Makezine

Inspired by Chris Gammell’s post about “trickle down techonomy,” Ben Krasnow posted this how-to video on making your own Astronaut Ice Cream. He used a vacuum pump, dry ice, and various hoses and fittings to freeze dry ice cream that can be easily enjoyed any time you’re out in space or even on terra firma. [via CRAFT]

Using little more than a vibrating motor and the snipped-off head of a toothbrush, you can make these colorful brushbots. Check out this video tutorial to learn how to do this quick and fun project. You can buy the kit in the Maker Shed, and learn how to put it together on Make: Projects!

Download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube.

More:

• Steerable Bristlebot
• Bristlebot Raceway
• Build a Bristlebot to Clean up your Apartment

While developing the second phase of their Cretaceous Sea Exhibition, The Hastings Museum in Hastings, NE commissioned a life-size model of a Xiphactinus from Gary Staab, a paleo artist based in Kearney, MO. The Xiphactinus was a large predator fish that lived in the Western Interior Sea during the late Cretaceous Period and skeletal remains of this “X-fish” have been found in many parts of North America, Europe, and Australia. Luckily for us, Gary and his team documented the painstakingly detailed process of creating the life-like model in the excellent video above. [Thanks, Jo!]

Nate’s Tumble Log • United States Postal Service tries to compete with Google using fear:

What you need to do is embrace the future. Embrace what’s working. Figure out what the “box” is that you and electronic delivery are competing in, and create a few attributes that you bring to the market that aren’t in that box. And spend all your time, money, and energy outplaying everyone at those attributes.

I wrote a big ole’ article about how the post office could embrace new technologies and get back in the game, unfortunately this video/ad was the most sent in link

Kiwi master craftsman Sören Berger is a woodturner, teacher, and inventor with 35 years at the lathe. It shows. In this amazing and slightly terrifying video, you’ll see him turn a giant tree trunk section that starts with the bark still on it, inside and out, until it’s perfectly smooth and translucent-thin. Inspiring and wonderful. Absolutely do not miss it. [via nerdstink]

Marie and Michael Porter of Minneapolis, MN, used colored marble tiles to create a gloriously nerdy Pi backsplash. [via Think Geek]

Jake Easton’s Better Mousetrap is electrically and pneumatically powered, weighs almost six pounds, features a key lock switch and a manual safety, and strikes with 102 pounds of force. I think they foleyed that crunching noise in the video, however. Sounds like a bag of Fritos, to me.

The Tiny Cylon Kit, available in the Maker Shed, is a fun and easy to solder multi-mode LED Larson scanner kit. It features 5 red LEDs that blink or glow in various patterns. The Tiny Cylon uses an Atmel ATtiny 13 for its brains that comes pre-programmed with multiple LED sequences. It’s a perfect beginning soldering kit and great for building your own robot army!

Kit Includes:
Preprogrammed ATtiny13 with TinyCylon firmware
Quality printed circuit board
5 red LEDs
Push button switch
Battery holder with cover and power switch

Sculptor Tony Cragg created this dice-covered sculptures for Paris’s FIAC art show, which took place in October. Love to see this style with d20s! [via Colossal; photo courtesy of Daniel Milliner]

Well, more accurately, they transform into “whegs,” which look like legs, but are driven like wheels and don’t, as a rule, have powered joints. Apart from sheer novelty value, the advantage seems to be that Quattroped is capable of high “road speeds” when it’s on a smooth surface and in wheeled mode, but can transform to negotiate rough terrain that the wheels alone couldn’t manage. It’s the work of a team from National Taiwan University. Intrepid roboporter Evan Ackerman has more deets over at IEEE Spectrum.

More:

• The Latest in Hobby Robotics 12
• How-To: Build BEAM vibrobots

Relays can do cool stuff when you hook them up to the Internet. Check out XDA member JsChiSurf demonstrate his Android controlled garage door opener. Using an old Linux box connected to a serial relay, he’s able to toggle his garage door opener using a custom app from his Android handset. [via androidcommunity]

Named in honor of Madame Curie (whose full name was Maria Sklodowska-Curie), the Maria S.C. chandelier from Polish designer Pani Jurek allows for all kinds of interesting end-user customization options. And it’s hard to imagine an easier remake. [via CRAFT]

In response to the Make: Newsletter Special Edition (on Tips) that we sent out yesterday, MAKE pal, and automata artist, Dug North sent us a link to a piece he did on Dremel tips. The article is part of Dug’s Automata Tips, Techniques and Tricks, a series he’s doing on Cabaret Mechanical Theatre.

10: Carving with Stones Wood carving bits often leave a rough surface on woods such as Basswood (a.k.a. Lime). Try using grinding stones for the final stages of carving. The pink/orange/brown Aluminum-oxide stones remove material a little faster, while the darker gray/blue/green Silicon-carbide stones remove material more slowly, but leave a smoother finish.

Dug’s Automata Tips, Techniques and Tricks No. 6

More:
We’ll be putting out Special Edition newsletters (in addition to our regular monthly letter) periodically, on tips, tricks, quick projects, tools, and more. Sign up for the Make: Newsletter if you’d like to receive these.

The late unpleasantness in Japan has recently focused our attention on homemade radiation detectors. These are often lumped together under the term “Geiger counter,” but in fact there is more than one way to skin that particular cat. A “Geiger counter,” formally, is a radation-sensitive instrument that uses a Geiger-Müller tube to detect the tiny electrical charges produced when radiation in the environment knocks electrons off atoms of a low-pressure gas sealed inside a glass tube…

A scintillation detector, like that inside the military surplus DT-590A/PDR-56F probe shown above, works by an entirely different principle—that is, optically, rather than electronically. Some transparent solids, called scintillators, emit tiny flashes of visible light when their molecules interact with environmental radiation, and though these flashes are usually too dim to see with the naked eye, if you seal a chunk of scintillator in a dark case, behind a window that passes high-energy radiation but not visible light, you can see them with a photomultiplier tube. The associated electronics have to A) power the photomultiplier and B) read its output into audible “clicks” or other discrete, countable signal events.

Because the detecting volume in a scintillator is a solid, rather than a rareified gas, scintillation detectors are much more sensitive than Geiger counters, especially when it comes to detecting gamma rays. While a typical Geiger-Müller tube reacts to less than 1% of the gamma rays that penetrate it, the comparatively dense atomic lattice of a scintillator crystal will interact with practically all of them.

Multi-talented engineer, scientist, and author David Prutchi has designed an excellent DIY method for converting these common military surplus scintillation probes, which were designed for detecting the very specific energies of gamma rays from plutonium fallout, into general-purpose gamma ray detectors that, in David’s words, “will outperform virtually any handheld Geiger counter in the detection of 100keV to 1.3MeV photons.” He teaches homemade power-supply and signal-processing circuits for the mlitary probe, as well as the necessary trim adjustments for the probe circuitry itself. It’s fantastically informative, well-documented work. [Thanks, David!]

Mike from Nootropic Design (maker of the delightful Defusable Clock) bought a LED matrix from Adafruit and used it to display video from his Android phone, with the help of a SparkFun IOIO board and an Arduino.

I used the OpenCV library to convert the video frames to 16×32 pixel resolution to match the LED matrix. I also constrained the color space of the frames to 12 bit color. That is, each pixel has 4 bits each for red, green, and blue. That means that each pixel can have 16 different brightness levels of red/green/blue, yielding 4096 possible colors. In other words, all of the image processing is performed on the phone because it’s much more powerful than the Arduino.

See the project page for information on how he did it.

My German pal Aram Bartholl shows you the principles of vacuum forming with his homemade rig for churning out Guy Fawkes masks. The video takes you to 28C3 and other public venues where visitors customized their masks while learning the process. Aram’s machine uses a bike pump to suck out the air from the mold.

The first time I used ShapeLock was in my hotel room at Maker Faire: Bay Area. We needed some sample objects made for display in the Maker Shed so I cooked up some ShapeLock using hot water from the coffee maker to soften the plastic beads. After I hand-molded and cooled the plastic I was left with a solid, man shaped doll that I couldn’t break despite my best efforts (even using the hotel room door and dresser!) Ever since then I have been hooked to this terrific material. It’s perfect for prototyping, making custom parts, and can be used in a variety of projects. I even used some to fix my washing machine. But “what is it” you ask?

The technical name for ShapeLock is Polycaprolactone (PCL.) It’s a biodegradable polyester that has a low melting point of around 60°C (140°F). It has physical properties similar to nylon when cool and has a putty like consistency that easily bonds to other plastics when hot. It is classified as an ultra-high molecular weight low temperature thermoplastic and with a density of 1.145 g/cm3. PCL is commonly used in the manufacture of polyurethanes and was one of the first raw materials extruded through a RepRap extruder. It’s also marketed under the names Polymorph, InstaMorph, CAPA, and Friendly Plastic.

If you’re the least bit interested in advanced materials or just want some of this wonderful stuff, I highly recommend picking up a bag from the Maker Shed. I find it nearly as useful as duct tape!

Boy Scout Adam Cole of Orlando, FL, used a PS3 Eye cam, laser pointer, Arduino, and a Processing sketch to create an instant replay system for pinewood derby races, to fulfill a requirement for his Inventing Merit Badge.

Adam has been working on his Inventing Merit Badge since last summer. We discussed potential “problems” and “solutions” for months. After the harsh realization that he wasn’t going to invent a flying car, or a robot to clean his room, he focused a bit more on things within reach. One problem kept resurfacing – at our annual Cub Scout Pinewood Derby, there are so many Cub Scouts around the track, the 75+ parents in attendance can’t see the track. Given that it takes 2+ hours for a race, things get boring pretty fast for the adults, Cub Scouts, and siblings that can’t see the racing action.

Adam decided this was a problem worth solving. He knew there were some existing systems out there, but none were designed specifically to work with our track. We discussed that inventing doesn’t mean you have to build something completely new – that taking an existing concept, but tailoring it for your specific problem was still a worthy challenge.

You really have to read the entire blog post. The work Adam did (with some Processing help from dad Ian) was simply amazing. He even mocked up the system with the help of Lego bricks to help visualize the solution.

Here’s the third episode of MAKE‘s podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I’ll interview one of the makers featured in the magazine.

Our maker this week is Larry Cotton, a long time contributor to MAKE. Larry’s a retired engineer and part-time math teacher who lives in New Bern, NC, and likes to listen to, write, and play anything musical. I talked to him about his LED Paper Cutter, Rok-Bak Chair, Spin the Birdie rotating bird feeder, Camp Stove Coffee Roaster, and his project in the current issue of MAKE, a sturdy, multi-position iPad stand called the iStand.

And, at the beginning of the episode, Makezine.com editor-in-chief Gareth Branwyn shares news of some cool things happening on the site.

When Steve Hoefer sent in his prototype of the Tacit haptic wrist rangefinder, we had a field day with it taking turns walking around MAKE headquarters with our eyes closed. Using it is super intuitive: with your hand extended, the servos vibrate as you get closer to an object, like a wall, and alert you to stop or change route. The closer the object, the greater pressure Tacit puts on your wrist. Steve wrote up the project for us and it appears on the pages of the current issue, MAKE Volume 29, a perfect fit for the DIY Superhuman theme.

The best part of Steve’s intro is when he talks about the first version of Tacit he made:

My first version of Tacit was a headband with vibration motors that ran faster when objects came closer. But this design had a distracting “mad science” look, and most obstacles, like furniture, are below head level. I also found that motors vibrating against your skull will quickly drive you insane. I realized that it was my own sighted prejudice to want to attach vision-simulating sensors to the head. The hand is more directable and useful, and putting a device on the back of the wrist leaves the fingers free.

Here’s Steve describing the deets of how Tacit works:

We’ve shared the full build instructions with you on Make: Projects so you can get started right away. To tap more of your Superhuman potential, pick up a copy of Volume 29, on newsstands now.

From the pages of MAKE Volume 29:

We have the technology (to quote The Six Million Dollar Man), but commercial tools for exploring, assisting, and augmenting our bodies really can approach a price tag of $6 million. Medical and assistive tech manufacturers must pay not just for R&D, but for expensive clinical trials, regulatory compliance, and liability — and doesn’t help with low pricing that these devices are typically paid for through insurance, rather than purchased directly. But many gadgets that restore people’s abilities or enable new “superpowers” are surprisingly easy to make, and for tiny fractions of the costs of off-the-shelf equivalents. MAKE Volume 29, the “DIY Superhuman” issue, explains how.

BUY OR SUBSCRIBE!