Now here are some wedding vows that the Adafruit crowd can get behind — soldering a project together that lights up to say “I DO” as a metaphor for the marriage contract. Fascinating! From Bill Porter’s blog:
When it came time for Mara and I to draft our wedding ceremony we pondered how we could incorporate an element from our theme. We had 4 days to go and only some vague ideas. Mara bought some wood letters to spell out ‘I Do’ and wanted to use them in the ceremony. We also joked about using a soldering iron during the ceremony; but how could we do it tastefully? Then it hit us, a common wedding ceremony know as the “Fishermen’s Knot” could be reworded for something a little more geeky. Yes, we really did solder some wires together in the middle of our wedding, with a Weller soldering iron Mara bought me for a past birthday no less. And you won’t believe what PCBs came in handy for the build…
Ok, this post will be short because this project was thrown together 4 days before the wedding and we didn’t have time to stop and document the steps. We were set to get married and still had a lot to do, as evident by the mini-maker space we created in my parents house (see below).
Mara bought the letters at a local hobby store. I sketched out a rough outline of evenly spaced LEDs and went to work creating the holes with a drill press. A coat of blank paint and then my best man Dan went to work soldering wires to all those LEDs. Next we had to figured out a way to control those LEDs. In a pleasant case of coincidence, the boards I hijacked to ask my bride to marry me 2 years ago were designed to control large numbers of LEDs. Yes, the boards that asked “Mara Will You Marry Me?” were used to run letters that said ‘I Do’ during our wedding ceremony.
What’s the most difficult thing you did in the last year? Now stop. Before you answer, can it compare to creating a full-fledged indie game—slated to be approved on Steam—created entirely with QBASIC? Probably not. QBASIC is a software interpreter for the BASIC programming language that showed up in 1991, and basic it is.
“It would be amazing for the game development community,” said McDonald when asked about Black Annex’s potential ascension to Steam. “It would show that even old, abandoned tools and the most basic pieces of software can still be put in the hands of someone who wants to create their dream and result in beautiful things happening.”
A couple more fun facts about the game:
• Black Annex requires at least a 2.6GHz processor due to the scope of the project and the unoptimized multi-dimensional arrays.
• The game’s catchy tune is by Abducted by Sharks
• It will support mods (meaning customized missions, levels, etc.)
• The game is a 12000 line .bas (BASIC) file. Yeesh!
The unique truck we gonna tell you about appeared in 1949. People still remembered about severe war time when freighters had to perform their tasks with a shortage of liquid fuel – gasoline. Partially the problem was solved by gas-producer vehicles – heavy and demanding – they allowed to get gas for powering engines. However such vehicles were not efficient enough and engineers thought about steamers which were used widely abroad in the 1920-40s.
A Red Cross website has been established to help people find loved ones in the area. “Individuals can register themselves as safe or search for loved ones,” Massachusetts’ emergency management agency says. wo dead, 22 injured in apparent bombings near finish line of Boston Marathon, Boston police say…
Bitcoin, our favorite untethered internet currency, has been gaining fame and notoriety with its wild ride up and down in value over the past few weeks and the Winklevoss twin’s much-discussed investment in the currency…but Paul Krugman of the NYTimes dismisses any idea that Bitcoin could supersede any government-backed currency or even gold or silver, because, as he explains, Bitcoin is the ultimate fiat currency, backed by absolutely nothing except the faith of those who use it:
“We have elected,” declared Tyler Winklevoss recently, “to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”
The similarity to goldbug rhetoric isn’t a coincidence, since goldbugs and bitcoin enthusiasts — bitbugs? — tend to share both libertarian politics and the belief that governments are vastly abusing their power to print money. At the same time, it’s very peculiar, since bitcoins are in a sense the ultimate fiat currency, with a value conjured out of thin air. Gold’s value comes in part because it has nonmonetary uses, such as filling teeth and making jewelry; paper currencies have value because they’re backed by the power of the state, which defines them as legal tender and accepts them as payment for taxes. Bitcoins, however, derive their value, if any, purely from self-fulfilling prophecy, the belief that other people will accept them as payment.
…Goldbugs and bitbugs alike seem to long for a pristine monetary standard, untouched by human frailty. But that’s an impossible dream. Money is, as Paul Samuelson once declared, a “social contrivance,” not something that stands outside society. Even when people relied on gold and silver coins, what made those coins useful wasn’t the precious metals they contained, it was the expectation that other people would accept them as payment.
Noted hacker and innovator Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a project manager for cyber security research at DARPA for the past three years- will be setting up shop in the Googleplex, according to a post on his Twitter feed.
Zatko announced that he would be joining Google, after three years heading up DARPA’s cyber security initiatives.
Zatko, who earned fame as a founding member of the early 1990s Boston-area hacker confab The L0pht and later as a division scientist at government contractor BBN Technologies, announced his departure from DARPA following a three-year stint as a Program Manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office on Friday. “Given what we all pulled off within the USG, let’s see if it can be done even better from outside. Goodbye DARPA, hello Google!” he Tweeted.
Apple has announced that it’s switching from its long-standing store-designer firms eight inc and bohlin cywinski jackson in favor of the larger and slicker foster and partners, known for, among other projects, the Hearst Tower in New York City and other large-scale glass-and-steel geometries in far-flung oil-rich countries like the Palace of of Peace and Reconciliation (in Kazakhstan) and the Blue City (in the Sultanate of Oman). After a long-time collaboration on the new Apple campus, Foster + Partners was selected to design all future stores. Let your imaginations run wild.
via designboom.
…if a company copied the Mac ROM into their computer, he would like to be able to do a demo during the trial, where he could type a few keystokes into an unmodified infringing machine, and have a large “Stolen From Apple” icon appear on its screen. The routines and data to accomplish that would have to be incorporated into our ROM in a stealthy fashion, so the cloners wouldn’t know how to find or remove it.
While not “3D printing” as much as “3D,” this teardown of a developers Oculus Rift kit is nonetheless equally exciting — have yesterdays’ dreams of virtual reality headsets finally been solved for the contemporary world? Check out the iFixit Oculus Rift Teardown!
Let’s face it, the year is 2013. Where are our flying cars? Why isn’t deep space travel a thing yet? Why hasn’t virtual reality become, well, reality? The Oculus Rift seeks to fill that lack of virtual reality in our lives. Still in its early developmental stage, the Oculus Rift promises to deliver VR gaming to the yearning public. Join us as we take a peek inside the Oculus Rift and its hardware.
Step 1 — Oculus Rift Teardown
Before we begin, we want to make it clear that this is the developer edition of the Oculus Rift, included in the developer kit. It is essentially an early prototype of the consumer version.
While not much is known in terms of tech specs, here’s what we’ve gathered so far:
Resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, with 640 x 800 per eye.
Horizontal Field of View greater than 90 degrees.
Diagonal Field of View greater than 110 degrees.
Head tracking accomplished with 1000 Hz absolute 9DOF orientation sensor (includes gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer).
Currently available for PC only.
We also found out it comes in a handy case that holds over one billion cables/adapters (our professional estimate)….
So the concept here is pretty simple. I wanted to mount a microphone on a stick with an LED and design a circuit that would react to a large amount of noise on the microphone input (blowing) to turn off the LED.
This could easily be accomplished with a micro controller, but I thought it’d be more thrifty and challenging to do it with analog components.
“ADA 9000″ faceplate created using Adafruit 100mm Massive Arcade Button with LED and an afternoon with a laser cutter, spray paint and a few bits and bobs. Not as detailed or authentic as the HAL replica that ThinkGeek used to sell…but about $480 cheaper!
Fist bump to Amadeus Prokopiak of the Replica Prop Forum for his amazing HAL 9000 blueprint.
…yes, everything is customizable now. Even the tile patterns around your toilet. Dutch tile manufacturer mosa has launched an interactive web program that allows you to design wall patterns using their tiles:
via designboom
Our modern lives are dependent upon proprietary technology which few of us could explain let alone understand how it works.
A growing number of people are reacting to this proprietary technology by building their own devices, so called Open Source Hardware (OSHW). This project explores the application of OSHW to the design of every day objects, taking the ubiquitous vacuum cleaner as it’s subject.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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