Make: technology on your time

Mikey77 writes:

Build a 1/20 cubic inch robot with a gripper that can pick up and move small objects. It is controlled by a Picaxe microcontroller. At this point in time, I believe this may be the world's smallest wheeled robot with a gripper. That will no doubt change, tomorrow or next week, when someone builds something smaller.

The main problem with building really small robots is the relatively large size of even the smallest motors and batteries. They take up most of the volume of a micro robot. I am experimenting with ways to eventually make robots that are truly microscopic. As an interim step, I made the three tiny robots and the controller described in this instructable. I believe with modifications, these proof of concept robots, could be scaled down to microscopic size.

There are a few clever pranks here. I particularly like the Mentos stealth geyser. From the Mischief Makers' Manual.

That's not an adjective in the title, "Awesome Grant" is the actual name of the grant, from the Awesome Foundation, of Cambridge, MA. Each month, they give away $1,000 to someone who wants to do something... well awesome. Here's how they define what they're looking for:

Awesomeness is often overlooked by mainstream culture, which tends to rehash the same broadly appealing but mediocre creations. Thankfully, there is the web.

Awesomeness is more the product of a creator's passion than the prospect of audience or profit. Awesome creations are novel and non-obvious, evoking surprise and delight. Invariably, something about them perfectly reflects the essence of the medium, moment, or method of creation. Awesomeness challenges and inspires.

You enter the proposals on their site and they only need to be 500 words. If you get accepted, you even get access to workspace to realize your project (if you live in the Boston area).

If any of our readers submit a proposal that gets accepted, please let us know. We're sure there are plenty of awesome ideas bouncing around the noggins of Make: Online readers.

The Awesome Foundation

On today's HacDC Blabber list, Trammell Hudson posted a link to this awesome account of British soldiers building a radio in a Japanese POW camp. Trammel writes:

Since they didn't have a local Digikey or Radioshack, everything had to be sourced from what was available. The caps were made from aluminum foil lining of tea-chests, the resistors were rusty barbed wire with burned tree bark, the rectifiers out of oxidised foil and salt water, they smuggled a tube ("valve") in the camps and bribed the local Chinese power station operator to slowly step the output voltage up to 130 from 110 volts.

Amazingly they were able to receive the BBC broadcasts! The initial RX design was pretty basic, so they then built a super-het regenerative transmitter, too, but never made use of it.

[FYI: The image I used above is not from this story, just a diagram of your basic DIY foxhole radio.]

Construction of Radio Equipment in a Japanese POW Camp

Let's Make Robots is a popular site for robot hobbyists. They've been running two build contests on the site which are now in their finals. Rik, a community member writes:

The LMR Dagu Mr. Basic Challenge invited makers to create any robot from a basic four wheel platform (provided by community sponsor Dagu Electronics). Entries vary from spectacular light shows (using Nixie tubes) to fire fighter to mouse droid (as seen on Star Wars). Three money prizes are at stake. All community members are invited to judge the entries.

The Oddbot LMR Video Challenge is sponsoring creative videos of home made robots. The criteria for "robot" are stretched far enough as to give any one a shot at the lavish prizes. The resulting videos are very funny and creative. The prizes consist of robots and components that Oddbot built and collected over the years. He must now part with them as he moves from Australia to China to become a pro.

I love the sense of humor, and fun, expressed in a lot of the entry bot designs and videos.

Let's Make Robots

The tradition of improvising a chess set from whatever's on hand is probably as venerable as chess itself. Chess culture is chock-full of sets put together from odds and ends of every description, but here I'm only focusing on sets built from mechanical and electrical bits--mostly nuts, bolts, and washers of various flavors. If you've got a good one I missed, please do link it in the comments.

If you're interested in making your own and want some guidance, Mother Earth News has a nice tutorial.

Most cell phones are provided with a very basic wall-wart charger, and you usually have to pay extra for a proper charging dock. The bundled charger is often unsightly in use, being just a transformer with a cord strung out to an end table or something where the cell phone rests. If you have a cat who likes to chew through cords, as I do, this can be more than just inelegant--it can be totally impractical. It's also a good project if you just hate, for aesthetic reasons, loose power cords strung out across the furniture.

A similar product is for sale at ThinkGeek, and that's where I got the idea. The nice thing about my version is that it requires no tools to mount or demount, being suspended by the plug on the charger itself. So you can quickly move it around to whatever outlet you want or take it with you when you travel. Plus it costs all of nothing to build.

Instructables has a roundup of 4th projects for a happy weekend. BBQs, recipes, summer clothes, and water abound.

Jörn Loviscach shares strategies for thermographic imaging using an infrared thermometer and custom software. Impressive results considering IR thermometers can be had for less than a hundred bucks while the cameras cost several thousand. [via Hack a Day]

Update: There's also a related discussion in our forums, where Bill Beatty points out an interesting strategy.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

J Miller shares video of the maiden voyage of his rocket built from the plans in MAKE Volume 15. The reaction to the lack-of-rocket-return here is genuinely priceless! And in case you're curious, yes, it was sucessfully recovered. Definitely a good idea to use a very wide open space for testing :)

Compressed Air Rocket  Volume 15, Page 102

Ever wondered what it'd be like to set off 204 bottle rocks at the same time? I know I have. Turns out, it's a good time (so long as you're not in the line of fire).

I Love Bottle Rockets

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Timothy J Silverman used the burrs from a peppermill to convert his drill into a handy coffee grinder. Use this along with the drill scrambler and you've got yourself a real workshop power breakfast!

Update:The maker adds -

I don't recommend using peppermill innards to grind coffee. They grind better than a commercial propeller-style grinder. But they're just too small to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time.

The next iteration will use real coffee burrs from a real coffee grinder. I found some to salvage, but they're also available as replacement parts. Then I can use a hand crank instead of the drill. That should make those who share my office, where this device is normally used, happier.

Make your own fire starter that uses compressed air and burns at 500 degrees!
Thanks to Bill Gurstelle for showing us this at Maker Faire.
To download The Fire Piston MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.
Pick up your own Fire Piston Kit in the Maker Shed.

This thing is wrong on so many levels, it almost reaches back around to right. Almost.

USB Cigar Flash Memory (with LEDs)

Some mobile carriers have started selling subsidized netbooks with integrated 3G radios. If you've already got a netbook and enjoy the form factor, but would rather not have to plug in a dongle, here's a quick run-through for integrating a Novatel EU850D 3G radio into a Dell Mini 9 that should give you an idea of what such a project entails.

How-to: 3G to Dell Mini 9. Not so easy way.. [via jkkmobile]

Scottish sound designer, the Amazing Rolo, traveled to Maker Faire this year especially to see what sorts of cool musical technologies people were cooking up. He made a series of videos of makers demoing their wares. Of the three videos above, he writes:

First up is Elly Jessop, a Masters Student at the uber-cool MIT Media Lab, and her Vocal Augmentation and Manipulation Prosthesis (VAMP). Next is Barry Threw, from Keith McMillan Instruments, showing off the K-Bow (and accompanying software) for extending stringed instrument performance into the digital realm. And finally, the amazing Moldover and his totally bonkers Syncomasher.

The Amazing Rolo

The Fire Piston Kit is a neat physics experiment based on the heat created when air is rapidly compressed. Bill Gurstelle, author of Backyard Ballistics and Barrage Garage, created this kit for us. If you were at Maker Faire you might have seen him demonstrating his kit in the Maker Shed. [Thanks Bill!]

More about the Fire Piston Kit

Limor has posted another installment of her exceedingly excellent sensor tutorials, this one on that most marvelous of switches, the tilt sensor. When you just have to know which end is up, you need to strap on one of these puppies. Here's how.

Sensor tutorials - Tilt sensors!

More:
Force Sensitive Resistor (FSR) tutorial
Ladyada's temp sensor tutorial
Adafruit's CdS tutorial

Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to becky@makezine.com or drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Bill writes in:

Last year I built a Kid Wash and my kids have loved playing in it. We brought it out again yesterday with the great weather we had over the weekend and my son (age 12) came up with the idea of earning money over the summer by building and selling them locally. It's an easy enough project that I figure he can handle it and it is popular enough with the neighborhood children that he could also have some success in selling it.

However, the new CPSIA regulations have me worried that such a project (however small) will never get off the ground or we'll just be setting ourselves up for legal problems down the road. How do makers who build and sell toys deal with such regulations? Obviously if he was trying to make and sell something hazardous I wouldn't allow it, but how do we encourage such entrepreneurship without exposing ourselves to liabilities.

There was a huge outcry over the CPSIA regulations when they were announced because of their lack of consideration of the costs they would impose on small manufacturers, especially handmakers of one-of-a-kind toys and clothes. The CPSC voted to impose a stay of one year for testing and certification requirements, which expires February 10, 2010. These folks clearly realized there needs to be more thought put into the wide-sweeping rules that would devastate many small businesses. So you still aren't allowed to sell toys with lead paint, small choking-sized parts, etc., but you don't have to have your KidWash tested by a third party for lead and phthalates before selling them to your neighbors. Not until next year, at least.

Matt Mets made a rotation-based MIDI controller using a motor, disc, webcam, and OpenCV. Source code included.

Alden Hart, who wrote the LED Light Bricks project for MAKE, Volume 18, has put together a lovely little kit to make building the project much easier. And we're now offering them in the Maker Shed! The kit includes a printed circuit board, 20 bright LEDs, in red, green, blue, and yellow, a programmed PIC16F916 (which you can reprogram, if you like), a tilt switch, power supply, and everything else you need to complete the project (except the molding and casting components). The kit sells for $27.

Here's a link to the Digital Edition of the article in MAKE, Volume 18.
Here's a link to the Web Extras page with the full mold-making and casting article.
Here's a link to the Make: Online how-to on different ways you can construct molds.

In the Maker Shed:

This is a moment that would have made 15 year old me very proud of present-day me: I've just received a DIY fireworks kit in the mail! I love the "Don't Send This Via Airplane" sticker.

My friend Heathervescent hipped me to this introductory Turbo Pyro kit from Skylighter. The kit supplies what you'll need to make your own fireworks, including a 206 page eBook that guides you through making ten different fireworks: from tube sparklers to bottle rockets to aerial shells to something called a "Flying Fish Fuse Mine". I've skimmed through the eBook and it looks thorough and professionally done. It has a number of embedded videos in it, which should be pretty helpful.

I've only had moments to scan the contents of the boxes, but they include a lot of paper tubes, charcoal, potassium chlorate, clay, potassium nitrate, sulfer, and other compounds (this endeavor involves making your own gunpowder), a few different kinds of ignition fuses, a bunch of mysterious custom tools for packing the fireworks, a digital scale, mortar casings, a large mortar tube, and more. You have to supply some sieeves, trays, measuring spoons, an electric coffee mill, tape, glue, safety gear, and a few hand tools.

I'm going to try the simplest projects first, hopefully in time for the 4th of July. Then, if all goes well (and I have the same number of fingers as I'm typing with right now), I'll put together some of the big flying stuff and head out to the desert to fire them off.

You can sign up here to be notified when the next batch of kits is available:TurboPyro

Their blog is pretty cool too, I had no idea people had taken things to this level!

Now this is a train layout, 1,800 sqaure feet of it. It's the pride and joy of the Walnut Creek Model Railroad Society, Walnut Creek, CA, who've been at it since 1975. I like how the piece on Wired.com opens:

Before SimCity -- even before Dungeons and Dragons -- back when "computer" was a job title, people still found ways to vaporize countless hours of free time designing and maintaining private universes. In the analog world, such parallel realities were built with tweezers, glue and a spouse's permission to cover the basement with papier-mâché massifs and plywood plains.

And this, on the system that runs the layout:

The society's control systems are a steampunk fantasy: a roomful of vintage 1930s magnetic relays once used to route phone calls, clacking like mechanical dominoes with every move the amateur engineers make. A full complement of 30 members can run 10 individual trains simultaneously on the layout, though only a dozen or so are required for basic operation.

Giant Model Railroad Is an Analog SimCity [via Boing Boing]

More:
Rod Stewart in Model Railroader Magazine

Introducing Syn/Ack Pac, a Political Action Committee for "SysAdmins, Tinkerers, CodeMonkeys, Makers, Technologists, Warranty Voiders, and Geeks of all types."

Why Do Geeks Need a PAC? Non-profit groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and many others do a great job evangelizing, lobbying, and litigating on our behalf. But as non profits, they're unable to particpate in the political process. That political void is what SYN/ACK PAC seeks to fill, bolstering the efforts of our non profit friends with our participation in campaigns and elections, we'll make sure we elect members of Congress who will represent our beliefs.

Sign up for the announcement list here.

Here are instructions for building a drum machine with a tangible visual interface. A camera above the paper drum board reads the positions of physical objects and translates them into sounds, as indicated on the labels on the objects. It looks fairly easy to make, with most of the components from paper and card.

The d-touch Drum Machine

An alloy of 1.3% copper, 0.3% magnesium, and 0.3% manganese in aluminum, etched with potassium permanganate and lye.

So I woke up this morning all pumped up to blog about metallography. If you don't already know, metallography is a type of scientific microimaging that involves mirror-polishing metal surfaces and then etching them with various reagents to reveal their microstructures, which are often of breathtaking beauty.

"Griffith Cannon Flash," by Dr. Frederick E. Schmidt, from the iron of a cannon used at Gettysburg.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of these images online. ASM International, the big metallurgical professional society, has a large online database of metallographs, but it's locked away behind a members-only paywall. Except for a couple of skimpy .PDFs (2007, 2008), even the winners of their annual International Metallographic Contest seem to go largely unpublicized.

Which is a shame, not only because the images themselves are so beautiful, but because they could inspire a whole culture of amateur and artistic metallographers that does not, as far as I can tell, presently exist. Which fact also surprises me, by the way, because the equipment and techniques of metallography are very accessible to amateurs, especially relative to other modern methods of materials analysis.

"Grain structure in CC cast 3304 aluminum alloy," by Elana Naez.

If you know of anyone who's making metallographs as a hobby or as a means of personal artistic expression, please drop me a link in the comments.

My dad recently took a minor tumble on his motorcycle. He's fine, but the bike was banged up a bit, including a bent brake rotor. Consensus among his buddies in the Magna Owners of Texas was that the rotor would have to be replaced, but of course they're pricey, and since the rotor was "shot" anyway, Dad figured he might as well try to straighten it and see what happened.

Here's what he did, in his own words:

Since I had mounted the tire/wheel on the axle in my vice to polish the wheel, it was a simple matter to rig up the "feeler" shown in the first picture to check out the rotor flatness. Just a piece of copper wire about AWG 7 to 9 or thereabouts -- I had in my electrical junk box. With a light behind the setup, one can use the reflection of the end of the wire from the rotor surface to obtain a very sensitive indication of warp when one spins the tire/wheel. Brought it back to planar using a soft face (brass) hammer. Go slow, it takes some time. "Sneak up on it" by whacking gently, measure, whack a little harder, measure, etc. until it yields just a bit.

Then, concerned that the rotor needed to be flatter than he could detect with the naked eye, he rigged up a second jig to test it:

Wow, a LEGO combination safe!

According to a piece on BotJunkie (translating a piece on Japan's Robot Watch), a small army of vacuum tube robots from the 50s and 60s, built by Aizawa Zirou, have been unearthed in a warehouse, many of them apparently brand new. I love the Google translation:

"Were sleeping in a warehouse until it's released by the packaging. We look at the state and restore the dynamics at the time."

Got it.

Awesome Retro Robots Revealed In Japan

Assemble your very own HD home theater projector using these DIY kits from G&P Optoelectronics. Combine the optics, housing, lighting, and electronics bundles and with luck you'll be watching your favorite episodes of Make: Television in glorious 1280x720 HD in no time.

DIY HD projector for under €499 [via slashgear]

Scoochmaroo shares this recipe for basic sunscreen free of the umpteen additives used in commercial varieties.

Sunscreen is intended to shield your skin from harmful UVA and UVB rays. These can cause premature aging, and more tragically, skin cancer. But commercial suncreens often involve more nasty chemicals than necessary.

By making your own sunscreen, you control exactly what goes in!

CDM points out this very sweet beat manipulator interface by Luca De Rosso. The project, better known as OTTO, makes use of an Arduino board, MAX/MSP software, and an array of LEDs + switches to create a very intuitive and approachable experience for musicians. -

OTTO is a new musical instrument for beat-slicing, the technique that allows to create complex and variegated rhythm sections by using just one rhythmic audio sample, cutting it into little pieces and rearranging them in time. OTTO provides a hardware solution with a strong visual feedback, to allow the musician to control the audio sample as if it was in his hands.

In this clip from FMCG, Ken responds to Jeri's capacitor deconstruction with his own very visual (and very mechanical) demonstration of how voltage is generated and how you can build a simple capacitor, with aluminum foil and plastic, to generate charge mechanically and dump it into the cap (analogous to how a Wimshurst machine works).

I love how this was inspired by Jeri's demo and how the two of them are having a Net-carried, seemingly casual conversation, marveling over the miracles of science. I don't know about you, but this sort of thing makes me strangely happy.

BTW: Jeri's capacitor demo is cool too, but unfortunately, the sound craps out at the end.

FMCG

This supremely cool analog synth with a gorgeous etched-brass faceplace showed up on Steampunk Workshop, via the German synth site Synthesizer Database. The builder is Moritz Wolpert. Apparently, from the Google translation, all the knobs and handles were turned by hand on a lathe and the faceplace was hand-lettered, decorated and etched. The project took him two years.

Schaltzentrale [via Steampunk Workshop]

This Desktop Onager is constructed out of only wood and twine. That's right, no metal parts here! These types of war machines were the predecessors to cannons and modern artillery. This desktop model uses the torsion skein for all of its power. Using this ancient power mechanism, it can launch the wooden projectiles up to twenty feet.

More about the Desktop Onager

Our friends over at Sparkfun have announced their decision to officially make some of their kits open source. Nathan and company have always been supporters of OSH, but now they're going to be putting links to the engineering files up to at least some of their kits. The first is the ClockIt kit, an alarm clock kit built around the ATMega168. The listing for the kit ends with links to the Eagle files (licensed under CC v3.0 Share-Alike), the schematic, the source code, and a link to an "Improve Source Code" forum posting. Nice. "One of the great things about open source is the ability to say 'Hey, I'm pretty sure this works, but it may not be the best way to do it. Can you help me out?,'" says Nathan Sheidle.

ClockIt

This is a cool skeleton mirror, anybody able to laser cut mirrors at home? Via Street Anatomy.

More:

Super skull roundupalooza

Rachel @ CRAFT points us to this rad circuit board latch hook rug by Red Tarts. I think I just realized Ineed a new bath mat.

The New Ecology of Things Lab at Art Center's graduate Media Design Program has released a new version of their NETLab Toolkit. This is a system for more easily connecting microcontrollers to computers, especially targeted at those who may be new to hardware and programming. In this video, Professor Philip van Allen of the Media Design Program shows how you can use NETLab to easily connect a a sensor to an Arduino and to Flash on a desktop machine.

Here's the basic product description:

The NETLab Toolkit is a free set of software tools that enable designers to easily "sketch in hardware". With no programming at all and working in the familiar environment of Flash (or Processing or MAX/MSP), designers can hook up a physical sensor (e.g. a knob) and immediately get that knob to control a motor or a video projection. The toolkit works with a wide range of sensors, wireless sensors, input from the Wii Remote, controls motors and LEDs, communicates with MIDI devices, controls sound, graphics, and video in Flash, and communicates with DMX computer controlled lighting equipment, all with a simple drag-and-drop interface (of course, programming hooks are provided as well).

NETLab Toolkit

By way of fellow papercraft enthusiast Cory Doctorow comes images of this incredible castle, posted on Tokyobling. Tokyobling explains:

I had the immense opportunity to see this wonderful paper craft art installation by a genius of the name of Wataru Itou, a young student of a major art university here in Tokyo. The installation is hand made over four years of hard work, complete with electrical lights and a moving train, all made of paper! Clearly, this man must have created one of the most stunning examples of Paper Craft in the world? At the exhibition you will also have the chance to see a video showing Mr. Itou at work in his studio, cutting and folding piece by piece. The exhibition is called Umi no Ue no Oshiro (A Castle On the Ocean ), 海の上のお城. It is exhibited at Uminohotaru, a place which in itself is a major attraction: a service area in the middle of the ocean, right between Tokyo City and Chiba Prefecture.

A Paper Craft Castle On the Ocean [via Boing Boing]

The twice-monthly Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). Every other Wednesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE, Volume 17

This week, we look at the largely-lost Medieval art of timbrel vaulting structures and the related, more modern (late 19th century) system of interlocking terracotta tiles which create what are known as Guastavino domes, after their inventor, Rafael Guastavino.

Low-Tech magazine has an excellent introduction to timbrel vaulting and Guastavino domes, called "Tiles as a substitute for steel: the art of the timbrel vault." Here's an excerpt:

The method of timbrel vaulting was developed in the 14th century around the Mediterranean, although its precise origins are unknown. The timbrel vault is also known as a "masonry vault", "Catalan vault", "tiled vault", "laminated vault", "flat vault" and "layered vault" (derived from Spanish, French, Italian and Catalonian descriptions).

A roof of tiles

Timbrel vaulting differs substantially from the Roman method of arch building, which relies on gravity. A Roman vault consists of a single layer of thick, wedge-shaped stones (see below).

The timbrel vault does not rely on gravity but on the adhesion of several layers of overlapping tiles which are woven together with fast-setting mortar. If just one layer of thin tiles was used, the structure would collapse, but adding two or three layers makes the resulting laminated shell almost as strong as reinforced concrete.

The result defies common sense, because a timbrel vault is very thin compared to a Roman vault, while at the same time it is capable of bearing much higher loads. This of course enables wider spans and gentler curves.

I've seen this thing referred to as an "Ocean Mat," a "Prolong Knot," a "Ladder Mat," and a "Sailor's True Love Mat." Whatever you want to call it, it's a noble expression of the manly art of knot-tying, and this tutorial at the UK's Scullion Enterprises will show you how it's done.

More:

• Rope bending
• Make knots - Alaska museum of fancy knots
• How-To: Tie a double fisherman's knot
• Star knot tutorial
• Val ties the canoe
• The forgotten Zeppelin knot
• Knot reference wallet card

By Alden Hart

The "LED Light Brick" project in MAKE, Volume 18 has generated lots of good feedback for us, so we went back and asked Alden to explore a few variations on the theme of the brick casting itself, how you might be creative with it. This article is the result. Be sure to check out the original piece in MAKE, Volume 18, and also the on-line supplement containing specific casting instructions. --SMR

From the pages of MAKE

Some Experiments in Mold Making

A lot of the fun of the Light Brick is trying out different molds. Some very different effects can be achieved depending on the mold you make. This post explores some mold making options and experiments.

The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk (Tig-Ihm-Boh-Edge) project is gettting a bit of a facelift. From Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, this "pay-it-forward style hardware sharing program for electronics" system has had its successes and pitfalls this year, and some adjustments to the system come now after learning what works and what doesn't. New standardized documents to be included in the boxes means everyone who gets one will know what to do with it, and recipients are encouraged to track their boxes even after they send them off to the next lucky hackers. EMSL is also launching new boxes this week, so check out the new and improved project wiki if you're interested in participating.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

The Arkansasridgerunner pioneers the world of shipping chic with this sensible wine rack built from FedEx tubes. I do believe this would go quite nicely with my packing-peanut chaise lounge!