hack:planet

[Kevin Osborn] is making it a bit easier for young programmers to write programs that interact with the physical world. The device he’s holding in the picture is an Arduino based accelerometer and distance sensor meant for the Scratch language.

Scratch is a programming language developed at MIT. It has kids in mind, and focuses on graphical building blocks. This can make it quite a bit easier to introduce youngsters to programming concepts without the roadblocks and gotchas that come with learning syntax.

As you can see in the clip after the break, [Kevin's] Arduino sketch includes hooks that automatically pull the accelerometer and distance data into the Scratch environment. We figure his example provides everything you need to get just about any type of sensor up and running, be it a magnetometer or LDR (both of which would make a nice burglar-alarm type project). Give it a try with your own hardware and see what you can accomplish.

Getting the motorized mushroom ready for action!

I’ve recently had success in making a conductive ink using a fine copper powder suspended in an acrylic airbrush medium. This paper on conductive epoxies was really the key to getting this ink working.

The paper shows that etching the metal filler slightly before mixing it with the binder improves the conductivity of the ink. In this test I first used ammonium persulfate as the initial etching solution. After decanting off the resulting copper sulfate solution, the powder was then washed with deionized water. The wet powder was then mixed with an acrylic airbrush medium to make the resulting ink.

There is still quite a bit of experimentation to be done, but this is a very encouraging result!

If you are interested in conductive inks you should look at some of these projects:

• This ink made at Pumping station one that results in bulk silver
• Kit-of-No-Parts  Amazing projects
• And of course openMaterials

In this installement of Retrotechtacular we’re taking a look at Shakey, a robot developed between 1966 and 1972 at the Stanford Reserach Lab. This was a glorious time when students had long hair but still wore long sleeves and ties to do their research.

The robot is actually communicating wirelessly with the PDP-10 computer which handles the processing. No computer monitor is used for interacting with the robot. Instead, a teletype machine lets you type out your commands on paper, and the response from the machine is printed back to you on the same sheet. There’s a camera which is used for image recognition, and sensors that give feedback when the body comes in contact with an obstacle.

We’d sure love to know what kind of budget this project had, but alas we couldn’t find any info about that. You can go and see Shakey in person if you want to. This info page mentions that the machine is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Here are crates of gear ready to be picked up by Maker Faire station managers. Gareth and I are coveting the black toolboxes.

When [Vince] saw a coworker give a presentation with an iPad, he thought to himself what a tremendous waste of computing resources he was witnessing; an iPad is just as powerful as an early Cray supercomputer, and displaying slides isn’t a computationally intensive task. We’re assuming [Vince]‘s train of thought went off the rails at that point, because he came up with a neat way to give a presentation with an Apple ][.

To get his slides onto his Apple ][, [Vince] created a tool to convert the text and images for a presentation to an Applesoft BASIC program. Yes, six-color images are supported in a wonderful 280×192 resolution. The presentation was transferred onto a CompactFlash card and loaded onto the Apple with the help of a CFFA card, making it much faster to load images during the presentation than a 5.25″ disk would allow.

Of course, after the presentation some of [Vince]‘s coworkers wanted to play Oregon Trail, a request easily handled by the voluminous CF card loaded with Apple ][ programs. You can check out video demo/walkthrough of his presentation after the break.

Learn to convert SMT LEDs into sewable sequins of light in this video tutorial. Video on YouTube (please subscribe to our channel!) and Vimeo.

In addition to the following supplies, you’ll need some tiny silver beads from your local craft or jewelry supply store:

• 3-ply conductive thread
• sewing needle
• SMT LEDs
• sewable battery holder
• CR2032 coincell battery

[Balline] really wanted to play with a hexapod but found the cost to be prohibitive. Being a mechanical engineer, he was able to fairly quickly come up with a stable 3 servo design that would allow him to experiment with the platform. He chose to use wood as the construction material to help reduce costs even more.  As you can see in the video after the break, his design gets around fairly well.  His cost for the whole thing, including the 3 servos, the basic stamp hobby board, the recycled batteries, and the frame, was under $100.

This is a great system to start with, though he unfairly compares the cost to the dancing ones he had seen in the past. C’mon, your bot ain’t no [Lou Vega]. It is still pretty cool though.

ArcAttack! does some amazing experiments with kids at Maker Education Day today.

There will be a lot of people showing off their 3D printers at the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, including Jeffrey Lipton representing Cornell’s venerable Fab@Home project. We previously posted about some of the food printing exploits of the Cornell Creative Machines Lab on the CRAFT blog last year. Food is just one application for the dual syringe head on the Fab@Home Model 2.

Collect them all!

If you’re planning a build that communicates wirelessly to that ‘Internet of things’ we’ve been hearing about, you might want to check out the Electric Imp. This tiny little card connects your project to the Internet without all the hassle of configuring an embedded wireless device.

Inside the Electric Imp is a good bit of hardware: an ARM CortexM3, and an 802.11b/g/n wi-fi module that will connect to your wireless network automatically. There are also a few pins left over for serial, I2C, SPI and PWM applications.

Instead of manually configuring the DNS and WPA encryption, the Electric Imp does all of this automatically. We have no idea how the Electric Imp configures itself, but we’d bet it’s something along the lines of plugging the SD card-sized Imp into a computer and piggybacking off the computer’s credentials. The Imp also uses a cloud service, but we’ll bet once Imps are out in the wild, you’ll be able to use them with your own network.

The Electric Imp card itself will sell for about $25, but there are also dev kits to turn the Imp into an Arduino-compatible board. If everything goes as planned, the Imp will be released sometime this summer; we’ll probably see a few Electric Imp projects finished before August.

Haris Andrianakis writes in:

Hello, I had send you before my new project, a six IV-11 vfd tube clock. Today I just finished a homemade wooden case for it. If you want you can see some photos on my photo stream. Also the photos have been added at the end of the clock’s article.

Beautiful work!

Cat Litter Trap by Triskite

It’s a testament to the wonders of 3D design and MakerBotting that a 3D printer is just so dang useful.  You can use it to whip up a toy, broken latch, and now… keep kitty litter in it’s proper place.

It may seem like a small matter, but it’s never a good thing to see kitty litter outside of a kitty litter box.  Thingiverse citizen Triskite’s cat litter trap takes care of this problem with aplomb.  While many kitty litter boxes even include similar litter traps, not all of them do.  This is such a simple and useful modification to a litter box or home that no cat lover should do without it to keep the rest of their home free of pesky pet particles.

Cat Litter Trap by Triskite

Porous stepping platform to provide a barrier + litter trap between a cat litter box and the rest of the house...

This thing brought to you by

A lot of 3D printing and a many servo motors went into this snake-like robot, and it’s only about half of what [Toby Baumgartner] plans to accomplish. In this orientation the snake is rolled into a circle, and apparently some special movements in the segments allow it to roll around like this. He compares it to a tank tread without the tank attached to it. Notice that each link is rounded on the outside. When the snake opens itself up, the toothed inside of the links contacts the ground for added traction.

It looks like eventually the larger link at the bottom will be about three times as wide. This will make room for him to mount a second ring of links. The idea is that the larger link will act as the body and this can unfold itself into a quaruped. Motors that allow the segments to pivot side to side would make it something like a four-legged spider bot.

Tested takes you inside Adam Savage’s man cave where he keeps amazing movie props and collectibles, as well as works on his own projects. Today, Adam tells the story of his Zorg Industries ZF-1 replica from The Fifth Element, which he’s been working on for over 13 years.

3D printed knuckleduster phone case on Instructables:

Talking on your cell phone can be a dangerous affair. Better arm yourself with some kind of defence in case someone tried to tangle with you while you’re gabbing away. What better way than to combine a knuckleduster with a phone case! You may have seen these neat “knuckle” iPhone cases, which is an iPhone case within a knuckleduster. However I wasn’t a fan of the $99 price tag, so I decided to make my own. 

I have zero experience with any type of 3D modeling software. So, you can understand my apprehension when I wanted to make my own custom 3D printed object. Luckily there was a very detailed Instructable already written on how to make your own action figure that outlined the process, showing that mashing up existing 3D models is easy. Making my own custom 3D model was so simple I  was able to make my model in about an hour on the computer. 

This project uses the free modelling tools Netfabb, and MeshMixer. I printed my model through another service, but there’s currently an offer through Instructables to print a model for free! You could make your own for almost nothing! How great is that?!

We’re used to [Sprite_TM] rolling out his own hacks hot on the heels of new concepts. Now we’re glad to see that [Jeff Ledger] is doing the same thing here. He was inspired by a Kickstarter project which vows to let you use fruit, clay, and a number of other common (but weird for this use) substances to interface with electronic projects. The mess you see above is the Bananaphone, a synthesizer played with touch sensitive bananas. Think of them as keys on a piano.

The interface works by measuring R/C decay. Each banana is connected to its own input pin on the Propeller board. The capacitance of the bananas rise when you touch them, and this results in a longer R/C decay measurement. Calibrate the target decay period, and you’ve got a reliable capacitive touch sensor which also happens to be delicious. Check out the results which [Jeff] achieves in the video after the break.

Aw hell yeah, Bananaphone!

I was recently inspired by a Kickstart project which used Bananas as sensors to control a video game on a PC.  I’ve done some video game controls using the Propeller in the past, but I thought this would make an interesting synthesizer project.

Parallax Propeller Quickstart USB Development Board. The QuickStart is an evaluation board for the 8-Core Parallax Propeller. As an open-source reference design the QuickStart board provides basic Propeller circuitry. Developers may use our PCB layout files as their own to speed their project towards completion. As a project board the QuickStart is fully expandable and provides unimpeded access to all I/O pins through an expansion header but includes some button inputs and LEDs to demonstrate programming. With USB power and a selection of QuickStart Project examples it’s also the fastest way to get up and running.

Examples at Parallax Semiconductor:

• QuickStart 1: Comparison of Programming Tools
• QuickStart 2: Propeller Programming First Steps
• QuickStart 3: Introduction to Spin Objects
• QuickStart 4: Common Methods Found in Objects
• QuickStart 5: Multiple Cogs
• QuickStart 6: Using the Parallax Serial Terminal

Features:

• Open hardware reference design through our Altium and DipTrace PCB layout files (more export options may be possible)
• Bus-powered USB coupled with 3.3V regulator for 500 mA
• 5 mHz cyrstal on board may be disabled by removing SMT jumper, allowing replacement with external through-hole crystal
• 64KB EEPROM (32K for P8X32A program, 32K for general-purpose use)
• External brownout reset may be installed by removing SMT jumper
• (8) blue LEDs on P16-P23
• (8) resistive touch-buttons on P0-P7
• Pads for sigma-delta A/D circuitry (two resistors and two capacitors, both 0603) for using the Sigma-Delta A/D AppNote
• Expansion header provides access to Vss, Vdd, 32 I/O pins (28 for any use, 2 are I²C bus, and two are optional Tx/Rx if connected to USB power)
• Measures 2″ x 3″ (5.1 cm x 7.6 cm)

This board doesn’t come with a mini-B USB cable or bumpers, but we stock them in the shop so you may want to pick those up.

In stock and Propelling now!

[Craig's] color clock really came together quite nicely. The majority of the body is acrylic, with two large clear squares and a pair of colored discs. All are held in place by a ring of hardware with spacers in them, and the RGB LED strip that is used to display time and date wraps around those spacers. This hides the components in the center, with a USB cord connecting to the Arduino compatible board to power the device.

Hours are displayed in red, with minutes shown in green, and blue used as a background color. In the center you can see one of two red LEDs which alternate like a pendulum to mark the passing seconds. There are timed events every ten , fifteen, and thirty minute. At the fifteen minute mark the clock switches to display the date. The other two events are animations to keep things interesting. All of the settings for the clock are accessed using just two momentary push buttons mounted on the back of the clock.

RobotGrrl writes:

Meet the newest addition to the flock of RoboBrrds at Maker Faire: RoboBrrd Phoenix! If you are going to Maker Faire, be sure to see it in person at my RoboBrrd table (located with the other robot tables)! Read on for a few more sneak peek photos…

Here you can see where the controller board can fit inside of the RoboBrrd. The Diavolino matches the colour theme quite well!