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Archives: June 2009

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June 30, 2009

How-To: Droning machine

Randy Sarafan's band has got to be set up by now, he built his own droning machine from the movie Eli Eli Lema Sabachthani.

Introducing the Fiat 500 Bulldozer

Ironsmith Kogoro Kurata took the body of a Fiat 500 and put it on an old set of Cat tracks. Tortoise-timed trips to the store, and hilarity, ensued.

Monkey Farm [via Pink Tentacle]

Keeping their cool

Over on GeekDad, Dana Bostic came up with this simple backyard cool-the-kids "hack" -- a hose sprayer set to "shower," zip-tied to a tall step ladder pouring down onto a trampoline -- so the kids can work up a sweat and cool off at the same time!

Keeping the Kids Cool This Summer [Thanks, Shawn!]

Motors and microcontrollers 101

Continuing with their fine series of tutorial videos, Humberto from NerdKits shows a number of basic experiments you can do with a DC motor, how EMF, resistance, and inductance influence the design of a motor control circuit, and finally, how to use toggled digital output and pulse-width modulation in driving the motor via a microcontroller.

NerdKits video tutorials [via Hack a Day]

How-To: Make pyrophoric iron

A former chemistry teacher of mine provided a great definition of "pyrophoric:"

[It] means that if you playfully squirt some at your lab mates, they will burst into flame.

In other (less amusing) words, a "pyrophoric" substance is one that ignites spontaneously on exposure to air.
Pyrophoric iron, however, isn't as dangerous as that makes it sound, especially in small quantities.

Basically, the oxidation of iron is so vigorous that it can cause very finely divided iron metal to become incandescent. Amazing Rust has a great tutorial on how to prepare finely divided iron by thermolyzing iron oxalate, a yellow powder that can, in turn, be prepared by a simple reaction between two common chemicals.

Book Review: Wayne Goddard's $50 Knife Shop

I've wanted to get into knifemaking since I was a teenager, but for years had been deterred by the belief that I first needed to buy a bunch of expensive equipment, like a 3-wheel belt grinder and an annealing oven. Then I found Wayne Goddard's $50 Knife Shop, which is a compilation of material originally prepared for Goddard's eponymous column in BLADE magazine. It kind of does for knifemaking what Dave Gingery's books did for foundrywork, going back to the historical fundamentals of the technology to get at what you really need to do good work. Goodies include homemade forges and anvils, homemade disc and belt grinders, scavenging steel for blades (including forging wire rope to make Damascus steel), finishing techniques, backyard heat treating, and a whole chapter on "tribal knifemaking," which is the modern art of making knives without using electricity. Fascinating stuff.

Solar hand fan

Elena Corchero designed this solar vintage-looking hand fan that functions as a portable light at night. Are we seeing a new niche in luxury goods emerging here? In her newly launched online boutique she also sells electronic toy construction kits and reflective lace (for safely biking in your fancy socks). Via Fashioning Technology.

Lithophane-making with the Micro CNC

MAKE contributor Steve Lodefink posted results from his Lumenlab Micro CNC's maiden voyage -

Lithophanes were a popular way to hide girlie pictures in the bottom a of gentleman's tea cup around the end of the 19th century. An image would be molded into the porcelain in the cup so that only when held up to a light would the picture be visible.
[...]
I "lithophaned" an image of a skull into a piece of corian. When viewed under normal front lighting, it sort of looks like a distorted C-3P0 face, but when held up to a light source, it is transformed into a skull.

Check out video of the 'skullithophanery' in process over @ Finkbuilt.

QR Code ruglette

Nikolaus Gradwohl, an Austrian MAKE subscriber, created a QR code of his mother's name that she can weave into the rugs she makes. Our very own Becky Stern was showing off her knitted QR code scarf at the Mini Maker Square at the Google I/O conference last month. She hadn't had much luck with getting phonecams to successfully scan the code before, but a number of people at the conference were able to read it.

QR-Code Carpet

How-To: Web-connected sensors with Arduino + Pachube

Morgellon posted steps on publishing Arduino sensor readings to the web via Pachube -

I recently discovered Pachube and have just fell in love with it.
This is a video of my first Pachube project and what I've been able to do. I connected two light sensors to an Arduino. One sensor measure light levels in my room, the other measures light levels outside.
The Arduino is connected to a computer running Processing, and it forwards the sensor data to Pachube.

The process is quite straightforward, making related projects much more approachable - iPhone and Android web apps are icing on the cake!

More:

Realtime sensor network awaits your input ... or output

How-To: Circuit bending Casio SA keyboards

Uber-bender Pete Edwards of Casper Electronics shares his recipe for cooking up some tasty mods for Casio 'SA' series keyboards -

This is an engineered modification which works on most of the Casio SA series ( SA-1, SA-5, SA-7, SA-8 etc). There will be an Amplifier chip ( No AN8053 ) common across the SA series and a mask programmed CPU which will be made by OKI and have the part No M6387-xx where xx is the variant for the specific keyboard it is installed in, in the case of the SA-5 it is M6387-16. The different variant number accommodates different key / button layouts of the keyboard it is fitted into, the PCM sounds however remain the same. There are 5 interesting modifications that can be easily fitted:

1) Pitch Shifting
2) Power Crash
3) 5th's Switch
4) Glitch Randomizer
5) Filter/ Feedback Adjustment

Oodles more info + sound samples available of @ Casper.

Shopping-cart serenade

Not since industrial noisemakers like Einsturzende Neubauten first miked a shopping cart... This is a decidedly more 21st version. The makers, Hogan Birney, Sean Kinberger, and David Plakon explain the design:

Touch and pressure are used to control the live manipulation of sound and image. The cart is equipped with a video projector, computer and battery making it portable and self contained. Using a microprocessor (Arduino) and custom software (max/msp/jitter) to sense the users touch and translate the pressure of the users touch, a real-time response is created both visually and sonically. The cart is used by MPG performers and the audience is also encouraged to play the cart as well.

More about the Mobile Performance Group

Transforming robot

Kevmag 2000 posted this YouTube vid of his transforming robot, apparently built for a robotics class. Pretty cool. I couldn't find out much else about it.

Kevmag 2000-Transforming Robot [Submitted by Chris Brent. Thanks, Chris!]

New in the Maker Shed: ARMmite PRO

The ARMmite PRO from the Maker Shed is a low-cost single board computer. It's perfect for small volume applications that require customization. The ARMmite PRO Features 21 TTL compatible digital I/Os shared with 7 10-bit A/D pins. Unleash the power of a 32-bit processor, running at 60 MHz to solve your control problem. Save time with built in support for PWM, SPI, 1-Wire, I2C, Pulse timing, Synchronous and Asynchronous serial protocols. Fully assembled, no soldering required!

More about the ARMmite PRO

June 29, 2009

How-To: Re-cover a bike saddle

Say your bike saddle's fabric/leather is wearing thin, or you just don't like the color. Or say you live in Phoenix and your black bike seat gets so hot while it's outside baking in the sun all day so that when you go to ride it, you get second degree burns. You might want to change the cover, and Instructables user djeucalyptus has just the tutorial for you. And me.

SPARK Project #1, Post #5

Shawn Schaffert's ratcheting scheduler

Real Time Operating Systems?

Even though this project is about a smart home dashboard that doesn't necessarily have any time-critical tasks, it very easily could. What if a cloud covered the solar panels, and I wanted to dim the lights in response. I don't want my software to wait for all the temperature sensors to finish updated before changing the lighting. To avoid this potential problem, I want a "Real Time Operating System" for my project.

Systems using embedded controllers are often characterized by the need to exhibit real-time computing behavior. It's important to understand what this means and how it affects the choice of software to use in a project. No one would argue that computers have been getting faster and faster over the years. Hard drive, memory, video card, and motherboard speeds and clock rates have been steadily increasing with each new generation of hardware. This has meant that the user can run complex applications without having to wait unreasonable amounts of time, and that simple applications perform their functions in vanishingly small time increments. For most desktop applications, small delays in program execution are unnoticeable and insignificant. But what if part of your application monitors the emergency-stop button for your home-built CNC milling machine? You need the emergency-stop button to shut the machine down within a guaranteed amount of time. Not having this determinism could create a very dangerous situation if, say, a background task like playing music or saving a file have momentarily taken over the computer bandwidth. You press and release the emergency-stop and watch in horror as your mill bit keeps going right through your part.

It doesn't take a powerful or fast CPU to give a timely response to a single bit change in a peripheral I/O register. Anyone who has programmed a port interrupt in a simple 8-bit microcontroller can figure out how long it will take for the 8-bit processor to capture the I/O interrupt and call the code to respond to the event. With PC operating systems like OSX, Windows, and Linux, there is some ability to implement "real-time" threads, but this capability is often implemented by overriding the operating system's normal behavior by using an operating system add-on to achieve this capability. These operating systems were designed to be effective general purpose tools for running a wide variety of applications and interacting with numerous third-party hardware devices, but they were not designed to have real-time, deterministic behavior.

A true real-time operating system (RTOS) is designed with features such that a program can be split into tasks which run on a fixed schedule, and asynchronous events, such as the CNC mill emergency-stop button press, will have a guaranteed maximum latency before they execute. You can write a program to toggle one I/O pin at 5 kHz and another at 1 kHz with minimal jitter, or program the emergency stop button response to shut off your CNC mill motors within a guaranteed 1 millisecond.

Check out a list of real time operating systems and find out about Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 here.

This SPARK Your Imagination Make: Windows Embedded project series is sponsored by Microsoft Corporation.

MAKE classifieds deadline fast approaching

Interested in placing a Classified ad in Make: Volume 19? Email classifieds@makezine.com for more information. Time is running out, and your ad must be placed by 11:59pm PDT on Wednesday, July 1st. One lucky reader will win a 4-line classified ad in Make: Volume 19 ($160 value) by emailing classifieds@makezine and inquiring about advertising in our Classified section. The winner will be notified Thursday morning, and if the winner already paid for an ad, he/she will be credited.

Got something cool you want to sell, have a service to offer fellow readers, looking for some precious widget that only another maker might have stashed away in the garage? The Make: MINImarketplace offers a place for you to reach the maker community for a very reasonable price.

MINImarketplace Classified Ad Specs:
Ads are $40 per line
40 characters per line
Minimum 4 lines, Maximum 16 lines

Sweet penny stove

We've covered these beer can stoves before, but this is a particularly nice one. And 'tis the season to be camping...

Penny Stove Instructions and FAQ [Thanks, Pete Marchetto!]

More:
Make a Pepsi Can Stove
A better soda can stove

Scottish rotary boat lift - The Falkirk Wheel

This amazing machine transfers boats between the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals of central Scotland, which are some 80 feet apart vertically. It was opened in 2002. Gareth wrote last year about artist Andy Scott's proposal to install a pair of titanic mythical sea-horse heads as part of the lock mechanism below the wheel. Via Neatorama.

Lithium backpack for Arduino MEGA

The Mega Lithium BackPack is an Open Source Hardware battery shield for the Arduino Mega that snaps to the back of the board, and provides around 15-27 hours of battery power to circuits built with the Arduino Mega (depending on the circuit). It gives a 3.3 volt, 5 volt, ground, and battery capacity testing signal that can be plugged into the Analog input port to test how much battery power is left.

The BackPack sells for $48.

Introducing the Mega BackPack, a battery for the Arduino Mega

June 2009 Home | Next >

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