate of some old ship Guitars More guitars The
mess? Oh, that just means I'm getting work done.
I can't believe he didn't mention the X-Files poster!
(Note: Click on the image for a larger version of the panorama.)
By way of maker muse Jeri Ellsworth comes this great project log site, 4HV.org, for those
pursuing high-voltage projects. We've linked to a few projects from here over the years, but it's
worth bringing it to the top again. Seen here is Marko's DRSSTC (Double Resonant
Solid State Tesla Coil). [Thanks, Jeri!]
And it goes without saying that high-voltage electricity can be very dangerous and is only for
those who have enough knowledge and experience to know exactly what those dangers are and how to
avoid them.
MarkusB of Lets Make robots designed this simple
Geiger counter. If you've somehow come across a Geiger counter tube and want to make a
detector out of it, this could be just the thing you need. His design uses only commonly
available parts, and is powered by a 5v power supply. He plans to make a radiation-seeking robot
out of it, perhaps as an atomic version to Natalie Jeremijenko's feral robotic dogs?
This is all well and good, but how does the circuit work? Let's take a look:
Fawning fanboys (and fangirls) of analog synths may want to hold onto their wigs and keys before
laying eyes on synth pioneer Vince Clarke's "cabin" in Maine. Clarke was a founding member of
Depeche Mode, Yazoo, and Erasure. In this vid, he gives Motherboard the grand tour of his studio
in the woods and his impressive thirty year collection of synthesizers. Drool.
Brian Doom, that is. And since the website of Doom doesn't include
any information to the contrary, I'm going to go ahead and assume Brian must be a doctor of
something or other. For obvious reasons.
Anyway, Dr. Doom saw this morning's Rubik's cube for the
blind post and did one of my very favoritest things for a reader to do: He one-upped me. Best
of all, he one-upped me with his own work. This modded cube he made is not as randomly kit-bashed
as it might look. When solved, each face features a unique color, shape, and texture, making it
equally useful to both sighted and sightless solvers. Doom himself explains:
A few years ago (2002?) I made this "accessible" cube puzzle by simply gluing/drilling an
existing cube. The goal was to get an intuitive sense of "where the cubes went" when a face was
turned - by holding the back and viewing the front, the cubist can sense all faces at all times.
This makes the design ideal for puzzling in the dark (which I did) but also as an enhancement for
the visually-impaired without sacrificing usability for the sighted.
MAKE magazine contributor Bill Bumgarner (who wrote the "Pinball, Resurrected" piece in MAKE Volume 08), wanted a
kegerator (keg refrigerator) for his homebrewed beer. He didn't want to buy one (they can be
expensive), so he built one. He started with a cheap Home Depot 5 cubic foot chest freezer. He
extended the lid and stacked a couple of 2 x 4s in-between the lid and the body of the fridge to
house his taps and CO2 tubing. A few nifty touches here, such as:
Ben Holt suggested a neat hack; stick a scale on the tank holder such that you know, by weight,
when that 5# of CO2 is about gone. The high pressure gauge is close to useless in that it'll read
about 750-850PSI until almost all of the liquid CO2 is gone, then the pressure drops rather
rapidly.
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!
Liz writes:
I'd like to install an outdoor wired (or wireless) low light stationary camera outside my
residence - I'd like it to annunciate to a mirror sort of similar to the rear view mirror camera
that only activates once the vehicle is in reverse. Is there a way to develop a mirror capable of
switching to the camera on cue by using a light switch or something along those lines? The
"mirror" would be located adjacent to my front door and framed aesthetically as it's primary role
would essentially be a mirror until you needed to access the camera. Thank you in advance for
giving us a heads up!
Oh, that sounds like a fun project! You can't really buy a mirror that can be turned on or off
(at least to my knowledge). Instead, what you want is a 'one-way' or half-silvered mirror. These
are the kind of mirror that you might see featured in a movie about an interrogation room, where
observers can hide in an an adjacent room and look through.
The mirror doesn't really only allow light to pass in one direction, though. Instead, it has a
fine metal coating on it that reflects one half of the light that goes through it, and lets the
other half pass through as if it were a regular pane of glass. The trick is that the secret
observation room is kept much darker than the investigation room, so that any light that does
make it the wrong way through the mirror is overpowered by the reflection from the main room. If
the observers mistakenly turned on their lights (or lit a cigarette), the people in the
investigation room would be able to see them!
If you build a little cabinet to hide the display for your camera, and put a piece of one-way
mirror glass over the front, then I think you will get the effect that you want. To be able to
see the feed from the camera, just turn on the display, and it will instantly visible. Look for
TV mirror glass- it's a product designed to do exactly what you are looking for. I was able to
find a few manufacturers that are selling small sample sizes for ~$20, which should be more than
adequate for a small camera monitor. Good luck with your project!
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Notice tarp taped to the ground, stocking
feet, and cotton gloves, all used to keep the fragile balloon intact. Bright tape on the
camera-carrying cooler helped them recover the balloon rig.
To the left can (barely) be seen
cellphone and handwarmers, to the right (under the bungies) the camera and handwarmers. The
warmers are used to keep the equipment from freezing.
That's Long Island to the middle-left,
the Hudson River, bottom-middle, and Jersey, middle-right.
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