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November 19, 2008

Bubble calendar

Caln-2009
This Bubble calendar via BBG is pretty cute, if you have extra packaging material laying around you could make your own.

Posted by Phillip Torrone | Nov 19, 2008 04:00 AM
Arts, Crafts, DIY Projects, Remake | Permalink | Comments (0) | Suggest a Site

HOW TO - Create sound samples for Gameboy

200811190708

Sebastian walks you through the process for creating sample kits for use with the Little Sound DJ sequencer cartridge on Gameboy. The small amount of memory you have to work with makes this an interesting process in its own right -

Now, in my opinion there are three places to look for space when choosing where to crop you samples. You may notice that before the initial attack portion of your sample, there may be small amount of silence or almost silence. You can delete this, of course. Not only will this give you more time, but your depending on the length that you delete from the start, your samples may sound more "in time" with the rest of LSDJ (because the sound will be starting on the beat).

- Prepare Samples and create LSDJ kits

Add a trumpet to your tailpipe

This tail-pipe hack is meant to make some noise every time the vehicle (in this case a motorcycle) spits out enough carbon monoxide that could be harmful to the environment. Since this might end up getting you into an accident, so we don't condone this type of modification, still it's kind of nice to hear the sound of trumpets rather than the usual gas guzzling motor sounds your bike normally spits out.

via Wrong Distance

Make throwies to learn Ohm's Law

If you really want to understand electric circuit theory, eventually you will need to come to terms with Ohm's Law. So how can you get the concept across that I=V/R? Will your students be able to figure out that V=I/R or that R=V/I, or that all three of these equations are pretty much the same? How can they integrate these theories with their changing letter designations so they can be used in real life applications? How about throwing some throwies at them?

Many instructional materials for learning to work with electricity and circuits are based on 9 volt batteries. Often they start by having the experimenter place a resistor in series with the LED to reduce current flow, save on battery life and keep the LED from getting fried. Having to use a resistor at such an early stage of learning circuits introduces too much theory at the beginning. 9 volt batteries are also either moderately or unreasonably expensive.

There are many online resources for studying electricity and circuits. I particularly like one from Paul Falstad, which shows visuals for the current flow and direction. You can use his sample circuits, and modify them as well. He has many other visualizations of various math and physics concepts on his site.

Some of the ideas that you can pursue by using throwies are: How long will a throwie stay lit? If you add a second, third, or dozen LEDs in parallel to the 3volt battery, how will that affect the run time of the circuit? If you wire the same number of LEDs in series to the battery, how will that affect the duration of the life of the battery? If you add other components to the circuit, like, resistors, capacitors, transistors or photo resistors, how will the circuit behave? How do you use a multimeter to determine voltage, resistance, amperage, polarity and more?

Another reason to look to throwies is expense. If you take a look at the picture at the top of this post, from Make: Volume 6, page 116, you can find sources and prices for all the parts you need. LEDs are pretty cheap now. The batteries are reasonably priced as well, the magnets will cost some. You should be able to outfit a class full of throwie making supplies for relatively short money, but most of these parts can be harvested out of junk. LEDs are in most of the electronics that we throw out every day. Batteries are in every computer heading for the loading dock, and inside every hard drive is at least a couple of good high strength rare earth magnets. The older electronics are actually better for scavenging than a lot of the new stuff, since the parts were bigger and assembled with more traditional fasteners. If you are going to desolder components, you will need at least a soldering iron and some desoldering braid to go with your safety glasses.

One possible pitfall for this project is the magnets. They are definitely a source of potential mayhem in the hands of the average teenager. Certainly there are some ways to modify the project to minimize the chaos. Sittees? Stickies? Floaties?

Have you taught electricity with throwies or other simple materials? If you give it a try, take some pictures, video or make a posting to the Make Flickr Pool. Add some links to the descriptions. Add some comments to this post with more ideas on great ways to get students excited about learning electricity!

Are there other articles in Make or Craft that you think work well in the classroom or other learning environment? Post your ideas in the comments.

The hazards of a Dad who's a Maker

I had just set the doll down on the floor of my studio when my kids walked in to see what I was making. Unfortunately, I was in the process of disemboweling yet another one of their beloved toys. This has happened once before during my Mechamo Crab build so I should have known better than to leave this kind of stuff lying around.

Even though they willingly offered me the old toy for dissection, nothing prepares them for the cruel reality that this once loved doll was...well, just a toy. Underneath the silicone skin is a bunch of plastic, speakers, wires, and motors, all waiting for me to hack apart and use in another project. It's a Makers gold mine!

My youngest daughter asked, "Why did her face fall off?" I just smiled and said, "Daddy is making something for work." She accepted my answer and happily ran off. I dodged that bullet! My oldest daughter was obviously fascinated by the inner workings of the doll. YES! She's hooked...another Maker is born!

Do you have any funny moments when you were building something? Post them in the comments below. Thanks!

DIY: Cardboard laptop cooler

Here is another great idea form James Li. This time he used some scrap cardboard and an old case fan to make a laptop cooler. Let's just hope his laptop does get too hot, cardboard ignites easily.

My laptop needs to be slightly elevated to cool it down, so here is a laptop cooler (unfortunately, not strong enough to be made into a stand) It even runs on USB power! All I need to plug it into a spare USB port. I stripped this USB plug form the masses of USB extenders that Dick Smith ship with their flash drives (that's that black USB plug)

More about the DIY: Cardboard laptop cooler

Arduino & XBee wireless accelerometer

This is a good place to learn about wireless communications using an XBee and an Arduino. There are a lot of different sensors that could use this same code with only slight variations.

I managed to put together a wireless accelerometer the other night using my two new XBees, an Arduino XBee shield, an XBee Explorer USB, an ADXL330, and some Python. I struggled a bit with some of it, so here's what I learned.

More about XBee & Arduino wireless accelerometer

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Mini Board, fully assembled

A Revolution in DIY engineering - How to Build With Grid Beam

How-To-Build-With-Grid-Beam
A review of How to Build With Grid Beam @ The Citizen Scientist. Sheldon writes-

How to Build With Grid Beam is a guide to a clever and flexible system of construction for a wide range of home-built projects, from storage units to work spaces to furniture, vehicles, and structures. The system relies on the use of “sticks” or beams of square tube steel or aluminum or wood with holes placed at regular intervals along the length of each stick. Using lag bolts or other fasteners, these sticks can be assembled quickly and easily into structures that are quite robust and easily adapted and reconfigured. And when you are finished with a project, you simply disassemble the project and use the components for something else. By using adapters and add-ons, most of which can be found in hardware stores, industrial supply houses, or fabricated in even a modestly-equipped shop, the system can be expanded to encompass a staggering array of applications.

Backyard beekeeping - 120 pounds of honey

treasure stolen gold
low the sun and busy bees
prepare for winter

We collected honey from our two backyard hives this fall and I've finally finished jarring it. The new hive, split from last year's hive, produced over 20 pounds of honey. This is more than our first hive produced last year, but the older hive was not to be outdone.

Queen Ann, in the second year of her reign, ran a very productive operation. Her daughters produced some of the lightest, most delightful honey I've ever had. The water content is so low that it pours out like a sheet of glass, folding at the bottom like you might expect from taffy.

From Ann's hive, we collected 100 pounds of honey, making the grand total 120 pounds between the two hives. This is the part we harvested. We leave enough behind for the bees to survive on during the long Minnesota winter, which amounts to another 80-100 pounds.

What's incredible is that all of this honey is produced from the flowers, trees, and vegetable gardens within a 2-3 mile radius of the hives. Two years ago, before I began this hobby, I wouldn't have thought this was possible in the city.

If you're interested in starting a backyard hive next spring, this is what you can look forward to. The real challenge of this urban agricultural experiment is to figure out what to do with the harvest.

Previously
Backyard beekeeping - splitting a hive

Toys designed by artists exhibition

The Arkansas Arts Center is looking for submissions to their annual Toys Designed by Artists exhibition. It's their 36th year!

Shirts from 3D models

Check out these shirts made from 3D models using an unfolding-polygon method similar to what product designers use when constructing paper models. Via Fashioning Technology.

Video version of the $20 and under gift guide - electronic kits for $20

Video version of the $20 and under gift guide - electronic kits for $20 and under (M4V).

DIY speakers

Lucas and his dad enjoy making stuff. In this video Brad interviews the young Tinkerer about the spiffy new speakers they made and rigged up to their stereo.

This was a great project - we followed the plans at http://makezine.com/12/diymusic_plate/ but didn't have the right wire, magnets, or plates. Instead we used 30 ga wire and magnets from RS and a variety of cups, plates, and disposable ware and compared how they all worked. They ALL worked well. This is one bulletproof project.

Making speakers is a really empowering thing. It can be as easy as wrapping some wire around a plastic cup, hooking it up to speaker terminals and listening in. Beyond that, you and your collaborators can find yourselves learning about crafting speaker enclosures, magnetism, electromagnets, repairing busted cones, and so much more. What have you done with magnet wire recently? Have you tried out projects from Make Magazine? If you have a tale to tell of the build, successful or 'learning experience', then post in the comments and add pictures and video to the Make Flickr pool.

Building the Gakken Cup Phonograph Kit

Gakken's New Edison-style Cup Phonograph Kit is a cylinder recorder that uses a needle to cut sound waves onto plastic cups. This kit lets you relive the excitement of Thomas Edison as he successfully recorded and played back sound for the first time on a similar cylinder recording system back in 1877.

Thomas Edison first experimented with sound recording by using paraffin paper, metal cylinders wrapped in tin foil, and then eventually settled on wax cylinders. As the story goes, the first thing to ever be successfully recorded and played back was Edison reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Gakken's phonograph kit lets you recreate a model of how Edison first experimented with sound recording and playback, replacing the wax cylinder with regular plastic cups.

How does it sound? Here's a video, yours truly, recording a brisk rendition of "I've Been Working on the Railroad":

This is certainly no mp3 player, but that's what is so great. It's eerily low-fi and nostalgic; it makes your voice sound like it's one hundred years old. You can hear and see the medium speak, and that is what makes this kit so much fun! Clear some space next to your music collection: You might never throw away a plastic cup again.

View the Gakken Phonograph Kit in the Maker Shed.

Read full story

Airpopper coffee roaster video

Here's a follow-up to my backyard coffee roasting post. All around great makers Mikey Sklar and Wendy Jehanara Tremayne made this video showing how to roast coffee with an airpopper. It doesn't get any easier than this! They used an unmodified West Bend Poppery II, which is a somewhat legendary machine in home roasting circles. With some luck you can pick one up for a few bucks at a yard sale, or get one on Ebay for around $30.

The Poppery II is 1000W and has its air holes in the sides of the cylinder, not the bottom, which improves circulation. This method is called "fluid bed air roasting". Since the beans are all flying around in a vortex being heated from all sides they roast much more evenly than the stirred pot method I use.

The craze for urban poultry farming

The craze for urban poultry farming... I know Mark has chickens, and so does Dale, maybe there is something to this...

For Brooklyn real-estate agent Maria Mackin, the obsession started five years ago, on a trip to Pennsylvania Amish country. She, her husband and three children—now 17, 13 and 11—sat down for brunch at a local bed-and-breakfast, and suddenly the chef realized she'd run out of eggs. "She said, 'Oh goodness! I'll have to go out to the garden and get some more'," Mackin recalls. "She cooked them up and they were delicious." Mackin and her husband, Declan Walsh, looked at each other, and it didn't take long for the idea to register: Could we have chickens too? They finished their brunch and convinced the bed-and-breakfast owner, a Mennonite celery farmer, to sell them four chickens. They packed them in a little nest in the back of their Plymouth Voyager minivan and headed back to Brooklyn.

Edible Estates: turning lawns into food

Edible Estates is continuing to march around the country, with 6 gardens that were formerly lawns now in place nationwide.

(Images of Austin's Edible Estate via fritzhaeg.com)

Check out Fritz Haeg's presentation from his Austin visit here for great visuals of the difference between lawns and edible estates.

Also check out this Mother Earth News article on edible ground cover and the "Food Not Lawns" groups popping up (Iowa City here, and San Diego here)

And, please comment if you've transformed your lawn into something more productive than xeriscaping and less wasteful than water-hungry grass!

Workbench contest winner

Hacked Gadgets ran a contest to try and find the awesomest electronics workbench in all of Geekdom. They got some pretty sweet entries, but the winner was Lorne Wilkins. Not only is his set-up top-drawer, he goes into detail describing parts of it, including some homebrewed tools, like the PCB holder made from an old printer tractor feed mechanism (15 in the photo).

Hacked Gadgets Workbench Contest Winner
All the contest entries

Mini-sequencer for SX-150

200811181804

Plan-K-Troniks posted a schematic of a nice little 8-step sequencer for use with the Gakken Analog Synthesizer kit. Their description is in Japanese, but not such a problem if your familiar with the language of electronics - MICRO ANALOG SEQUENCER FOR SX-150

Mkgk8-2
SX-150 Analog Synthesizer Kit

the operator of a MIDI calculator

AJTurley lives out many a Kraftwerk fan's fantasy as he uses his scientific calculator as a MIDI controller by way of a Basic Stamp board -

This is a demo of a project I built so that I could use my HP 48 to play a MIDI keyboard. The calculator is running a program that sends data to a Parallax Stamp Basic microcontroller over the built-in serial port whenever I press a button. The microcontroller is running software that converts the message from the calculator into a MIDI noteon or noteoff message that is then sent to the keyboard. This is a response to a createdigitalmusic.com poll in which a (small) number of users said they wanted the site to cover more calculator music.

[via Create Digital Music]

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WOW! Thanks to everyone involved with Maker Faire Bay Area and Maker Faire Austin in 2008: attendees, makers, exhibitors, sponsors, volunteers, and crew...it was an AMAZING year! Over 1,000 Makers and 87,000+ attendees total! Be sure to check out the photos @ Flickr, and our Maker Faire posts for all the action! Check back for dates for 2009 soon!