CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The space shuttle Endeavour bolted off its seaside launch pad in Florida on Monday, carrying six astronauts on a voyage to install the last two main pieces of the International Space Station.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People are afraid to lose money and an unusual study released on Monday explains why -- the brain's fear center controls the response to a gamble.
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have found specific genetic variants which may explain why some people age earlier than others and say their findings have important implications for understanding cancer and age-related diseases.
WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - Climate change is transforming the Arctic environment faster than expected and accelerating the disappearance of sea ice, scientists said on Friday in giving their early findings from the biggest-ever study of Canada's changing north.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pluto is turning brighter and redder as its 248-year-long rotation around the sun changes its seasons, NASA reported on Thursday.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian cargo ship delivered food, water, fuel and other supplies to the International Space Station on Friday, space officials said.
GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists operating the "Big Bang" particle collider at CERN could solve the mystery of what gives mass to matter during a nearly two-year non-stop run lasting until late 2011, a spokesman said on Wednesday.
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have used an "artificial pancreas" system of pumps and monitors to improve blood sugar control in diabetes patients in the first study to show the new device works better than conventional treatment.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Astronomers have found a comet-like object they believe was created by the collision of two asteroids, possible siblings of the rogue rock blamed for killing the dinosaurs millions of years ago.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. space agency on Tuesday awarded $50 million in grants to five private firms in a first step to implement President Barack Obama's vision of turning over space transportation to the commercial sector.
VANCOUVER (AFP) - Global warming is starting to worry the International Olympic Committee, with concern mounting over how it might affect future Games.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People are afraid to lose money and an unusual study released on Monday explains why -- the brain's fear center controls the response to a gamble.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A proposed new U.S. NOAA Climate Service is meant to help businesses adapt to the impact of climate change, and to spur development of new technologies to cope with it, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke on Monday.
HELSINKI (AFP) - Finnish researchers called for a revision of climate change estimates Monday after their findings showed emissions from soil would contribute more to climate warming than previously thought.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President Barack Obama's administration announced plans Monday for a new office handling climate change, aiming to help businesses chart future plans as the nation shifts to a greener economy.
BRUSSELS (AFP) - The European Union on Monday unveiled a new Green logo that will have to be shown on all pre-packaged organic products produced in Europe from July.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - The US space shuttle Endeavour on Monday soared into orbit carrying an observation deck for the International Space Station, a seven-windowed dome offering breathtaking views.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - The US space shuttle Endeavour blasted off Monday carrying the last major component of the International Space Station -- a seven-windowed dome for breathtaking panoramic views.
Space shuttle Endeavour is now orbiting Earth after blasting off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center in Monday's early morning darkness. Weather problems had delayed what might be the last pre-dawn launch for the shuttle program, which is heading toward retirement.
Endeavour and six astronauts rocketed into orbit Monday on what's expected to be the last nighttime launch for the shuttle program, hauling a new room and observation deck for the International Space Station. The space shuttle took flight before dawn, igniting the sky with a brilliant flash seen for miles around.
Space shuttle Endeavour is rocketing toward the space station on one of the shuttle program's last scheduled missions. Endeavour and its crew of six blasted off early Monday.
With the weather prospects looking up, astronauts boarded shuttle Endeavour for the second day in a row early Monday in hopes of blasting off on the last big space station construction mission. The six astronauts looked more optimistic than they did Sunday morning, when the launch site was socked in with clouds.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will soon get to enjoy "a room with a view." Space shuttle Endeavour is bringing up a dome-shaped observation module with a total of seven windows, giving astronauts unprecedented views of Earth and space.
The photos from the Hubble Space Telescope paint a Pluto that is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades. The pictures also show nitrogen ice growing and shrinking, getting brighter in the north and darker in the south. That's got astronomers surprised.
NASA's administrator is defending the president's proposed budget for NASA, which cancels the space agency's planned space shuttle successor and instead relies on private companies to taxi crews into orbit. Charles Bolden said executives from seven companies working on commercial crew vehicles are "the faces of a new frontier."
Airlines are checking the weather in space these days before taking some of their longest flights. That's because thousands of flights each year now cross the poles, where cosmic storms can interfere with communication and navigation systems, or even expose travelers to worrisome doses of radiation.
The NASA budget for fiscal year 2011 would give the agency a more than 30 percent financial boost while dramatically changing the direction of future human exploration. The budget would also fund NASA to contract with private industry to provide astronaut transportation to the international space station as soon as possible.
NASA rover Spirit is stuck in the Martian dust. But don't give up yet, says Steven Squyres, principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Squyres discusses tactics for freeing Spirit and what projects are on the horizon for the rover if it survives the Martian winter.
The Hayden Planetarium in New York takes opera to the moon with a new production of Il Mondo Della Luna. Diane Paulus and Philip Bussmann talk about merging cosmos footage with music, how science can enhance the arts and the future of technology and theater.
The $4 million the United States spends each year to detect near-Earth comets and asteroids is not nearly enough to detect all potentially threatening objects, according to a new report. Faith Vilas and Michael A'Hearn, two authors on the report, discuss options for keeping Earth safe.
The space agency will end for now its effort to free Spirit from the sand trap where it has been stuck since April 2009. Instead, the focus will turn to preparing it to survive the upcoming Martian winter.
A new report says NASA will not meet a 2020 deadline to detect big asteroids and comets that could potentially pose a risk to Earth. It suggests new strategies to find potential threats but says they'll require more funding than the annual $4 million currently spent on such searches.
Our favorite armchair astronaut, Rachel, is sleeping off all the adrenalin and exhaustion of covering the STS-130 shuttle launch for MAKE. (Great job, Rach!) So, we crowd-sourced a few more pictures from Make: Online member Volkemon, who was also on-hand for the big blast. Here are a couple of his pics (that's him and his mom in the top one, the causeway and the moon before launch, and the launch). There are a few more pics, and others from previous launches, in his Flickr sets. Thanks, Volkemon!
A battery that runs on air? Why, that’s almost as good as a car that runs on water! Those cars are fantasy, but batteries that run on air are actually quite common, especially among older people. Tiny zinc-air batteries are widely used in hearing aids, where they have replaced toxic mercury-based batteries in providing a small but steady stream of power. They supply more energy for their size than any other battery, because they draw some of their power straight from the air.
Flickr user numist had a typerwriter that he wasn't using anymore, so he converted it into a teleprinter. What's that? It turns out that teleprinters are basically a printer and a keyboard put together in a single device, but not directly connected. Instead, both are connected to a remote computer using a serial connection. When you type on the keyboard, it gets interpreted by the computer, which then prints a response on the printer. They probably don't make much sense anymore, but before electronic displays were readily available, these were one of the main ways of programming mainframe computers.
To make his version, numist took an old electronic typewriter, and added some electronics between the keyboard and printer board. He used an Arduino microcontroller to read in each key press and relay it back over a serial port to his PC. When it receives characters back from the PC, the microcontroller emulates the keyboard to feed them into the original typewriter circuitry, causing the typewriter to print. Now, I'm not entirely sure what one could do with such a modernized typewriter, but I'll bet there are lots of potential projects there. Got any ideas?
Tom Igoe got his hands on a Peppermill circuit board, and took it out for a spin:
Nicolas Villar sent me a sample of the PepperMill, a new sensor board he and Steve Hodges designed at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. It's a nifty little board. You attach a DC motor and the board can an output voltage when the motor is turned, and analog signals telling you the direction and speed of the motor. It turns a DC motor into a rotary encoder, of sorts.
Wiring is very simple. The motor connects to the two spring connectors at the top of the board. Direction and Speed pins connect to two analog inputs on your microcontroller. Ground connects to your microcontroller's ground. The motor generates voltage when you spin it.
(Tom is a member of the Arduino team and the author of Making Things Talk).
Making Things Talk Our Price: $29.99
Programming microcontrollers used to require an expensive development environment costing thousands of dollars and requiring professional electrical engineering expertise. Open-source physical computing platforms with simple i/o boards and development environments have led to new options for hobbyists, hackers, and makers. This book contains a series of projects that teach you what you need to know to get your creations talking to each other, connecting to the web, and forming networks of smart devices.
Kicking off our Maker Business series is this piece by Jeffrey McGrew, who along with his wife Jillian Northrup, and their trusty CNC machine named Frank, are a two-person (and a bot) design and fabrication juggernaut. From their design-build studio in Oakland, CA, they do custom interior design, furniture, and such artist wonders as the "Art Golf" course they've set up at Maker Faire. Here, Jeffrey shares some words of advice to those who may be thinking of going "Maker Pro." -- Gareth
We get a lot of friends and folks asking us about how we got started. And we know a lot of folks through the Maker Faire that would love to turn "pro." So, I thought I'd jot down the six big things that I see as being key elements to getting started in such a business. I hope they help, and I'd love to hear more from other folks! [Chime in via comments. -Ed.]
1. Get as debt-free as possible, and try your best to stay that way.
We would have never been able to buy the robot (or CNC machine) and make the jump to working for ourselves had we not had our financial lives in order first. Having six months in savings to fall back on, no debt, other than a half-paid off car loan, and not taking on huge debts to get started, made it possible for us to make a lot of mistakes and learn things instead of going out with a quick bang. I've met a fair number of people who want to start their own business, but simply can't, due to this single issue alone. No amount of great business ideas, hard work, or luck can overcome the burden of an unstable foundation on which to the start. Also, honestly, once you get your business going, you'll find that your priorities, and what you think is important, will change greatly. If you're really happy (which running our own business certainly make us), then you'll need less stuff anyways. So, save your pennies, don't worry about getting the latest and greatest, and pay off all those loans and credit cards before you take that leap.
2. Plans are worthless, planning is essential.
That quote from Winston Churchill sums up nicely a lot of what you'll need to do when you start a business. You don't need a perfect plan, with every step already outlined, in giant Gantt charts. But you do need a plan. And you need to be smart enough to change that plan as circumstances change. Running a business is more like sailing a ship than launching a rocket. What I mean is that you need a plan, and to be prepared, but honestly, at some point you'll just point yourself at the horizon and go. And then everything will change, you'll need to change direction, plans, and ideas. You'll re-aim for that spot you wanted to get to constantly as the world around you changes in response to what you're doing. And heck, sometimes you'll find when you're halfway there, you actually want to go somewhere else. So don't fret too much and over-plan everything (and therefore never get started), or freak out when things don't go according to your plans. But at the same time, don't aim for that horizon without one!
For the next few months, in concert with our "Your Desktop Factory" themed issue of MAKE (Volume 21), we're going to be exploring the world of "maker business," turning your passion for making things into a means of making money. We'll look at everything from casual commerce, selling small numbers of goods online, at places like Etsy and the upcoming Makers Market, to the running of a more serious and sustainable small business. We'll be talking to, and have guest articles by, maker businessfolk across this spectrum, from those just starting out, to those who are making a comfortable living as self-employed makers. We'll also be touching on everything from the most philosophical questions of why to the more pragmatic nuts and bolts of how.
Do you run a small "maker business?" If so, we'd love to hear from you. If creating such a business is something you've thought about, what questions/concerns do you have? What would you like to see us cover in this series? Let us know in the comments, or email me (gareth at makezine). We'd love for this series to be a useful service to you, especially if going into such a business is a fantasy, but you have nagging questions or reservations that hold you back, or just need a little encouragement from those who've made this sort of career change work for them.
From MAKE magazine: MAKE Volume 21 is the Desktop Manufacturing issue, with how-to articles on making three-dimensional parts using inexpensive computer-controlled manufacturing equipment. Both additive (RepRap, CandyFab) and subtractive (Lumenlab Micro CNC) systems are covered. Also in this issue: instructions for making a cigar box guitar, building your own CNC for under $800, running a mini electric bike with a cordless drill, making a magic photo cube, and tons more. If you're a subscriber, you may have your issue in hand already, and can access the Digital Edition. Otherwise, you can pick up MAKE 21 in the Maker Shed or look for it on newsstands near you!
The occasion of Dmitri Mendeleev's birthday seemed like a good opportunity to recognize another great hero of the periodic table and to relate one of my favorite anecdotes about him: Glenn T. Seaborg (Wikipedia), who, among his various stellar achievements, won the 1951 Nobel Prize for "discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements." By the time of his death in 1999, Seaborg had participated in the discovery and isolation of ten superheavy elements. Shortly after the official 1997 recognition of the name seaborgium for element 106, Jeffrey Winters, writing in the January 1998 issue of Discover Magazine, made the following observation:
Not only is Seaborg the first living scientist to have an element named after him, he's also the only person who could receive mail addressed only in elements: Seaborgium, Lawrencium (for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory where he still works), Berkelium, Californium, Americium. But don't forget the zip code.
Naming an element after a living scientist generated significant controversy among the international chemistry community of the time. At a talk in 1995, Seaborg himself famously quipped: "There has been some reluctance on the part of the Commission for Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry to accept the name because I'm still alive and they can prove it, they say."
I think I could watch this ball-launching sculpture for a long time. Called parabola, it was created by youtube user MechanicalSculptor. I wonder how long it took to design a system that can launch balls with such precision? [via Hacked Gadgets]
Thirty two shish kabob skewers and 176 small rubber bands are all it takes to make a beautiful hyperbolid of revolution. This is an example of what is called a "ruled surface," meaning even though it is curved, it is made of straight lines.
Below is the same object seen from the top. Make one of your own following the instructions here, but be careful not to skewer yourself!
French author Jules Verne was born on this day in 1828. His father wanted him to be a lawyer and circumstances forced him to work as a stock broker, but eventually he shook off these humdrum vocations and became the world's first professional science fiction author.
Verne quickly gained a reputation for combining ultramodern technology (of the time) with clever guesswork and an affinity for adventure writing. His most celebrated works are found in a 54-piece canon of science fiction and adventure novels called Les Voyages Extraordinaires.
While most of these stories were rousing adventure yarns, what is most remarkable about them was Verne's ability visualize futuristic devices. He wrote about submarines when the technology was merely a curiosity. In his lost work Paris in the 20th Century he predicted that air conditioning, the Internet, television and electricity would become everyday conveniences. In From the Earth to the Moon he imagined a space program that would launch three astronauts from Florida, who were recovered after an ocean splash-down. In The Steam House he created one of the first visions of mecha,
He did it by imagining the possible, and defining it in terms his contemporaries could understand, a mission many of us undertake when we visualize a new project. And so, Jules Verne, happy birthday!
Born on this date in 1834 in the small village of Aremzyani, in what was then considered Siberia, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (Wikipedia) would go on, in 1869, to publish the first periodic table of the chemical elements. Mendeleev used the periodicity he'd observed in the properties of then-known elements to accurately predict many of the properties of germanium, gallium, and scandium, which had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev died in St. Petersburg in 1907, at the age of 72. Element number 101 is named mendelevium in his honor.
The Open Heart kit V2.0 is a matrix of individually addressable LEDs that allow you to create customizable animations when connected to your favorite micro controller. Attach it temporarily to fabrics with headers that you simply push through, or sew it into a project with conductive fabric for a more permanent setup.
One of the great things about being here at Kennedy Space Center for the launch of STS-130 is getting to meet some of the other space enthusiasts who are also here for the launch. The Space Tweep Society has proven to be a great resource for connecting with fellow space geeks (specifically those active on Twitter), and it was through this group that I met John Knight. John is a SmartGrid Program Manager for Whirlpool Corporation who describes himself as a maker, geek dad, space enthusiast, and Lego fanatic.
"I've been building since 1976," he said. "I have a lot of Lego and an entire room dedicated to them. My favorite building theme is Classic-Space."
Last year, John created a 7-foot space ship and moon base for an exhibit at an art gallery in St. Joseph, Michigan. His latest Lego project is smaller in scale, but has reached a much larger audience. He used Lego's Digital Designer, a tool that lets people create virtual sets, to create a set based on the Solar Dynamic Observatory that will be launched this week from Kennedy Space Center. SDO will study the solar atmosphere to help us better understand the sun's influence on Earth and near-earth space. John's set is a scale replica of SDO, and after working with the SDO team and representatives from Lego, the set was accepted for a much larger order than standard virtual kits (that can be ordered three at a time if parts are in stock) and is now available for purchase through the Lego web site*.
John described the experience as the perfect overlap between space geek and Lego enthusiast in the geek Venn diagram, and already has ideas brewing for his next project. His last non-Lego project was a working steampunk globe utilizing RFID tags and reader (Touchatag) to remote control Google Earth on a steampunked tablet computer.
* To Purchase this limited edition Lego set, follow these steps from John:
Step 1) Download the latest version of Lego Digital Designer.
Step 2) You should see a link to purchase the set. You will have to create an account with Lego.
Step 3) Please be aware that your SDO set may have different graphics than some seen on the web. Those were special "limited" edition sets.
Step 4) If you have ANY problems ordering please call Lego Customer Support at 1-800-838-9647 (US) or see Lego.com for other numbers.
Pete Edwards does a bit of toy-megaphone turbo bending in this music video montage shot at the Casper Electronics lab. Dang - this makes me think I should start soldering to music myself!
This article just drew my attention to the interesting story behind carmine, which is a pigment precipitated from carminic acid (shown below) extracted from the bodies of Dactylopius coccus, the so-called "cochineal" insect, of which the acid comprises up to 24% of dry body weight. The cochineal is a parasite of cacti of the genus opuntia, from which it has been harvested in South America since pre-Columbian times. It is carmine that produced the "red" of the famous British "red coats," and today carmine is still produced in great quantity for use in fabric, cosmetics, and as a natural food coloring. (Vegans beware!) [via Neatorama]
When I interviewed STS-130 Mission Specialist, Bob Behnken last week in Houston at Johnson Space Center, I asked his advice for what to expect at my first shuttle launch. He gave me three tips: First, he said, "Bring bug spray." Fortunately, we didn't have to worry about that with this morning's cold, windy weather. Second, he told me to hope for clear skies. Night launches are all spectacular, but when skies are clear, you can keep eyes on the shuttle for up to eight minutes. When skies are cloudy, that visual can be as little as eight seconds. Finally, he repeated something I've heard from shuttle viewing veterans: put the camera down and just watch.
With mostly clear skies and a flawless countdown, my more-than-20-year-old dream was realized as the shuttle Endeavour lifted off before dawn this morning. The bright white light from the massive rocket boosters turned night to day within seconds. My brain could hardly process what my eyes were seeing, and when the sound finally hit my ears (there are a few strangely quiet seconds before the sound reaches you) my entire body felt the force of this amazing vehicle. It was bigger, better, and more exhilarating than I ever could have imagined.
I cried like a baby.
The tears started when Endeavour was given the final "go" for launch. They were slow as my heart rate began to pick up speed, and by the time the shuttle cleared the tower, I was breathless. Once Endeavour pierced the thin clouds and the entire sky was glowing bright white, the sobbing came on hard. As I listened to the loud outdoor speakers blast the communication between Mission Control and Commander Zamka, and watched Endeavour sail through the sky as a bright star for a good seven minutes, I sat on the ground and cried uncontrollably. I cried for the spectacular images my mind was still attempting to process. I cried for the awe and wonder of such an incredible display of human ability and teamwork. I cried for the realization of such a long-held dream that I wasn't sure would ever happen. And I cried to think that this icon of my childhood, the vehicle of exploration that lit my imagination on fire so many years ago, only has four more launches ahead of her.
As I finally settled back in to the press room and finally overcame my weeping, I found myself overcome with a smile that would not end. I smiled for the amazing opportunity I'd just had. I smiled in gratitude for all the folks who helped make this dream a reality. And I smiled at the thought of this great crew unstrapping from their seats and floating as they start their time on orbit. I can't wait to watch them as they work through this important and complicated mission. And more importantly, I can't wait to share it all with you.
Can't wait to cozy up to the new Apple iPad? Why not try your hand at constructing this handsome papercraft surrogate? Here's links to the front and back. It may not have access to your iTunes or eBooks like the real thing, but it does share its good looks and lack of multitasking, GPS, and camera. [via MacRumors]
Since there's almost any size and shape of solar panel available for purchase from a myriad of vendors across the Internet why would anybody want to go through the hassle of tabbing together their own cells to build a solar panel? Because you can, obviously. This DIY video will run through the basics of chaining together polycrystalline cells and leaves the details like enclosure and such to the user.
William Stranger specializes in building furniture out of repurposed wood. I especially liked the massive coffee table whose top is a four-inch-thick slab of bowling lane. It's part of a exhibit(?) called Second Growth:
A second growth forest is one that has re-grown after it has been heavily logged or clear-cut. The installation of reclaimed materials, organic furniture and hand carved objects suggests the life cycle of a tree. It encourages a closer look at the relationship between consumption and conservation and promotes the idea of a culture in balance with the natural world. A tree is borrowed from its cycle without breaking it. The wood is worked with attention, treated with non-toxic finishes, and after its long second life it will return to nourish the earth. Scrap wood is saved and becomes the raw material for innovative design.
A commenter on my recent dazzle camouflage post alerted us to the fascinating story of the HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen which, in 1942, escaped destruction by the Japanese fleet because the crew moored her among other small islands and covered her in a thick layer of tree branches, thereby disguising her as a small island. [Thanks, rekinom!]
Check out UK maker John Honniball's sweet workshop panorama.
This is an almost-360-degree panorama of my computer and electronics lab and workshop room. The four big CRT monitors that you can see were obtained from FreeCycle, as was the iMac. Far left is a Stag PPZ EPROM programmer. At the right-hand end are the HP stack (1980B, 1630G, 3456A) and a Tek 575 curve tracer. Far right is an HP LaserJet 4+ with duplexer. On the electronics bench, you may be able to see an Arduino and some LEDs.
See the panorama full-sized on John's Flickr page.
Brooklyn-based hacker collective NYC Resistor is holding its first 48-hour hackathon this Friday starting at 6pm and ending Sunday, February 14th at the same time.
You can work by yourself or with a team, and if you don't have a team/project we'll assign you to one.
The format is open, you're welcome to come and go as you please. We'll keep the Club Mate flowing and follow a loose schedule of demos and workshops to help spark your imagination.
The Belkiz Feedaway is a cardboard portable feeding chair that can be used for temporary situations or where space is at a premium. It is cardboard, easy to assemble for toddlers up to 20 months of age up to 20kg who are away from home. Ideal for temporary and commercial use, the Belkiz Feedaway is safe, strong, folds up easily and quickly and stores away in a tiny space. Ideal for mobile and modern lifestyles.
What do you think, readers? A silly concept that would never work, or is there a cool idea here? [via Inhabitat]
The forces that affect buildings and other structures can be modeled inexpensively and quickly by using the humble drinking straw. Usually, the projects built with drinking straws are rapid build. Storage can be an issue if you plan on having students work the design over multiple classes, or saving the structure for reference. This really becomes a problem if you are doing the same project with a full load of 5 classes. By doing the project in a single class period, you can easily reuse the straws, having students discard any cut ones and replenish them with new for the next group.
For fasteners, there are a few options. Tape can work, but is hard to remove if you are reusing straws. This can be good if you are aiming for a more durable product. Sewing pins can be used over an over again. Having students count out the pins they need and keeping them in plastic cups is works for multiple classes. As a new batch of kids collects their supplies, they just check to see that the last group left the right number of pins in the cup. This can occur at the same time they get the straws they will need. Some towers are built with paper clips as the fastener. If you do this, you may give the option of using wire cutters and pliers to modify the pins.
Often in straw towers, you will want to incorporate the differences between live load and dead load. Sometimes called dynamic load and static load, you can model them by having the tower hold a weight, representing the live or dynamic load. You can also have students become more aware of factor of safety and failure analysis of their structure.
The building of these towers can lead to a competitive situation. You can have students all build with the same materials, and set the grades on how high the towers stand while holding the live load. One way of doing the calculation is to set the highest and lowest possible grade, 100 and 75 for example. Then you measure the towers, identifying the tallest structure. If the tallest tower is 50 inches, then each inch is worth 1/2 point. The group with the tallest load bearing tower gets the 100. A tower that holds the live load at 40 inches would get a 95. The group that has the ball on the floor gets the 75. The other groups in between get grades based on the height of the ball, or other load.
You can also use a project like this to examine the forces affecting a building during an earthquake.
Have you built a straw tower as a student, or have you used the project as a teacher? How well does a project like this work in homeschooling? What techniques work well, and what resources are really helpful?
Spaceflight is complicated, with many constraints and requirements that must be met before all systems can claim "go" for launch. Unfortunately for STS-130, this evening's "dynamic" weather proved to be too risky for this morning's launch. Endeavour's first launch attempt was scrubbed at 4:30 AM EST. The good news? We get to try it again in just under 24 hours and get to experience all the launch countdown fun twice. Not bad! Check back with my tweets tomorrow for the status of Endeavour's second launch attempt.
Pictured above: Endeavour's crew as they walk out to the famous Astrovan that will deliver them to the launch pad.
This 2007 piece by Vancouver artist Steven Shearer (Wikipedia) is called "Geometric Healing Cell for Youth - Model III." It reminds me of some of my favorite work by Tom Friedman. I love art that challenges our expectations of everyday materials. [via Neatorama]
With 87,000 bar fights a year in the UK, with a combined health care cost of over 2.5 million pounds per year, the British Design Council saw a need for better bar glassware. Design agency DesignBridge stepped up with these concepts. What do you think, readers? How would you redesign the classic pint glass to to make it safer, while keeping it glass? [via Core77]
Forum user LeversFulcrumsLoads has amassed a large quantity of leftover Altoids tins, and is trying to think of something to do with them. Now, we've covered many projects that make use of a single tin, but I can't think of any that called for a whole pile of them. Got some ideas? Chime in on the forum discussion!
It was like stumbling onto something out of National Treasure.
Is there an elegant way of punching holes in the sides without having sharp jaggies surrounding a USB socket?
With literally hundreds of tins, I was thinking on the best use of these (pocket survival kits, minty boosts, recycle, really big LED Throwie's, etc...) but have been overwhelmed by the staggering amount of sugars and fillers ingested in order to stack this cache up. Insights are welcomed. Wow, talk about supporting the U.S. market.
I'm here at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in preparation for the launch of STS-130 and the Space Shuttle Endeavour. After a brief spell of heavy rain last evening, the skies cleared, making a perfect backdrop for this morning's retraction of the Rotating Service Structure to reveal Endeavour in all her glory.
Endeavour is scheduled to launch at 4:39am EST Sunday morning, and it will be worth waking up - or staying up - to see. This is the last scheduled night launch of a shuttle. With only five remaining launches, not only are the opportunities to view one dwindling, but experiencing the impressive views of a night launch will be likely gone forever by this time tomorrow. People who live along the eastern coastline have a good chance of viewing the launch from their backyards. If you're further west in the US, why not just stay up a little later with friends and celebrate this milestone in the space program? You'll still have plenty of time to go back to bed and wake up in time for football (if that suits your fancy).
I'll be tweeting from Kennedy Space Center all night long as the launch approaches, and I've been constantly updating pictures over on Flickr. Stay tuned for continued mission coverage over the next week and a half, including an interview with the STS-130 crew member who is a maker at heart.
Pictured at top: This morning's RSS Retraction, revealing Endeavour. Below: A night launch of the shuttle Discovery. Image courtesy NASA.
Thanks to Extech for giving away all this swag! And it keeps getting better. Not only was the RC100 upgraded to a RC200, but there are TEN of them now, and TEN pen-style multimeters! Hot dog! Still only one EX540, however.
These are fun enclosures for your iPod or other smartphone. I made a simple one for my G1, and now need to find some driving/biking games to try it out on. It was fun and frustrating to stir the bin in search of just the right part. So often, when kids build with them, they make wildly complex designs that are at times of low structural integrity. Is there any formal LEGO design curriculum out there?
This is a great way to test out your rapid prototyping skills. Once you get a decent iteration, then the hunt is on for a more permanent solution.
Back when I got my Chumby Guts kit a few months ago, I imagined that it would be pretty funny to set up it up Teletubby style with the screen in the belly of a plushie. At the time, I didn't have a suitable doll to sacrifice at the alter of maker fun, but like Kent Barnes, I did have the box it came in. I like the alarm clock features, and enjoy being chirped awake. Eventually, though, the box kind of wore out, and my Chumby Guts lay loose on the night table.
Sunsue heard my call for a sacrificial Teletubby and found me a Po doll. When I saw it, I realized that this one would not work, since it is smaller than the ones my daughter used to have. It does have an interesting voice box, so that will come in handy some other day. A bit later, I fell upon a Build A Bear monkey at the Duxbury Mall. In his first invasive surgery, I found the heart, bar code and a monkey voice box with a dead battery. After swapping out the dead battery, I hid the voice box in my daughter's school bag, where it occasionally went off (ooh ooh aaah aah) as she bumped the bag. It now sits atop her social studies teacher's desk as a warning signal for those about to get a detention.
The monkey looked like he was on a starvation diet for a couple of weeks, as his stuffing sat in a bag in the cave as waited for the right moment to do the next operation. Eventually I got tired of loose ChumGutz on the night table and got together with my neighbor, Robin. She's pretty crafty and I figured would have some good techniques for the project. We went over and got to it. A few snips in the belly and monkey boy had gastric bypass of a kind. We hot melt glued the screen in place. Then I removed the speakers from the plastic holder and fit the circuit board inside the body behind the screen. I thought that I would have the switch loose, but left it attached over the power input and usb connectors. We re-stuffed him and he became ChumbyChimp. He is pretty happy to hang out with Po, and even gets to spend a little time with Creepy Baby.
This is the third iteration for my Chumby Guts, and I suppose that it will be a somewhat transitional situation. It would be useful to sew an old PDA stylus into his hand. That way it will always be easy to make accurate selections on the screen. I would like to put in some iMac ball speakers left over from the 50 iMacs project into the body instead of the nice little box speakers it came with. It would also be neat to add a switch to the hand with either a tactile switch or some conductive thread. I would definitely like to explore battery power, if only to add a bit of portability between locations in the house. The kitchen counter is a decent location, and with the right widgets ChumbyChimp really adds to the room.
Jeri's Star Trek Next Generation Pinball Modifications - Trouble with Tribbles. Nice!
Modifications to a Williams Star Trek Next Generation pinball. Added lasers to the cannons, custom-etched flipper bats and added animatronic tribble for replays.
When I think of horrifically frustrating project experiences that end in an outcome far exceeding expectations, two instances spring to mind. I tell these stories frequently (stop me if you've heard this one before) because I think they represent the power of perseverance in the face of projected failure.
The first tale I've told countless times, probably even here on MAKE, about a friend of mine, a fabric artist, who, back in the 80s, entered a weaving contest in a fabric arts magazine. She'd never done any weaving. She got some how-to books, borrowed a loom, and decided to weave the fabric to make a seersucker shirt. It quickly turned into a nightmare. The seersucker threads kept breaking as she wove them. It became a huge exercise in frustration, but she kept at it. She thought her difficulty was due to the fact that she was a newbie. Finally, after much struggle and heartache, she finished the weave, made the shirt, and submitted it to the contest. The magazine called a month or so later and said they were stunned by the piece, especially because you "can't" hand-weave seersucker! She'd won the contest, and a ginormous, gorgeous Swedish loom that consumed most of a small room in her house. This is a perfect example of how you can do things when you're ignorant of (or ignore) the common belief that you can't. Sometimes ignorance is a huge advantage.
The second story concerns my BEAM robot pieces in MAKE, Volume 06. I agreed to write an introduction to BEAM and two simple BEAM robot projects for the issue. I've done plenty of BEAM projects over the years (since the mid-90s) and had made several Symets (think: solar-powered top), but I'd never made a Solarroller, except for a kit version. Still, I figured I'd choose those as my projects. How hard could a roller be? It used the same solar-engine circuit as the Symet, and frequently used a cassette motor and part of the body of the cassette player for the structure, and a couple of wheels. No biggie. So, of course, I made sure to wait until the absolute last minute to start working on the piece.
Having trouble visualizing how current flows in a circuit? A great way to get a feel for how a circuit works is to use a circuit simulator, however most are either expensive or require a fair bit of electronics knowledge to use. If you are just wondering how a common circuit works, then you might want to check out this Java-based Circuit Simulator. It's got a large library of parts and pre-built circuits that you can simulate and modify to get the feel for how they work. Though it may not be a full substitute for more traditional full-featured simulators such as LTSpice or Qucs, it is free, runs in your browser, and is actually pretty fun to play around with. [via Stephen Hobley]
The quantum-logic clock, which detects the energy state of a single aluminum ion, keeps time to within a second every 3.7 billion years. The new timekeeper could one day improve GPS or detect the slowing of time predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.
My friend, Willow Bay, has a brief piece on The Steampunk Workshop called "Why I believe in maker culture." Snip:
All the things I do in life (which, admittedly, is a lot) are about Doing. I'm up to my eyeballs in Stuff to Do and up to my elbows in What I'm Doing because I love it, and because I so adamantly believe that Maker Culture is a healthy response to an unhealthy pop culture. Here's a glimpse at why I feel this way.
When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Which is to say, you use the tools you have to solve the problems at hand. Tools and technology do, of course, range everywhere from a wrench to language to roads to electricity. And when your tool is the mindset of a maker, any system at hand looks like something to be tinkered with and improved upon.
Willow is also the director of a relatively new makerspace in Seattle called Jigsaw Renaissance. I love the first paragraph of their About Us page:
So, here's the idea: Ideas. Unfiltered, unencumbered, and unapologetically enthusiastic ideas. Ideas that lead to grease-smeared hands, lavender sorbet, things that go bang, clouds of steam, those goggle-marks you see on crazy chemistry geeks, and some guy (or girl) in the background juggling and swinging from a trapeze.
What is your feeling about the concept of "maker culture?" Is there such a thing in your mind? It it a fad or something more significant and enduring? Has becoming a maker and participating in things like Maker Faires, hackerspaces, Dorkbots, or other DIY festivals and activities, changed the way you look at the world?
IEEE Spectrum's 25 Microchips That Shook the World presents a list of most groundbreaking IC's, including familiar classics like the 555 timer, 741 operational amplifier, and a link roundup to relevant info resources - good stuff. [via jeriellsworth]
Interesting article over on TwistedSifter about the use of so-called "dazzle" or "razzle-dazzle" camouflage beginning during WWI. (The Wikipedia article is pretty good, too.) It's a kind of practical op-art: The idea was not so much to make the ship invisible against the background, but to confuse enemy weapons operators as to its distance and heading. The Rhode Island School of Design has a wonderful online collection of various paper plans for dazzle camouflage schemes donated by Maurice L. Freedman, who was district camoufleur for the 4th district of the U.S. Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation, and would go on to invent the board game "Battleship." [via Dude Craft]
We're thrilled to be heading back to the Exploratorium this Saturday for the first Young Makers event put on by Make, the Exploratorium, TechShop, and Pixar. Here's a little bit about the program from Make's writeup: "It's a first experiment in a new program we call Young Makers, in which we intend to create an infrastructure to nurture kids who want to learn by making, beyond what they can do with construction kits. We hope to fulfill a dire need: satisfying a little bit of what shop classes used to do before they, lamentably, started getting booted out of schools."We hope to see you there this Saturday between 11 am and 3 pm. There will be BristleBot building going on, as well as BlinkyBug building with our friend Ken Murphy. Ken also has an exhibit called A History of the Sky that is at the Exploratorium through the end of the month and is definitely worth seeing. If you can't make it this weekend, they've got a great line-up of folks for the last Saturday of each month leading up to Maker Faire: February 27th: Wearables & Soft Circuitry -- Adrian FreedMarch 27th: Make Your Own Kind of Music -- Walter Kitundu and Krys BobrowskiApril 24th: Motors & Mechanisms -- Brad Prether and Ernie Fosselius
Asteroids. And cookies. Their fusion was only a matter of time.
For this project we had originally intended to follow one of the instruction sets to make our own DIY cookie cutters-- there are a number of good methods posted online. Amongst others, you can make themfrom metal shim,from copper strip,from a baking pan, orfrom a kit.
But, since we actually don't plan to make these on a regular basis, we ended up just cutting out the shapes (one by one) with a hobby knife. This is a clean method, but it is slow and takes patience. A sharp and fresh blade helps.
In the past we've used sugar cookie dough (and similar recipes) with cookie cutters. But they actually tend to flow during baking more than we'd like. By comparison, this graham cracker recipe works remarkably well. It cuts cleanly and-- as you can see above --it holds its shape under baking.
It's also nice and dark.
The frosting is a simple layer of piped royal icing, placed as a single bead with a single width, to emulate a vector graphics display. For us, this is the weak point in the process; it requires skill. (You may have far more frosting-fu than we do.)
To represent the bullets, we added these small filled-in squares.
I never really set out with the goal of roasting my own coffee beans, it just kind of happened.
It started a month ago when we got a coffee grinder. Naturally we started getting whole bean coffee, which we used at a rate of about one pound per week. While I'm not (by any standards) a coffee connoisseur, I found myself noticing that the first pot of coffee out of the new can really was just better than the last pot of coffee out of the old can-- meaning that the coffee quality does actually decline noticeably after just a week.
Now, that's a minor annoyance, and hardly cause for action. But, two weekends ago I happened to be browsing in a home brewing store (needed champagne yeast-- that's another story) where there were sealed bags of green coffee beans just sitting there on the shelf. Fair trade, organic, and in a number of varieites. Only 5 bucks a pound. So what the heck, right?
It turns out that there's a common and cheap method of roasting coffee at home: using a regular air popcorn maker. You put the beans in the popper as though they were popcorn kernels, heat them for a few minutes until they're properly roasted, and then cool them. (You can read the details of this process here, here, here, and here, amongst other places.) This is kind of neat because it doesn't take much in the way of equipment and it roasts just enough for a big pot of coffee.
The weak point in the popper method is the cooling. The beans keep roasting as long as they are still hot, so many of the sites suggest pouring the beans back and forth between a couple of metal colanders until they cool down. We tried it, and while it did cool them faster than a cookie sheet, it was more tedious than fun. It also seemed a bit silly to use this nice semi-automatic roaster and then turn it over to a manual process for the next few minutes. So, here is our better (if somewhat obvious) solution: a dedicated coffee cooling tower, built from a second modified air popper.
For roasting coffee, it's better to have a specific type of air popper, one that has the heater vents on the sides the roasting chamber, rather than one that has a mesh or bottom vent for the heat. You can read more about this in Sweet Maria's guide, which lists several poppers of this variety.
So, after we first picked up those green beans, we immediately went to eBay and bought an old Popaire 2, which is one of the models that Sweet Maria's recommends.
And... then we got it. It turns out that it's actually one of the "bad" mesh-bottom models. (Doh!)
We tried it, and indeed, it was pretty questionable. Also: it doesn't have a power switch. (Doh, again.)
Since that was something of a bust, we did some more research and found that the Toastmaster 6203 Popcorn Popper is one of the correct variety and is actually available new from Amazon.com. After a couple of tries, this one works like a champ for roasting coffee. For a few reasons, we found that it works much better with the yellow lid removed. The disadvantage is that the chaff (papery coffee husk material) flies around a bit. But it's easy to clean, there isn't usually much of it, and it lands in an eight-inch circle around the machine.
(For proper irony: We had one of these exact poppers a few years ago, but got rid of it because it's a *terrible* popcorn maker. I wish we had kept it-- it's a *great* coffee roaster.)
Of course, using the Toastmaster for roasting coffee left us with the extra mesh-bottom Popaire 2, ready to convert to a cooler.
So what's in a popcorn maker? Obviously there's a heater and a fan. Can we just disconnect the heater and hook up the fan alone? There's one way to find out.
Fortunately, the whole machine is held together by a few sets of screws and comes apart easily. Once the outer case is off, you can see that the inside consists of an aluminum vessel-- which normally holds the popcorn -- with a high-temperature plastic base, a motor below that, and then the outer black base of the popcorn maker.
After removing the outer black base, you can see that the fan motor is driven through this part labeled RB153; which is a 1.5A 200V rectifier bridge. This type of motor is an inexpensive type that requires DC current to operate. A rectifier bridge like this converts AC to (poor) DC in a process called full-wave rectification, so that the motor can run.
There are other wires here too. Some are leading into the plastic base, so let's look in there as well to see what's going on.
On the right you can see the aluminum "fan" (or impeller, actually) attached to the motor, and on the left you can see the main electronics of the popcorn maker. Next, we'll get a closer look at the electronics.
The bottom right component, with the silver cylinder and the pink cone, is a thermal cut-off (safety) fuse. To the left of that is the thermostat; it's stamped "150 C" on the side.
There are also two coils of heater wire beneath the board. It's relatively straightforward to map out the circuit and see what we find:
The thermal fuse protects the whole circuit from overheating-- if it goes, the popcorn maker will be fully dead. Whether or not the thermostat is open, the 75 ohm heater coil will always be dissipating power.The thermostat can be used to turn on or off the *big* 15 ohm coil, depending on the temperature inside. The rectifier bridge is used to drive the motor, but is in series with the 75 ohm resistor.
From the standpoint of our mod, this is a minor setback. If we snip out the thermostat and/or 15 ohm heater coil, the motor will still run, but there's a 75 ohm coil used to (1) generate heat and (2) drop the voltage to a suitable level for the DC motor. It's not as big as the other coil, but we probably don't want to leave any heater coils at all running in our cooler.
A solution is to drive the motor independently from DC, from our own power supply, and completely ignore the original circuitry. With a benchtop power supply, it looked clear that the motor can run well at 12 V, albeit slightly slower than when running off of AC.
Since we didn't need it, we took out the assembly with the heater coils parts and set it aside. This has the added benefit of improving air flow from the fan to the coffee beans.
Next, we hook it all up and put it back together.
We took a 12 V DC power supply that we happened to have hanging around, and soldered up a matching jack across the motor, along with a power switch-- for a real improvement over the original.
And there it is, all completed, with the 12 V power cord coming out of it now.
To use the cooler, roast beans normally, then pour them from the "roasting" popper to the "cooling" popper, with the fan on.
The heat transfer from the beans to the air coming out is surprisingly efficient-- the air over the top when the beans are still hot is flaming hot so watch your hands above it. The beans come to room temperature in a minute or two, which is ultimately comparable to the two-colander method that we were using, but it's slightly easier and more reliable.
While trying to figure out what to do with about 75 pounds of fruit that our citrus trees bestowed upon us in January, we came across an interesting fact: marmalade is really easy to make. People of older generations may know this already, but so far as we knew, marmalade was one of those mysterious things that strictly comes from a jar. It turns out that all you need is citrus fruit, water, sugar and some time on the stovetop.
The first step is to peel the fruit. We've made lemon, lemon-orange, and orange marmalade, but you can use pretty much any citrus fruit. We looked around a bit and settled on this recipe primarily because of its simplicity. It scales well. For a large batch, just keep peeling and cutting fruit until the pot is full or your hands were tired. You can also scale down--grab a couple of oranges from the cafeteria and you'll make a lot of friends in your dorm kitchen. The peels need to be cut into little slivers for the appropriate texture in the marmalade. If you stack up the pieces, you can cut a bunch at once. Many recipes recommend removing the white pith because it is bitter. Other recipes recommend removing the pith and reserving it, cooking it along with the fruit in a cheesecloth bundle and removing it at the end, presumably to allow extraction of the pectin. Many jam and jelly recipes call for pectin to be added, but it isn't needed for marmalade because of the amount of pectin already present in the skin and pith of the citrus fruit. Some recipes call for a blanching or soaking stage. The primary purpose of blanching is to remove the bitterness from the pith and peel. We like bitter marmalade, so we left in most of the pith and didn't soak or blanch the peels or fruit. That also keeps the recipe simple-- just slice up the fruit and throw it in the pot with the peel pieces. The fruit and peel are cooked in water until they're good and soft. It takes a while (about an hour), but once you've got a nice simmer going, you can ignore it pretty well. The sugar goes in. Lots of sugar. The original recipe calls for 4 cups of water and 4 cups of sugar (with ten lemons). The 4 cups of water barely covered the raw fruit (in a saucepan with roughly equal depth and diameter). For scaling the recipe up or down, you can use that as a rough guide: pour in water a cup at a time until the fruit is almost covered, then once everything's soft add as much sugar as you did water. Stir in the sugar, and bring it up to a boil, stirring regularly. The original recipe says to cook it until it's 220 degrees fahrenheit. If you're one of the few with a well-calibrated thermometer, congratulations. For the rest of us, put a spoonful of the proto-marmalade on a cool plate. If it's still runny after cooling for a minute, keep simmering a little longer. It should show signs of jelling after cooking for 45 minutes to an hour. That's it. You've made marmalade! But now you're wondering what to do with it. We recommend spreading it on a freshly toasted english muffin. Or maybe a crumpet. You can put the rest of it in a bowl, let it cool, then keep it in the fridge and use it. Or you can can it. Canning is not as scary as it sounds. You pour the warm marmalade into warm jars, wipe the rims clean, put a clean lid and rim on them and boil the jars covered with water for 15 minutes. There are lots of kinds of canning setups but the simplest is a pot with a spacer to keep the jars off the bottom. While you can get dedicated canning kettles with jar racks inexpensively, you don't really need any special equipment. Rules of thumb: your pot needs to be deeper than your jars so you can cover them with water, and the jars shouldn't rest on the bottom of the pot, so as to avoid thermal stress. You can put a small wire cooling rack, a vegetable steamer, or an array of skewers tied together in the pot to keep the jars off the bottom. After boiling the jars, you can ladle out some of the water and lift your jars out with an oven mitt. However, a set of jar lifting tongs doesn't cost much and makes that step easier. A wide mouthed funnel is nice since it keeps stuff of the rims of the jars, but is also not necessary, especially if you get wide mouthed jars.The folks who make Ball jars have some nice overviews of canning techniques. You may recognize our technique as one common in mathematics. We have reduced a difficult problem (what to do with 75 pounds of citrus) into a problem whose solution is well known: what to do with many jars of marmalade. QED.
When you're playing it, it feels like the video game representation of some real-life sport. You're bouncing a ball back and forth with another player, which at first glance sounds a lot like like table tennis, AKA ping pong-- and that would seem to explain the name. And yet, PONG is two-dimensional and free of gravity. The ball goes in a straight line, at a fairly constant rate of travel. And you don't play ping pong by rotating a wheel. Come to think of it, it's not a darned thing like ping pong. So what the heck is it?
To answer this important question, we built this real-life Tabletop Pong game.
But, let's back up for a second. PONG is one of the earliest arcade video games, released by Atari way back in 1972. (It was not the first video game, but it's venerable indeed.) We're certainly not the first to build a real-world analog of a video game or even of PONG itself.
While there are other examples in this little genre, the most relevant for us to mention is the Pongmechanik project (better link for photo and video). Built from 2003-2004, Pongmechanik was a startlingly faithful mechanical representation of PONG-- right down to the pixelated square floating on guide wires across the playfield. And amazing though it is, it does not feel much like a "real-world" game, but instead more like wonderful old electromechanical arcade games.
Coming back to our main question now, what is PONG supposed to represent?
Our answer to this question is a game somewhere between pinball and ping pong: Two players each have a single knob that controls the position of a paddle along a short track. Using the paddles, they bounce the ball back and forth and try not to miss the ball, lest the other player score a point. The paddle surfaces are curved, so that the ball reflects in different directions depending on the position of impact. The paddles are powered, so that the ball keeps a fairly constant velocity between the two sides, and the speed gradually increases as the game is played. The playfield is level and has a dotted line down the middle, and the scores are displayed on either side of that line. There are top and bottom walls of the playfield that the ball can bounce off of. Sounds possible, right? So we built it.
We documented the build with (a heck of a lot of) photos, which are available in this flickr set; probably the best way to see them is a slideshow-- we've embedded one below, so click through to flickr if you can't see it.
And of course, you'll want to know how it looks in practice so we took a quick video while trying it out for the first time-- bugs and all. It's embedded below. Again, if you can't see it, you may want to click through and view it on YouTube.
In what follows, we'll walk briefly through the build, pointing out some features along the way.
The paddles need to slide along a track. We found this nice assembly at a local surplus shop for 45 dollars. It had two linear bearings sets on board by IKO, each with a 9.75" long rail.
We stripped out the linear stages and designed some laser-cut plywood pieces to act as paddles that could be moved around by a timing belt (white). Minor challenge here: finding metric screws to work with the IKO rails and bearings.
Next, more lasering. Each rail will get mounted in a wooden box, with a slit for the paddle to slide down. We painted the top panel of each box black so that it will have the right look from above when the project is complete.
The paddles need to be powered to keep the ball moving. We go this 24 V pusher solenoid from McMaster-Carr. It didn't come with a return spring nor a place to put one, so we (a) drilled a hole in the back of the plunger (b) found a spring, cut it apart, bent it, and fed it through the back of the plunger and (c) glued it all down with JB weld. (Damn, that stuff is strong.)
The paddles need to detect a ball hitting it. We found some soft-touch limit-detecting microswitches that seem to work nicely. The paddle surface is a 1/4 section of a PVC pipe, about 1" thick. Put it all together with the solenoid and the paddle assembly, plus a hardware-store miniature brass hinge.
Inside the wooden paddle box are two timing belt pulleys. One is turned directly by a knob that will be added to the top, and the othe is free spinning. As the timing belt turns it slides the paddle assembly, which is mounted to the linear slide system and can move up and down the slot.
The overall feeling that you get turning the knob is a lot like operating foosball controls.
The two solenoids are driven by high-current n-channel MOSFETs with reverse protection diodes. They are driven by an ATmega168 microcontroller. The program is very simple: when the switch is closed (because the ball hit the paddle) the paddle solenoid is fired for a set length of time, with a gentle stop. This would be easy enough to do with analog electronics as well, but it sure is easy to write a nice debouncing routine on an AVR.
The playfield is made of clear acrylic, and is held together by acrylic cement. It spans the distance between the two paddle boxes and locks them into place. Beneath the acrylic, we attached a piece of carefully cut glossy black paper that gives the characteristic shape of the playfield-- it's held in place with spray adhesive. The dotted line in the middle is emphasized with a second white piece of paper attached beneath the black paper.
The remaining cutouts are to display the score.
Our score wheel is a piece of 1/16" thick two-tone engravable plastic. The outer edge is knurled (or the two-dimensional equivalent, ridged?) to give a better grip when turning it by hand. The inner cutout allows it to sit around a 1/4" tall acrylic cylinder, cemented to the black material below, that acts as a plain bearing. Once the playfield is added on top, it's pretty easy to read the score. The top edge of the wheel reaches past the top of the playfield, so it just takes a finger touch to spin it to the desired value.
And some final touches. The top and bottom walls of the playfield need to be bouncy. Acrylic is not. At the surplus shops, we found some beryllium copper finger strip-- the sort of thing that is used for providing flexible EMI shielding near covers of instruments and computer cases. It's all kinds of springy, and can be glued in place with tough epoxy--that makes the walls remarkably elastic.
The knobs on both sides get a neat rubber grip-- made from an old double-sided timing belt and pulley, and finally we add the ball-- a 1 1/4" steel ball bearing.
Some time ago, we wrote up a tutorial about using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller. A couple of years have passed, and so we've returned to update and clean up some loose ends on this project.
The Analog Devices ADXL330 that we originally wrote about (shown above) was one of the original low-cost breakthrough devices-- the ones that first showed up in Wii controllers and other consumer electronics with accelerometers. At the time it cost $11.50 in unit quantity, and we were able to get one pre-soldered to a breakout board at Sparkfun.com for $35. In the time that has passed, the ADXL335 has come along as a next-generation drop-in replacement for the ADXL330, which now bears the dreaded stain of "not recommended for new designs." (The ADXL335 is less expensive than the 330-- currently $5.42 each, compared to $12.15 for the 330 --but is otherwise mostly equivalent.)Tiny chips like these are (IMHO) not easy to solder, so it's convenient that this new chip is also available presoldered to a breakout board. We're using the one from Adafruit ($20), but similar pin-compatible boards are also made by Analog devices (model EVAL-ADXL335Z) and Digi-Key (model DKSB1002A). (Sparkfun also has a ADXL335 breakout, but it's pin-compatible to their discontinued ADXL330 board, not to these others.)
Besides bumping up to the current accelerometer chip, we've also cleaned up the project a little bit with one of our ATmegaxx8 breakout boards. Not that there's any magic hidden in that board-- you certainly can still do this project on a breadboard --but at our presentation is a bit neater, and the end product is much more reliable. Let's start at the beginning. We're using an ATmega168, a popular AVR microcontroller*, which we will power at 3 V, from 2 AA cells. (3 V is a good choice to make both the chip and accelerometer happy.) The circuit diagram above shows the essential power supply connections for the AVR. We're also using the 3 V power supply as the reference input for the analog to digital converter. *Note 1: The other AVRs in the same family will work too, ATmega88, '168PA, '328P, etc. Note 2: If you're new to AVR, you may want to look at our list of resources for getting started.
The next thing that we add is the 6-pin ISP header, which is necessary for programming the microcontroller through a standard ISP interface such as the USBtinyISP (also from Adafruit).Now, the circuit diagram thus far-- with just power supply and ISP connections --is common to a lot of our projects, which is why we designed those ATmegaXX8 boards in the first place. So here is the breakout board, AVR, 2 x AA battery box, and header. The three wire jumpers (like resistors with one black stripe) are used to connect pins 20-22 to power/power/ground. Having put this together, we have built the circuit shown in the last circuit diagram.
Next, we want to add the accelerometer board.There are six pins on the ADXL335 breakout board. Two for power and ground, three analog outputs for X, Y and Z, plus a "test" pin that we can leave disconnected. We're going to connect the power supply up first and then wire up the X, Y, and Z lines to the analog inputs of our microcontroller.
First, solder the 6-pin header to the ADXL335 breakout board.
Next, we add that board to the breadboard-style proto area on the side of the microcontroller board. The locations inside each white rectangle are internally connected (and not connected to anything else).
Here, we wire up the 3 V and ground lines of the accelerometer board. Ground comes from the "GND" terminal on the upper left to one of the middle stripes through a blue wire, and then through another blue wire to the far left pin of the ADXL335 board-- the one labeled GND. Similarly we connect Vcc ("positive power supply") to the 3V terminal through a couple of red wires. (The perspective of this photo makes it hard to see which pin of the ADXL335 board goes where-- it's easier to see in the photo above this and to the right.)
Now that we've wired up the power supply connections, we can wire up the X, Y, and Z analog lines.To do this, we add three wires. "X" goes to "ADC5", "Y" goes to "ADC4", and "Z" goes to "ADC3." Having done so, we are now caught up to the last circuit diagram.
Next, we will add some output LEDs that the AVR can drive to indicate the acceleration values as it reads them out.Here, we add two LEDs (one red, one blue) for each of the three axes. The big idea is that when there is no acceleration in (say) the X-axis direction, both X-axis LEDs are off. When it detects acceleration one way, the red LED lights up (and brighter, the higher the acceleration is) and it lights up blue for acceleration in the opposite direction. (Naturally, the other two axes work the same way.)To do this, we're using the pulse width modulation outputs from the three timers (timer 0, timer 1, and timer 2) on the microcontroller. Each timer has two outputs, called "output compare" pins A and B, which go to the two LEDs. The six outputs are called OC0A, OC0B, OC1A, OC1B, OC2A, and OC2B, and are hooked up to the LEDs as indicated in the diagram. (No resistors are needed on the blue LEDs, because the forward voltage of those is 3.6 V-- we will not approach their rated current, ~25 mA, with our 3 V power supply.) Our new parts: six LEDs (three red, three blue) and three resistors. First, we'll add the LEDs for the X axis.OC0A goes through the resistor to the LED, to ground. OC0B goes directly through that yellow wire to the blue LED, to ground.
You can download the firmware program (C code) for the AVR here (11 kB .ZIP file). It's a very simple AVR-GCC program, licensed under the GPL. It reads in three analoginputs sequentially, and lights up the six display LEDs depending on the values that it reads. Once you've gotten the AVR programmed, it should be ready to go and show you outputs that depend on the acceleration.So far, we've only got the output LEDs for the one axis, but you can already try it out. As you shake it, even fast, you can see the LEDs responding to motion along the X axis. If you aren't wildly swinging the board around, what you'll see is just the steady-state gravitational acceleration displayed. You might call it a tilt sensor, and it can tell you which way is up. If we tilt our board left or right, such that the X-axis is now pointing slightly up or down (slightly with or slightly against gravity) you can see the X-axis LED pair, shown here, switch from red to blue. (Which way is X? It's written on the circuit board, and also in the datasheet for the accelerometer.) Finally, we add the Y and Z indicator LEDs.And here's the completed project. The "Y" LED pair is in the upper right, connected to OC1A and OC1B. The "Z" LED pair is in the lower left, requiring one longer wire from MOSI/OC2A to the red LED for the Z axis.Now, it's sensitive in all three directions and has the capability to tell you what it sees. Lying flat on our (not particularly level) photography table, the X and Y axes are reporting near-zero acceleration. There isn't much tilt in X or Y. The only bright LED is the blue one for Z, because there *is* a strong vertical acceleration. Naturally, the red Z LED comes on instead when you flip it upside down.
Woo-hoo! We got a box of MakerBeam to keep us busy through the long dark winter evenings. For more info, see their kickstarter page, and the google group. They've been busy actually getting stuff made, so we'll forgive them for not updating much lately. The beam cross section is shown here with an LED for scale. We got several lengths of beam; 45, 60 and 90 degree plastic connectors; fancy screws and assorted nuts. The prototype connectors are made on a shopbot out of ABS. The little screws look funny at first--there's nowhere to put a screwdriver! They slide nicely into the side of the beam, where you can see that you won't need a screwdriver for them.
Come join us at the ComBots Cup at the San Mateo Fairgrounds on Saturday, December 19 and Sunday, December 20 from 2-7 pm. (Get tickets here.) And if taking your loved ones to see combat robotics wasn't gift enough, you can do a little last minute holiday shopping without having to brave the mall! We'll have a selection of kits (and a few robot repair parts) on hand. You can try out Meggy Jr RGB and see the new Bulbdial Clock in person. Read more about the event at Suicide Bots. Special treat for our readers who attend: mention this post and we'll give you an RGB LED in your choice of style. Hope to see you there!
Joyce and Kaufman sent in this truly fantastic Star Trek Pez LED menorah that they made. Joyce made it lastyear to hold candles, and this year Kaufman brought it right into the 24th 21stcentury by mind-melding modding it with one of our Deluxe LED Menorah kits.
Let's give them both double credit for a fantastic job. Overengineering at its finest, this is.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - The US space shuttle Endeavour on Monday soared into orbit carrying an observation deck for the International Space Station, a seven-windowed dome offering breathtaking views.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - The US space shuttle Endeavour blasted off Monday carrying the last major component of the International Space Station -- a seven-windowed dome for breathtaking panoramic views.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - The US space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of six astronauts blasted off Monday and headed for the International Space Station to deliver a module dubbed Tranquility.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The space shuttle Endeavour bolted off its seaside launch pad in Florida on Monday, carrying six astronauts on a voyage to install the last two main pieces of the International Space Station.
CAPE CANAVERAL (AFP) - The US space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of six astronauts reached orbit early on Monday after a successful launch from the Kennedy Space Center, NASA said.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - The US space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of six astronauts were set Monday to make another launch attempt on a mission to deliver a module dubbed Tranquility to the International Space Station.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - NASA officials crossed their fingers ahead of the second attempt to launch Endeavour to the International Space Station on one of the last missions for the soon-to-be-retired shuttle fleet.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - The US space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of six astronauts were set to blast off early Sunday on a mission to deliver a module dubbed Tranquility to the International Space Station.
Researchers at the National Ignition Facility in California are one step closer to the elusive goal of triggering a self-sustained, stable fusion reaction
Sebring Builders, a privately owned Builder/Developer is hoping to become a “trendsetter”. In 2006, Sebring Builders started planning to build Stone Ridge, a private, gated community in the small central Florida town of Sebring. With single family homes starting just under $200,000, they thought this development had everything to offer, great location, clubhouse with [...]
At the mention of the term natural gas, most of us come to think of it as a gas that, as the name might suggest occurs naturally. Right to an extent, but quite vague in the true sense of it, actually natural gas is a mixture of about eight gases, mainly methane, ethane, butane, [...]
ECOtality has announced a clever new contest aimed at promoting their fresh new blog. It’s been awhile since we’ve published a review anyways, so this is a welcome challenge. Ecotality Life is a beautiful website. I love the how the images add meaningful impact and color to the articles, which are further emphasized by [...]
FeedBurner is a popular online service that gives website owners the ability to enhance and promote their blog and news feeds. Recently the company began introducing their long-anticipated networking service, which gives users the ability to create and manage feed networks based on a topic or theme. These feeds can then be combined and [...]
I hope the price of gasoline and oil doubles in the next year. Actually, I hope it increases 1000%. Why? Because super-inflated gas prices may be the only thing that wakes North America up to the need for change. Public awareness about global warming and climate change has been numbed by increasing media saturation of [...]
Leonardo DiCaprio is best known as a gifted Hollywood actor, but he is also a major spokesperson for the growing environmental movement. For some time now he has also been busy inspiring people to take action to prevent global catastrophe in the face of global warming and climate change. His latest effort is the [...]
This car commercial features a GM EV1 and a hummer. The purpose of this video was to document the car’s existence, as GM has claims they do not have any footage of the car. Those cars were so cool… I’m deeply appalled that they aren’t being produced anymore. Regardless, it was nice to see the [...]
A beautiful, well-designed and frequently updated website community focusing on sustainable living tips and green energy technologies. The daily green tips section includes valuable eco-fashion designs and how-to resources for green outdoor enthusiasts. The forums provide a convenient place for visitors to discuss everything from pollution and climate change to solutions like volunteering and [...]
Rate your conservation efforts with “I Conserve!” challenge cards - the Conservation Council of Ontario distributes cards through The Beer Store’s 441 retail stores across Ontario. By 2009, the Conservation Council of Ontario wants everyone in Ontario to say “I conserve.” The goal is not to become perfect overnight, just better. To make it [...]
SmartPower Urges President Bush to Sign Energy Bill
SmartPower, in a clarion call to the President today strongly urged President Bush to put aside partisan politics and to sign the recently passed Energy Bill. Both the House and the Senate have passed slightly differing versions of this comprehensive energy bill. A compromise bill is expected [...]
As part of our ongoing commitment to bring you the best renewable energy resources, we’ve now launched the AEoogle search engine. Our newest tool combines the power of GoogleTM’s algorithm with the comprehensive resources you’ll find in the renewable energy directory. This fruitful combination provides a more accurate and relevant search result when you [...]
Scientists at Columbia University are proposing a revolutionary new agricultural technology that would bring food supplies closer to the end-user. After studying modern greenhouse techniques they have come up with a new concept to build 30-storey skyscrapers to grow food and raise small livestock, effectively eliminating the shipping and pollution expenses associated with urban living. [...]
Phi Tran submitted this link to me by email. According to Phi, Neo-Aerodynamic introduces a new, history making technology to extract kinetic energy from a flowing fluid, providing “unheard-of” amounts of electricity as the final result; this “rate has not been seen before”. During the development of this technology we have gone from one surprising [...]
This was emailed to me for immediate release. Friends of the Earth Canada has launched a landmark lawsuit today against the Government of Canada for abandoning its international commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. Filed in Federal Court in Ottawa by Canada’s foremost environmental law organization, Sierra Legal, the lawsuit alleges that the federal government [...]
This video raises some serious questions about the perceived advantages of ethanol and the current political hype surrounding its production. Politicians throughout the United States are promoting increased production and subsidies for the so-called ‘green fuel’, but as this video clearly points out, there may actually be zero environmental or economic benefits. Simply put, [...]
In this video a Wrightspeed X1 electric car out-performs both a Ferrari and Porche! What is stunning about this race is just how well the electric car performs. It shoots off the starting line and very quickly races ahead of the other two cars in both races. I’m very impressed! It’s just too bad that [...]
This solar power tower in Spain acts as a powerful electricity generator and graceful work of landscape art. The 40-story high concrete tower is bathed in powerful rays of bright sunlight and it can be seen for miles. This effect is created by 600 large and intensely powerful mirrors which are used to concentrate the [...]
These last few stories blew my mind (thanks to the EcoGeek I have hope). It’s great to see wind energy technologies evolving, and the concepts sure are attractive. Here we have a beautiful new loopwing tip-less blade design, a collaborative design by students of Archinect that can harness the wind energy of highways, and the [...]
According to Dave White of Mobile Magazine there may be a way to convert carbon dioxide emissions into electricity using Solar Power! This amazing new potential technology is being developed by a group of scientists at the University of California in San Diego. Apparently they already have a working prototype of the technology, which would [...]
Being the bicycle enthusiast that I am I can’t help but notice this cool new toy from Segway. It’s great how it can maneuver in tight spaces and stay on two wheels at high speed. The possibilities for this technology seem very promising (as long as it isn’t used for military purposes). I bet [...]
Retired Airplane Product Development Engineer Gary Reysa has compiled the most comprehensive do-it-yourself solar website online. His non-commercial website, Build It Solar, contains plans, photos and links to over 500 DIY solar and renewable energy projects. “While trying to find good solar heating ideas for my house, I noted that there is not much [...]
Artist and Engineer Theo Jansen has been designing and creating these wonderful wind powered vehicles for over 10 years. He uses lightweight plastic yellow tubing to construct the vehicle’s skeleton. I realize these projects do not produce energy, but they are so beautiful that I just had to share them. Also featured in wind power.
The folks at otherpower.com are extremely busy building new wind energy projects, as is evident by the massive amount of information available on their website. Even the most novice do-it-yourselfer could find enough information there to construct a fully functioning wind energy system for their house. There are do-it-yourself instructions, forums, and they even host [...]
Yet another update: We decided to move the energy forums in order to better integrate them with our main site structure. The old forums are still online but are closed for new registrations and posts. Please feel free to register an account and help us get these conversations going!
For over a year I’ve been trying to figure out a way to display the latest alternative energy news headlines in a timely fashion. It has been very difficult. We’ve gone from manual daily updates to daily feed updates via a sub blog. This past month I’ve been setting up and testing a new system [...]
EcoPhotos.com is a stock photo agency specialized in nature, environmental protection, and sustainability related topics. Images illustrate what needs to be protected, threats to people and to the environment, and a wide range of more sustainable alternatives.
A user submitted video from the Discovery Channel. A very detailed and informative introduction to processing biodiesel as a fuel source. The host tours a biodiesel processing plant and gets an explanation of how the process works, as well as how to convert a regular diesel engine to run off of biofuels. Also featured in [...]
What an exciting and fun website! Designed with kids in mind, Meet the Greens uses flash media to present information about climate change and environmental issues. There are games and videos for kids (and adults) to play and watch. I found myself spending quite a bit of time on this site, it is quality educational [...]
This excellent eye-opening video compares the energy crisis in North America with the sustainable energy models that have been developed in Europe over the past 50 years.
This video gives a detailed overview of an amazing Spanish tower that generates power by collecting heat at its base and forcing the air up through a small chimney. Electricity is produced using a power generator located at the top of the chimney. Also featured in solar power.
For the past seven years, I've had a broken digital camera lying around. It is still able to take pictures, but it is almost impossible to use on account of a broken screen. The fundamental problem is that sometimes the menu will accidentally get turned on, and not being able to see the screen, I ca... By: 62 Projects to Make with a Dead Computer
In this Instructable I will show you how I made a old computer into a power supply and radio for the top of my tool box. This is a work in progress and I decided to take it apart to show how I made it. I started this project to have a reliable power supply for testing sensors on automobiles without... By: scojanp
Get a cloth cut to the length you prefer Paint Choose a color paint that you would like to dye it. Paint Container Put a drop of paint in a container Hot Water Turn on hot water. Get it steaming hot Water in Container Fill container 3/4 full with hot water Stir Stir the paint a... By: SahDesign
I have a lot of old coffee cans, and tobacco cans laying around, and was trying to think of something to use them for. Here is one of my ideas. It's a star lamp, you can make out of a coffee can, or in this case, a tobacco can. Materials 1 coffee/tobacco can 1 bulb socket 1 cord (I had this one ... By: TimBTodd
Make a Wood Block USB Drive from an old flashdrive. What You'll Need I found some one inch square wood blocks at a good will. they are perfect for home projects. 2 - 1 inch Square Wood Blocks 1- old usb flash drive a dremel with drill tool hot glue gun with hot glue some sandpaper safety cl... By: legendofmatt
This instructable will show you how to make peanut butter bars that taste just like Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. Gather Your Ingredients 1/2 cup butter 1 3/4 cups confectioner's sugar 1 cup peanut butter 3/4 cup graham cracker crumbs 1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup milk chocolate chips Melting Melt 1/2 ... By: holdenleslie
Today I am going to show you how to make a case for your USB memory stick with an old IPod broken IPod. Materials and Tools You are going to need: MATERIALS * Broken IPod (preferably nano) * Working USB Memory Stick Tools * Small Screwdriver * Hot Glue Gun Disassemble Ipod Pretty straight f... By: davej6694
Using a single 8 1/2" X 8 1/2" square sheet of paper you will be able to make an approximately 4 ounce paper cup. Obtain and 8 1/2" by 8 1/2" square sheet of paper. Fold one corner to the opposite corner forming a triangle. Orient the paper so the crease of the paper faces you Take the ri... By: znosredna
This is a guide to help you in airsoft so you won't get hurt like I did the first time I played Equipment In airsoft you'll need 1.a mask of some sort(paintball ect.) 2.A primary gun preferably an AEG I have an M4 and a uzi 3.e secondary ( a pistol or a mini AEG) 5. at least 500 bbs 6.i wear jean... By: Aragornrocks3
Taking a Spyderco knife apart is easy, but putting it back together can be a pain. This is the method I came up with after trial and error. I hate to make such a specific instructible, but I think these knives are popular and user-friendly enough to warrant it. In this instructible I assume the pock... By: Nilhilustfrederi
First off, this is my first Instructable. I had been looking at fishing poles on Instructables when I thought about making my own. I copied the idea of a pen launcher and I used a basic idea for the pole. Made 1/30/2010 What you need I used some household items to make this so you'll probably ... By: Ruffles1
Have you ever played The Impossible Quiz by Splapp-Me-Do? I have, and I wanted to make a quiz like it. Sadly, it is a flash file, and I cannot afford a flash maker. However, I figured out how to make a quiz using Microsoft PowerPoint nearly as good as the flash. If you read this Instructable, you ca... By: saintjimmy
List of Materials: 1. 8 ½ in x 11in computer paper 2. Scissors 3. Creativity Place paper in portrait orientation and leave the paper in this position until finished folding Fold the bottom edge up to the top edge Fold the left edge to the right edge Fold diagonally so the bo... By: felixforcats
Well, My first instructable. I was planning on waiting to add this to Instructables until it was final, but I can't... for 2 reasons, 1: It's just too frigging awesome to keep in hiding any longer, and 2: The dead computer contest (It fits perfectly) For those of you who are wondering what this exac... By: pizzaboy192
Inspired by Samsung's new Dual View TL220 digital camera that has a second LCD screen on the front so you can see yourself when you snap your own picture, I velcroed a small mirror to my existing digital camera and saved over 300 bucks! When I thought about how many pictures I have taken of myself ... By: noahw
Who doesn't love sketch of themselves or their loved ones? but... and but... You probably don't have a Tablet PC (or iPad), drawing skills are good for making amoeba and lazy enough to not use existing copying techniques then I have something for you (sounds pretty theatrical ) - A $2 Sketch portra... By: manish15
Rein fire from the sky with this mockery of a Chinese balloon! This instructable requires: - A couple of meters of incredibly thin wire. - Cheapest trash bag/bin bag liner you can find (these are the sort bin men hate as the split if you look at them funny) - A couple of balls of cotton wool - Sello... By: fallscrape
Had ladle brake the at dinner one night and rather than throw it away i decided to make something with it i turned the spoon part into a stand for my usb be cable. By: spacepirate04
Valentine's Day occurs during the coldest part of the year for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere. Here in Central Texas, winter is also the wettest part of the year which makes for pretty gross weather especially because it typically doesn't get cold enough for snow. When it's cold a... By: AngryRedhead
there will be only one pic for the first few steps cuz they are really easy but one of the last steps have to have alot cuz it is tricky.u can modd it cuz there are sum red pecies that are needed to keep it straight but they take away from the y-wing look so your welcome to mod and repost but make s... By: slifenoa286
Today's stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: how your gadgets could become truly wireless, a secret hidden in the big bang's echoes, and a tour of the UK's most secret science sites
Today's stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: Earth's billion-year struggle for oxygen, how smart dust could warn us about space storms, and how far you can trust an AI
An iPhone app that understands voice commands and can book restaurant tables on your behalf works well, but how much more sophisticated do we want such assistants to get?
The agency wants to do away with its own rockets and buy tickets to space on commercial taxis – here are the first five projects it is supporting in this effort
Sometimes, the space shuttle 
Have you ever seen a halo around the Sun? 
Most galaxies have a single nucleus -- does this galaxy have four? 
This remarkable scene combines multiple exposures
It's spring for the northern hemisphere of Mars and
This cosmic expanse of dust, gas, and stars covers close to 3 degrees
What is this strange object? 
We're thrilled to be heading back to the Exploratorium this Saturday for the first Young Makers event put on by Make, the Exploratorium, TechShop, and Pixar. Here's a little bit about the program from Make's writeup: "It's a first experiment in a new program we call Young Makers, in which we intend to create an infrastructure to nurture kids who want to learn by making, beyond what they can do with construction kits. We hope to fulfill a dire need: satisfying a little bit of what shop classes used to do before they, lamentably, started getting booted out of schools."We hope to see you there this Saturday between 11 am and 3 pm. There will be BristleBot building going on, as well as BlinkyBug building with our friend Ken Murphy. Ken also has an exhibit called A History of the Sky that is at the Exploratorium through the end of the month and is definitely worth seeing. If you can't make it this weekend, they've got a great line-up of folks for the last Saturday of each month leading up to Maker Faire:
While trying to figure out what to do with about 75 pounds of fruit that our citrus trees bestowed upon us in January, we came across an interesting fact: marmalade is really easy to make. People of older generations may know this already, but so far as we knew, marmalade was one of those mysterious things that strictly comes from a jar. It turns out that all you need is citrus fruit, water, sugar and some time on the stovetop. 
The peels need to be cut into little slivers for the appropriate texture in the marmalade. If you stack up the pieces, you can cut a bunch at once. 
Many recipes recommend removing the white pith because it is bitter. Other recipes recommend removing the pith and reserving it, cooking it along with the fruit in a cheesecloth bundle and removing it at the end, presumably to allow extraction of the pectin. Many jam and jelly recipes call for pectin to be added, but it isn't needed for marmalade because of the amount of pectin already present in the skin and pith of the citrus fruit. Some recipes call for a blanching or soaking stage. The primary purpose of blanching is to remove the bitterness from the pith and peel. We like bitter marmalade, so we left in most of the pith and didn't soak or blanch the peels or fruit. That also keeps the recipe simple-- just slice up the fruit and throw it in the pot with the peel pieces. 
The fruit and peel are cooked in water until they're good and soft. It takes a while (about an hour), but once you've got a nice simmer going, you can ignore it pretty well. 
The sugar goes in. Lots of sugar. The original recipe calls for 4 cups of water and 4 cups of sugar (with ten lemons). The 4 cups of water barely covered the raw fruit (in a saucepan with roughly equal depth and diameter). For scaling the recipe up or down, you can use that as a rough guide: pour in water a cup at a time until the fruit is almost covered, then once everything's soft add as much sugar as you did water. 
Stir in the sugar, and bring it up to a boil, stirring regularly. 
The original recipe says to cook it until it's 220 degrees fahrenheit. If you're one of the few with a well-calibrated thermometer, congratulations. For the rest of us, put a spoonful of the proto-marmalade on a cool plate. If it's still runny after cooling for a minute, keep simmering a little longer. It should show signs of jelling after cooking for 45 minutes to an hour. 
That's it. You've made marmalade!
But now you're wondering what to do with it. We recommend spreading it on a freshly toasted english muffin. Or maybe a crumpet. You can put the rest of it in a bowl, let it cool, then keep it in the fridge and use it. Or you can can it. Canning is not as scary as it sounds. You pour the warm marmalade into warm jars, wipe the rims clean, put a clean lid and rim on them and boil the jars covered with water for 15 minutes. There are lots of kinds of canning setups but the simplest is a pot with a spacer to keep the jars off the bottom. While you can get dedicated canning kettles with jar racks inexpensively, you don't really need any special equipment. Rules of thumb: your pot needs to be deeper than your jars so you can cover them with water, and the jars shouldn't rest on the bottom of the pot, so as to avoid thermal stress. You can put a small wire cooling rack, a vegetable steamer, or an array of skewers tied together in the pot to keep the jars off the bottom. 
After boiling the jars, you can ladle out some of the water and lift your jars out with an oven mitt. However, a set of jar lifting tongs doesn't cost much and makes that step easier. A wide mouthed funnel is nice since it keeps stuff of the rims of the jars, but is also not necessary, especially if you get wide mouthed jars.The folks who make Ball jars have some nice overviews of canning techniques. 
You may recognize our technique as one common in mathematics. We have reduced a difficult problem (what to do with 75 pounds of citrus) into a problem whose solution is well known: what to do with many jars of marmalade. QED.
The Analog Devices ADXL330 that we originally wrote about (shown above) was one of the original low-cost breakthrough devices-- the ones that first showed up in Wii controllers and other consumer electronics with accelerometers. At the time it cost $11.50 in unit quantity, and we were able to get one pre-soldered to a breakout board at Sparkfun.com for $35.
In the time that has passed, the ADXL335 has come along as a next-generation drop-in replacement for the ADXL330, which now bears the dreaded stain of "not recommended for new designs." (The ADXL335 is less expensive than the 330-- currently $5.42 each, compared to $12.15 for the 330 --but is otherwise mostly equivalent.)Tiny chips like these are (IMHO) not easy to solder, so it's convenient that this new chip is also available presoldered to a breakout board. We're using the one from Adafruit ($20), but similar pin-compatible boards are also made by Analog devices (model EVAL-ADXL335Z) and Digi-Key (model DKSB1002A). (Sparkfun also has a ADXL335 breakout, but it's pin-compatible to their discontinued ADXL330 board, not to these others.)
Let's start at the beginning. We're using an ATmega168, a popular AVR microcontroller*, which we will power at 3 V, from 2 AA cells. (3 V is a good choice to make both the chip and accelerometer happy.) The circuit diagram above shows the essential power supply connections for the AVR. We're also using the 3 V power supply as the reference input for the analog to digital converter. 
The next thing that we add is the 6-pin ISP header, which is necessary for programming the microcontroller through a standard ISP interface such as the USBtinyISP (also from Adafruit).Now, the circuit diagram thus far-- with just power supply and ISP connections --is common to a lot of our projects, which is why we designed those ATmegaXX8 boards in the first place.
So here is the breakout board, AVR, 2 x AA battery box, and header. The three wire jumpers (like resistors with one black stripe) are used to connect pins 20-22 to power/power/ground. Having put this together, we have built the circuit shown in the last circuit diagram.
There are six pins on the ADXL335 breakout board. Two for power and ground, three analog outputs for X, Y and Z, plus a "test" pin that we can leave disconnected. We're going to connect the power supply up first and then wire up the X, Y, and Z lines to the analog inputs of our microcontroller. 
Here, we wire up the 3 V and ground lines of the accelerometer board. Ground comes from the "GND" terminal on the upper left to one of the middle stripes through a blue wire, and then through another blue wire to the far left pin of the ADXL335 board-- the one labeled GND. Similarly we connect Vcc ("positive power supply") to the 3V terminal through a couple of red wires. (The perspective of this photo makes it hard to see which pin of the ADXL335 board goes where-- it's easier to see in the photo above this and to the right.) 
To do this, we add three wires. "X" goes to "ADC5", "Y" goes to "ADC4", and "Z" goes to "ADC3." Having done so, we are now caught up to the last circuit diagram.
Here, we add two LEDs (one red, one blue) for each of the three axes. The big idea is that when there is no acceleration in (say) the X-axis direction, both X-axis LEDs are off. When it detects acceleration one way, the red LED lights up (and brighter, the higher the acceleration is) and it lights up blue for acceleration in the opposite direction. (Naturally, the other two axes work the same way.)To do this, we're using the pulse width modulation outputs from the three timers (timer 0, timer 1, and timer 2) on the microcontroller. Each timer has two outputs, called "output compare" pins A and B, which go to the two LEDs. The six outputs are called OC0A, OC0B, OC1A, OC1B, OC2A, and OC2B, and are hooked up to the LEDs as indicated in the diagram. (No resistors are needed on the blue LEDs, because the forward voltage of those is 3.6 V-- we will not approach their rated current, ~25 mA, with our 3 V power supply.)
Our new parts: six LEDs (three red, three blue) and three resistors.
OC0A goes through the resistor to the LED, to ground. OC0B goes directly through that yellow wire to the blue LED, to ground. 
And here's the completed project. The "Y" LED pair is in the upper right, connected to OC1A and OC1B. The "Z" LED pair is in the lower left, requiring one longer wire from MOSI/OC2A to the red LED for the Z axis.Now, it's sensitive in all three directions and has the capability to tell you what it sees. Lying flat on our (not particularly level) photography table, the X and Y axes are reporting near-zero acceleration. There isn't much tilt in X or Y. The only bright LED is the blue one for Z, because there *is* a strong vertical acceleration. Naturally, the red Z LED comes on instead when you flip it upside down.
Woo-hoo! We got a box of MakerBeam to keep us busy through the long dark winter evenings. For more info, see their kickstarter page, and the google group. They've been busy actually getting stuff made, so we'll forgive them for not updating much lately.
The beam cross section is shown here with an LED for scale. 
We got several lengths of beam; 45, 60 and 90 degree plastic connectors; fancy screws and assorted nuts. The prototype connectors are made on a shopbot out of ABS. 
Come join us at the ComBots Cup at the San Mateo Fairgrounds on Saturday, December 19 and Sunday, December 20 from 2-7 pm. (Get tickets here.) And if taking your loved ones to see combat robotics wasn't gift enough, you can do a little last minute holiday shopping without having to brave the mall! We'll have a selection of kits (and a few robot repair parts) on hand. You can try out Meggy Jr RGB and see the new Bulbdial Clock in person. Read more about the event at Suicide Bots. Special treat for our readers who attend: mention this post and we'll give you an RGB LED in your choice of style. Hope to see you there!
For the past seven years, I've had a broken digital camera lying around. It is still able to take pictures, but it is almost impossible to use on account of a broken screen. The fundamental problem is that sometimes the menu will accidentally get turned on, and not being able to see the screen, I ca...
In this Instructable I will show you how I made a old computer into a power supply and radio for the top of my tool box. This is a work in progress and I decided to take it apart to show how I made it. I started this project to have a reliable power supply for testing sensors on automobiles without...
Get a cloth cut to the length you prefer Paint Choose a color paint that you would like to dye it. Paint Container Put a drop of paint in a container Hot Water Turn on hot water. Get it steaming hot Water in Container Fill container 3/4 full with hot water Stir Stir the paint a...
I have a lot of old coffee cans, and tobacco cans laying around, and was trying to think of something to use them for. Here is one of my ideas. It's a star lamp, you can make out of a coffee can, or in this case, a tobacco can. Materials 1 coffee/tobacco can 1 bulb socket 1 cord (I had this one ...
Make a Wood Block USB Drive from an old flashdrive. What You'll Need I found some one inch square wood blocks at a good will. they are perfect for home projects. 2 - 1 inch Square Wood Blocks 1- old usb flash drive a dremel with drill tool hot glue gun with hot glue some sandpaper safety cl...
This instructable will show you how to make peanut butter bars that taste just like Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. Gather Your Ingredients 1/2 cup butter 1 3/4 cups confectioner's sugar 1 cup peanut butter 3/4 cup graham cracker crumbs 1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup milk chocolate chips Melting Melt 1/2 ...
Today I am going to show you how to make a case for your USB memory stick with an old IPod broken IPod. Materials and Tools You are going to need: MATERIALS * Broken IPod (preferably nano) * Working USB Memory Stick Tools * Small Screwdriver * Hot Glue Gun Disassemble Ipod Pretty straight f...
Using a single 8 1/2" X 8 1/2" square sheet of paper you will be able to make an approximately 4 ounce paper cup. Obtain and 8 1/2" by 8 1/2" square sheet of paper. Fold one corner to the opposite corner forming a triangle. Orient the paper so the crease of the paper faces you Take the ri...
This is a guide to help you in airsoft so you won't get hurt like I did the first time I played Equipment In airsoft you'll need 1.a mask of some sort(paintball ect.) 2.A primary gun preferably an AEG I have an M4 and a uzi 3.e secondary ( a pistol or a mini AEG) 5. at least 500 bbs 6.i wear jean...
Taking a Spyderco knife apart is easy, but putting it back together can be a pain. This is the method I came up with after trial and error. I hate to make such a specific instructible, but I think these knives are popular and user-friendly enough to warrant it. In this instructible I assume the pock...
First off, this is my first Instructable. I had been looking at fishing poles on Instructables when I thought about making my own. I copied the idea of a pen launcher and I used a basic idea for the pole. Made 1/30/2010 What you need I used some household items to make this so you'll probably ...
Have you ever played The Impossible Quiz by Splapp-Me-Do? I have, and I wanted to make a quiz like it. Sadly, it is a flash file, and I cannot afford a flash maker. However, I figured out how to make a quiz using Microsoft PowerPoint nearly as good as the flash. If you read this Instructable, you ca...
List of Materials: 1. 8 ½ in x 11in computer paper 2. Scissors 3. Creativity Place paper in portrait orientation and leave the paper in this position until finished folding Fold the bottom edge up to the top edge Fold the left edge to the right edge Fold diagonally so the bo...
Well, My first instructable. I was planning on waiting to add this to Instructables until it was final, but I can't... for 2 reasons, 1: It's just too frigging awesome to keep in hiding any longer, and 2: The dead computer contest (It fits perfectly) For those of you who are wondering what this exac...
Inspired by Samsung's new Dual View TL220 digital camera that has a second LCD screen on the front so you can see yourself when you snap your own picture, I velcroed a small mirror to my existing digital camera and saved over 300 bucks! When I thought about how many pictures I have taken of myself ...
Who doesn't love sketch of themselves or their loved ones? but... and but... You probably don't have a Tablet PC (or iPad), drawing skills are good for making amoeba and lazy enough to not use existing copying techniques then I have something for you (sounds pretty theatrical ) - A $2 Sketch portra...
Rein fire from the sky with this mockery of a Chinese balloon! This instructable requires: - A couple of meters of incredibly thin wire. - Cheapest trash bag/bin bag liner you can find (these are the sort bin men hate as the split if you look at them funny) - A couple of balls of cotton wool - Sello...
Had ladle brake the at dinner one night and rather than throw it away i decided to make something with it i turned the spoon part into a stand for my usb be cable. 
Valentine's Day occurs during the coldest part of the year for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere. Here in Central Texas, winter is also the wettest part of the year which makes for pretty gross weather especially because it typically doesn't get cold enough for snow. When it's cold a...
there will be only one pic for the first few steps cuz they are really easy but one of the last steps have to have alot cuz it is tricky.u can modd it cuz there are sum red pecies that are needed to keep it straight but they take away from the y-wing look so your welcome to mod and repost but make s...
