"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering"
REMINDER: ARRL Field Day is June 26-27th, it is a national event during which radio operators promote ham radio by setting up stations and transmitting in parking lots, open fields, etc. To celebrate, we are throwing a ham radio party where we will be making contacts, giving demos, and dancing. Remember, hams were some of the original hackers.
Preparty Class: 6pm-8pm: Learn to Solder by Building an Arduino Morse Code Oscillator, cost $90, register http://hamsolder.eventbrite.com/
Demos: 8:00pm – 1am: Transmitting on the HF Bands TBD: Talking to Satellites 8:30pm: Old School Radio Goes New School Digital 9:15pm: Scanning Fun, listening on local fire departments, police departments, zoos, parks, lifeguards, and airport frequencies 10:00pm: Powering a Lightbulb with Radio Waves Late Evening: Ham Radio Dance Party, Dj Eric Beug will remix beats live out of transmissions made by ham radio operators sitting on the stage
Sorry kids, unfortunately for insurance reasons we can only allow guests ages 18+ and NYC Resistor is not a handicap accessible space.
Adafruit’s Ice Tube Clock Kit is just one of the prizes up for grabs. In honor to Field Day, Adafruit will be offering a 10% discount on their kits from June 26-27 for all licensed hams. Just enter code “HAMS” at check out and in the comments include your call sign.
Ever get a sunburn? Prefer to avoid them in the future? Mr. Burns combines information about your skin type and any sunscreen you’re wearing with a realtime UV light measurement to let you know before the burn sets it!
Throughout recorded history most people who have wanted a household article have bought or bartered it from someone else – in past times an artisan or trader, more recently a seller of mass-produced products. With few exceptions (such as some clothing) it is rare that any of us make such articles for ourselves these days. That may soon change. Thirty years ago only dedicated enthusiasts would print their own photographs or edit and reproduce their own newsletters. The advent of the home computer, and in particular of low-cost high-quality printers, has now made such things simple and commonplace. Recent developments in producing affordable and hobbyist-friendly printers that can reproduce three-dimensional rather than just flat objects may mean that printing a toast-rack or a comb becomes as easy as printing a birthday card.
Any lawyer familiar with copyright and trade mark law can see, however, that printing one’s own birthday cards could, depending on the source and nature of the images used, infringe a number of intellectual property (IP) rights. Tempting as it may be to copy and use a picture of a well-known cartoon character, the resulting cards would very likely be an infringement of the copyright and perhaps trade marks owned by the relevant rights holder. But what if someone uses a printer capable of producing a mobile phone cover bearing such an image? Or reproducing a distinctively-styled piece of kitchenware? What about printing out a spare wing-mirror mount for your car? Do these uses infringe IP rights?
In the first part of this paper, we review the history of 3D printing and describe recent developments, including a project initiated by one of the authors to bring such printers into the home. We then examine the IP implications of personal 3D printing with particular reference to the bundle of rights that would typically be associated with a product that might be copied.
I had great fun working on a cool Multimeter Clock project which got picked up by Design News for their Gadget Freak series. I thought it would be cool to have a clock that looks like an old Simpson 260 multimeter. The clock consists of three multimeters, the first meter displays hours, the second displays minutes and the last displays seconds. A 16F628A PIC microcontroller keeps track of time and outputs a calculated current to each meter to display the current time.
Jeri Ellsworth’s attempt at making electroluminescent phosphor, yields crystals that emit light when crushed. Smash-Glow Crystals or Triboluminescence.
When you think – “DIY electronics”, one of the first images that likely comes to mind is a bunch of parts and wire soldered to a standard piece of perforated circuit board – and that makes sense. Perfboard is super-versatile – essentially it’s just a grid of potential solder-point connections. You can trim it down to just the size you need – or leave extra space for future enhancements … or revisions, if need be.
An ATTiny2313 powers this night light, driving multicolor LEDs diffused by ping-pong balls. nuumio writes:
Geir’s RGB night light was such an inspiration I just had to make my own. Instead of Picaxes I decided to use ATTiny 2313. At first I tried to program it with C but I ran to some “differences of opinions” with gcc when I tried to assign dedicated registers to variables holding duty cycle values (for speed optimizations). After some struggling I gave up and coded the whole thing in AVR assembly. I was quite surprised how easy it was after all. It took me about one weekend and I got first versions running nicely.
With every thing Mark Suppes fixes, another thing breaks. We’re in his workshop, and he’s hunched over, tightening the bolts on a squat tubular machine. This is the fusion reactor Suppes built, and it’s not working. Suppes never slows down, moving from one problem to the next with an irrepressible smile. The workshop is a few hundred square feet sub-let from a roboticist friend in a warehouse one floor above a hassidic clothing factory near Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. “I’m starting from nothing, I mean nothing,” says Suppes, “There’s no reason I should be doing this. It’s ridiculous on all levels.” What he’s doing is building a Bussard Polywell fusion reactor.
I’ve been waiting to use that title for a long time. Building the ‘blades has been quite an exercise in unfamiliar territory. First, the skates will be using the Maxon DEC modules, which are essentially experimental with respect to the project, me having seen no other vehicles that use them (seriously – all other Google results seem to just be press releases). Having access to the DEC modules was the impetus behind me finally learning PCB design and layout. I just discovered the magic that is force-sensing resistors and how they can be used as an analog throttle. And now, as the final and pivotal step in closing the proverbial control loop of the Deathblades, I shall link the throttle with the DECs using XBee radio modules.
Deathblades, wireless & Arduino controlled motorized milled metal Rollerblades.
Hand planers, telescopes, and electric guitars, oh my! The Flea at the MIT is held at the outdoor lot at the corner of Albany and Main streets in Cambridge on the third Sunday of the month, April to October. Our intrepid photographer Erik Jacobs set up his portable photo booth at the market to snap shots of the buyers and sellers and ask about their wares.
A substantial amount of cruft we have at adafruit came from the MIT flea!
Ever since we taught them how to play, the machines have been trying to beat us at chess — and succeeding. But where it took a closet-sized computer running a complicated computer program to beat Garry Kasparov and claim chess dominance for the machines, child’s toys are now aligning to make you wish you hadn’t ever moved your queen’s bishop. “Monster Chess” was built from 100,000 Lego pieces and plays an autonomous game of chess on a 156-square-foot board, with each massive robotic piece gliding around the board autonomously.
Anyone else completely creeped out by the Knight pieces?
The Apple A4 discussion kicked off in earnest when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad on January 27. In an infamous series of slides tracing the roots of Apple back to the two Steves in his garage, Jobs introduced the Apple A4 processor that powers the iPad, operating at a clock frequency of 1GHz.
The first question was whether the A4 could be the first offspring spawned by Apple’s April 2008 acquisition of PA Semi. However, it seemed there was not enough time for a brand new design. Jon Stokes provided an interesting early insight into the CPU-GPU combination and the potential role of PA Semi.
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