Ben Cowell-Thomas shows off his amazing Lightplot, a 3D robotic light painting system.

Lightplot is a robotic 3D light painting system. Animation is exported from 3DS Max, and imported into the Lightplot software which then drives a robotic arm to draw the models in the air. The software also controls a DSLR camera to take long exposure photographs of each frame of animation.

The project grew from early experiments with Lego NXT and robotics. It currently comprises a custom built robotic arm controlled via Phidgets boards, which are driven by a stand alone Windows application written in C# and Microsoft .net. The exporting software is written in Maxscript within Autodesk 3DS Max.

Make sure to check out his website and watch the video of how the entire setup works.  Here is a pic of the Lightplot rig:

Really great work!  Here is another of my favorite demos:

Beautiful.

Woah. Rob Flickenger writes:

The Tesla Gun is a hand-held, battery powered lightning machine. It is a spark gap Tesla coil powered by an 18V drill battery. You pull the trigger, and lightning comes out the front.

It is functionally inferior to that of Tesla’s design in the Five Fists in a few important respects. Notably, it is a bit longer and heavier than Tesla’s own. It also cannot (yet) create an ion wind strong enough to cushion the user when leaping from a four story building.

On the other hand, my design is an improvement in two important respects: 1) It is battery powered, and 2) It actually exists.

via Geekologie

Val Head taught her first Processing workshop at HackPittsburgh, and handed out Adafruit Processing skill badges to the participants.

I had such a great time teaching my first Processing workshop this past weekend. I had a wonderful group of ten students to spend the day with and get them started on their own creative coding adventures.

We set aside the last half hour of the class as “free time” for everyone to make something on their own. (An idea I borrowed from Seb’s CreativeJS training.) It was amazing to see what the class came up with even in such a short time. Most of them had never even opened Processing or done any kind of programming before. That made it even more impressive!

Pick up the Processing badge or one of our many other skill badges here.

PaulMakesThings writes:

I created this as a simple project for those just starting out in robotics. It is relatively inexpensive, requires minimal tools and is easy to build. Once finished you have an expandable robotic platform that fits in the palm of your hand and can be easily programmed in the Arduino environment.

On ch00ftech via Hackaday:

So, this is a project that was nearly a month in the making.  I set out to make a sound-reactive EL panel but found that driving EL in such a way is actually kind of difficult.  If you’ve been following the blog, I’ve been working on this project in one way or another since my transformers article, and it’s actually the reason I wrote that article.

Again, a disclaimer. There are over 8,000 words in this post that document all of my design decisions on this project.  It is not a how-to guide, but if you have some background in EE, I hope that you gain something from it.

EL materials (wire, tape, panels) are an odd bunch.  No matter where you look, EL panels seem to be always be made very cheaply and with very little documentation.  There doesn’t seem to be any “pro” version of the stuff.

So my goal with this project was to try to exert more sophisticated control over EL materials.  So far, everyone can seem to make EL blink fairly easily, but if I know my electronics, fancy gadgets don’t have blinking lights, they have pulsing lights that fade in and out gradually. This is usually because blinking a light is much simpler than dimming one.

So I want to make a dimming EL panel driver.  And what the hell, let’s make it react to sound too.

Add a little audio-reactivity to your EL projects! Video on YouTube and Vimeo.

EL Wire 6V Sound Activated Pocket Inverter. A small, portable inverter for EL wire with an audio input! This inverter has a little microphone and will light the connected EL according to the surrounding audio volume. Makes for an easy reactive project.

This inverter requires 6V input (it works great with our 4xAA battery holder) and it can drive 2-3 meters (7 to 10 feet) of our high-brightness EL wire OR 1 meter (3 feet) of EL tape OR a 10cmx10cm piece of EL panel continuously for about 21 hours (off of 4xAAs).

There is a switch for selecting steady/sound/off modes – steady is always on. Comes with a single 2.5mm pitch female JST connectors, standard for all the EL wire and tape we carry. Theres also two power wires, youll need to connect these to a 6VDC power source.

You can plug any of our EL wire/tape into this inverter directly. To connect a raw piece EL wire to this, youll want a male connector wire

The EL inverter requires a load to stabilize itself. Do not run the inverter without at least 2 ft of EL wire attached! Otherwise the inverter can spike and damage itself

Like all inverters weve used, the 2000 Hz oscillation is slightly audible. To reduce the squeaking, we suggest opening up the case padding it with thick foam tape/weatherstripping. Squirting some hot glue around the capacitors may also help. We managed to get it silent this way.

Check out our EL TRON bag tutorial for ideas, as well as the EL wire couch video!

Soldering to raw EL wire is a little tricky but luckily we wrote a detailed step-by-step tutorial! The tutorial also covers a lot of information about EL and how it works.

In stock and shipping now.

Ask an Engineer 5/12/2012 – Video on YouTube – subscribe to our channel! Also on Vimeo.

Can’t wait to see this project at the Maker Faire this weekend!

This is my Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 project, the Arduino GRANDE. It is a fully functional Arduino that is about six times larger than real life. Come hear all about it at the Maker Faire this coming weekend, May 19th and 20th. I’ll be doing talks and demos on Saturday. http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/8185

New Products 5/12/2012 – Video on YouTube – subscribe to our channel! Also on Vimeo.

Digital cameras are everywhere, and are such a common everyday item, but most of us don’t really know how they are able to take and store a picture in such amazing detail.  EngineerGuy to the rescue.  Bill Hammock, better known as EngineerGuy on the MAKE blog, gives us a detailed rundown of how the CCD in our digital cameras work.  The video is a great introduction to Bill’s new book, Eight Amazing Engineering Stories: Using the Elements to Create Extraordinary Technologies.

Eight Amazing Engineering Stories reveals the stories behind how engineers use specific elements to create the material world around us. In eight chapters, the EngineerGuy team exposes the magnificence of the innovation and engineering of digital camera imagers, tiny accelerometers, atomic clocks, enriched uranium, batteries, microwave ovens, lasers, and anodized metals. In addition, short primers cover the scientific principles underlying the engineering, including waves, nuclear structure, and electronic transitions. “In Depth” sections cover entropy, semiconductors, and the mathematics of capacitors. Eight Amazing Engineering Stories forms the basis of the fourth series of EngineerGuy videos found on-line.

The video is great, and the book looks fantastic.  Find out more information about the book, and where you can buy it here.

Source: hackaday.com

Kirsta Klein at Rio Grande writes:

Recently our website underwent a complete makeover, and one of the coolest updates, in my opinion, are the product review tabs! Did I mention that I make some of this stuff? That means that you, the customer, have a direct line to me, the operator. Your product reviews are a powerful source of information! If the ball on the ball head pin you purchased is not round, I want to know about it. I want to know if my bezel cups are off-center. And please let me know if my crimps are cracking.

Like most manufacturers, we set quality standards that we strive to adhere to. These standards vary from product to product, alloy to alloy, and machine by machine, but the following example shows how I quality-check my snap set settings.

The viewer you see above is called an optical comparator, and it’s totally cool! See how one prong leg in the round viewer is a tiny bit taller than the other? What you’re seeing is a .001 difference in height. Whew – this is what we’d consider an acceptable variation. Any more difference than that and this piece would be scrapped. What’s most important is that the two curvatures are parallel to one another.

We get our jewelry supplies from these folks, they’re solar powered and we’re happy to see a look behind the scenes on their blog!

by Florian Gassmann and Andreas Muxel.

The installation „Supercharge Momentum“ is composed of varying surfaces which are oriented in the three dimensional space. The basic logic of the structure consists of replicas of the defining spatial elements.

Through integrated controllable light the different spatial patterns get illuminated indirectly. The time interval of the transmitted light pulses cause a constant reinterpretation of the spatial moments by the observer. Sound patterns which are sent synchronously into the structure alter the logic of the different patterns of light rushing to open and close the temporary window of perception.

I’ve been coming across a lot of installations like this recently — works in which smaller pieces of a larger space are individually defined in some way (usually with light or sound). Each smaller space exists on it’s own, and they are then combined in some sequence to form a whole. Even when things are moving as fast as this is, you get a sense of spatial superposition — summing the individual nodes to characterize the entire system.

Interesting news from Jameco:

ClubJameco.com is our new website where you can turn your bright ideas and electronics skills into cash.

Club JamecoIt couldn’t be easier:

1. Come up with a great electronics project

2. Identify the components for the kit

3. Write step-by-step instructions

That’s it! Jameco will source it, build it and sell it… and pay you a royalty on every sale!

Tagstand, a startup which helps companies integrate NFC tags into products and events, threw a massive cocktail party in New York to show off their capabilities.  While details of the tech are sparse, from the picture above, it appears that Tagstand used the Adafruit PN532 NFC/RFID controller breakout board powered by an Arduino.

From a writeup of the event on TechCrunch:

[Tagstand] will see its technology used to enable some nifty actions for the 3,500 guests, like tapping to tweet, posting pictures to Facebook and registering “likes” for the cocktails they’re drinking. Sounds like (kind of geeky) fun!

The event in question is New York’s big cocktail party for the opening night Gala at The New York Public Library, which is offering up 30,000 different cocktails, created by over 150 different bartenders. (Now you can see why “liking” a particular cocktail might come in handy – that’s a lot to remember.) In fact, after a guest likes a cocktail, they’ll be able to receive the drink recipe via a personalized email courtesy of foodie guide Tasting Table.

Pick up the Adafruit PN532 NFC/RFID controller breakout board here, or if you prefer, an Arduino Shield version here.

I swung by the ITP show last night, you still have one more night to check it out if you’re in NYC! Above: Etch-a-Sketch 3.0 by Yelizaveta Lokshina

ITP Spring Show 2012
Monday, May 14, 2012 – Tuesday, May 15, 2011
5pm – 9pm on Monday, 4pm – 8pm on Tuesday (Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.)
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York

Tornado Alley by Ben Light

Rºad’io’’ by Lia Martinez and Mercedes Blasco

Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson

Great Kickstarter project for high resolution 3D printing.

Right from the beginning I wanted the B9Creator to be different. Anodized aluminum construction, stainless steel hardware, many thoughtful features that enhance normal operation… all these things set the B9Creator apart from the DIY 3D Printer herd. But when it comes to printing complex, detailed and fragile objects, this is where the B9Creator really shines bright!

DIY 3D Printers based upon the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) concept simply can not match the higher resolution capability of the B9Creator.  We utilize a powerful Deformable Mirror Device (DMD) projector to shine a 1024 x 768 pixel image onto a layer of photo-initiated polymer resin.  The result is a quick solid cure of the entire layer in one operation.  The layer thickness is typically 100 microns but your model can be sliced even thinner if you need even higher resolution.  Note that 100 microns is .1 mm or about 0.004″

Back the B9Creator on Kickstarter here.

sean-h on Instructables made this impressive Sam Flynn costume from Tron Legacy using all sorts of EL goodies, and documented the build quite nicely.

Electroluminescent (EL) Tape/Strip Starter Packs! – 100cm – White, Green, Blue, Aqua and Red. Get glowing in seconds with our Electroluminescent (EL) Tape Starter Pack! This pack contains everything you need for your first EL tape project, even the batteries.

Includes:

• 1 meter long x 1 cm wide EL tape strip
• Portable 4xAAA inverter powerful enough to drive a full meter of strip
• 4 x AAA alkaline batteries to power the inverter and tape for 10 hours

Electroluminescent (EL) Tape/Strip Starter Packs! – 100cm – White Electroluminescent (EL) Tape/Strip Starter Packs! – 100cm – Green Electroluminescent (EL) Tape/Strip Starter Packs! – 100cm – Blue Electroluminescent (EL) Tape/Strip Starter Packs! – 100cm – Aqua Electroluminescent (EL) Tape/Strip Starter Packs! – 100cm – Red

Kinetic Creatures on Kickstarter via Cool Hunting:

Kinetic Creatures are a set of three walking cardboard animal sculptures. The Creatures, Elly the elephant, Rory the rhino, and Geno the giraffe, are each made up of cardboard pieces that you assemble using tabs-and-slots. By turning the wire handle the creatures come alive with a simple mechanical motion.

via who killed bambi?

Please smile is an exhibit involving five robotic skeleton arms that change their gestures depending on a viewer’s facial expressions.  It consists of a microcontroller, a camera, a computer, five external power supplies, and five plastic skeleton arms, each with four motors.  It incorporated elements from mechanical engineering, computer vision perception to serve artistic expression with a robot.

Audiences interact with “Please smile” in three different ways. When no human falls within the view of the camera, the five robotic skeleton arms choose the default position, which is bending their elbows and wrists near the wall. When a human steps within the view of the camera, the arms point at the human and follow his/her movements. Then when someone smiles in front of it, the five arms wave their hands. Through artwork such as “Please smile,” I would like to foster positive audience behaviors.

Friend of Adafruit, George Graves, showed off his DIY Constant Current Dummy Load design on the forums.  The design is based off of the EEVblog design shown on episode #102.  The purpose of the device is for when you need a constant load to test things like power supplies, or batteries.  No matter what the voltage coming out of the power supply, the constant current dummy load will adjust automatically to provide the same amount of current.

George has a whole lot more pictures in the forum, as well as links to his design files.

Jean Wlodarski writes:

I just finished developing my USB temperature logger and shot a video showing how it works. Here are the key figures:

• Up to two months of logging with a single coin cell battery.
• 30 000 timestamped temperature measurements.
• Logging period from every 5 seconds to every 24 hours.
• 0.5°C accuracy, 0.06°C resolution.
• No driver, no software and no admin rights needed!
• Compatible with any computer with USB port.
• Automatic time synchronization with the computer.
• Low cost design.

When plugged to a computer’s USB port, the logger appears as a normal USB drive. The temperature logging period is changed by editing a config.txt file. When this file is saved, the logger reads the periodicity (in seconds), synchronizes its clock to the computer’s date and time and starts to flash the LED to indicate it’s ready to log. Once removed from USB, the logging is started by pushing the button (the LED blinks three times). For every temperature measurement, the LED flashes.

via Hackaday

If you’re looking for data logging for your Arduino…

Adafruit Data logging shield for Arduino – v1.0 – Here’s a handy Arduino shield: we’ve had a lot of people looking for a dedicated and well-designed data logging shield. We worked hard to engineer an inexpensive but well-rounded design. Not only is it easy to assemble and customize, it also comes with great documentation and libraries.

You can get going quickly – saving data to files on any FAT16 or FAT32 formatted SD card, to be read by any plotting, spreadsheet or analysis program. We even have a tutorial on how to use two free software programs to plot your data The included Real Time Clock timestamps all your data with the current time, so that you know precisely what happened when!

Please note that this item does not come with an Arduino (you’ll need one to use with the shield), or an SD card. It does come with the RTC battery, however. The kit is un-assembled, You’ll need some basic soldering skills to put it together, but even if you don’t have much experience you can get it done in under 1 hour.

• SD card interface works with FAT16 or FAT32 formatted cards. 3.3v level shifter circuitry prevents damage to your SD card
• Real time clock (RTC) keeps the time going even when the Arduino is unplugged. The battery backup lasts for years
• Included libraries and example code for both SD and RTC mean you can get going quickly
• Prototyping area for soldering connectors, circuitry or sensors.
• Onboard 3.3v regulator is both a reliable reference voltage and also reliably runs SD cards that require a lot of power to run
• An Arduino with a ’328 chip is pretty much required, you can get an upgrade chip from us if you have an older Arduino (such as NG/Diecimila)

For more information, including libraries, schematics and examples see the data logger shield webpage

Check it out at ~1:15 in the video (it goes by pretty quick). Peter Parker using the Parallax Propeller Professional Development Board (say that five times fast). Neat!

[via twitter]

Billy Keyes shows off his final project for Interactive Art and Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon University.

SketchSynth lets anyone create their own control panels with just a marker and a piece of paper. Once drawn, the controller sends Open Sound Control (OSC) messages to anything that can receive them; in this case, a simple synthesizer running in Pure Data. It’s a fun toy that also demonstrates the possibilities of adding digital interaction to sketched or otherwise non-digital interfaces.

NEW PRODUCT – Transistor Man Shirt! Did you know that inside every transistor is a little man whose job it is to watch the incoming base current and adjust the collector-emitter impedance to match the datasheet? Its true! And now you can celebrate the hard-working guy with this fabulous Transistor Man tee shirt.

The front of the shirt has the now legendary Transistor Man diagram from Horowitz & Hill’s “The Art of Electronics”.

Not only did we get a blessing to make these from Cambridge Press, we even got a scan of the original artwork transparency from Professor Hill! These are without a doubt, the coolest NPN shirts we’ve ever seen.

These shirts are directly printed onto high quality American Apparel T’s. The women’s are 100% cotton, the men’s sizes are a 50/50 poly-cotton blend. We find these shirts to be a little more expensive than the common ‘Hanes’ T’s but they’re much more comfortable and better fitting — especially the women’s sizes! All shirts are black with white ink. Please check the links above to American Apparel for detailed fitting information.

In stock and shipping now!

Online comic strip, The Oatmeal, has done a fantastic job with their long tribute to Nikola Tesla.

Geeks stay up all night disassembling the world so that they can put it back together with new features.

They tinker and fix things that aren’t broken.

Geeks abandon the world around them because they’re busy soldering together a new one.

They obsess and, in many cases, they suffer.

Over one hundred years ago, a Serbian-American inventor by the name of Nikola Tesla started fixing things that weren’t broken.

What a great intro to a well written overview of Tesla’s accomplishments.  Take some time today, and read through the whole thing.

Thursday will mark two weeks until the submission deadline for the Open Hardware Summit proposals. If you’ve got an idea for a talk, a poster (see below) or a project demo, you have until May 31st to submit it.

The Open Hardware Summit (OHS) invites submissions for the third annual summit, to be held on September 27, 2012 at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City. The Open Hardware Summit is a venue to present, discuss, and learn about open hardware of all kinds. The summit examines open hardware and its relation to other issues, such as software, design, business, law, and education. We are seeking submissions for talks, posters, and demos from individuals and groups working with open hardware and related areas. Submissions are due by May 31, 2012 BY 11:59pm (EST). Notification of accepted proposals will happen by July 8th, 2012.

Submission topics
Topics of interest for the summit include, but are not limited to:

• Digital fabrication
• DIY bio
• Soft circuits
• Wearables and fashion tech
• Quantified-self hardware
• Means of supporting collaboration and community interaction
• On demand and low volume manufacturing
• Distributed development and its relationship to physical goods
• Software design tools (CAD / CAM)
• DIY technology
• Ways to share information about hardware that’s not captured in source files
• Business models
• Competition and collaboration
• Sustainability of open hardware products (e.g. how to unmake things)
• Industrial design
• Open hardware in the enterprise
• Specific product domains: e.g. science, agriculture, communications, medicine
• Legal and intellectual property implications of open-source hardware
• Open hardware in education
• Addressing the gender imbalance in the open hardware community
• And any other topic you think relates to openness and hardware. We want to hear all about it!

This year there are three types of proposals you can submit. You can propose a talk, a poster, or a project demo. The talk concept is self-explanatory. The demo sessions are just what they sound like: show off your open-hardware project! In case you need examples, here are two from last year by RobotGrrl and Chris Novello.

New for this year is the poster presentation concept — I think this has a lot of potential for sharing great ideas that might otherwise be missed. Posters fill the gap between project demos and talks. They’re less formal than plenary talks, but more conceptual (as opposed to hands-on) than demos. They give you a chance to exhibit a project or organization that you can’t physically present or which is beyond initial hardware design but not far enough along to be an auditorium presentation. If this sounds like you, consider submitting a poster presentation!

Check out this awesome Kickstarter project by the same guys that worked with Ladyada to develop the Drawdio.  Take a MaKey MaKey controller, connect up some alligator clips to just about anything conductive, and interact with your computer and the internet.

Alligator Clip two objects to the MaKey MaKey board. For example, you and an apple.

When you touch the apple, you make a connection, and MaKey MaKey sends the computer a keyboard message. The computer just thinks MaKey MaKey is a regular keyboard (or mouse). Therefore it works with all programs and webpages, because all programs and webpages take keyboard and mouse input.

Make + Key = MaKey MaKey!

Learn more, and back the MaKey MaKey here.

Helicopter Physics – Speed Limit Light Painting via Hackaday

Educational mini UAVs badge!

Jonathan Feldman talks about the future of Open Source Hardware in a commentary for Information Week.

Those of us with gray hair remember when mainstream companies viewed open source software with extreme skepticism–that is, until it became apparent that the Internet backbone was running reliably on OSS. Now attention is turning to open source hardware.

Open source hardware? Really?

Really.

If you’ve been following the Maker Movement, you’re already in the loop. Just as many open source iterations and eyes changed the face of software, so it will go with hardware. Want to build a USB battery charger out of a mint container and other widely available components? Limor Fried (aka Lady Ada) to the rescue, with her “minty boost” USB charger.

Surely this movement is for hobbyists only, right? You don’t want to fork out $50 for a USB battery charger, so you fork out $20 for the kit and work on it with your buddies over the weekend.

Well, there’s a larger world out there. Like open source software, open source hardware started among hobbyists and will make its way into the corporation.

Great comments from Nathan Seidle and Chris Clark of Sparkfun.com.  Check out the full article here.

On Kobakant:

July 28+29 2012, 10am – 5pm, MQ, Vienna/Austria
Info and registration: office@mqw.at Location: freiraum quartier21 INTERNATIONAL

Participants will experience first hand the making of Exquisite Electronics and produce their very own piece of hand-embroidered electronic Haute Couture. The workshop will cover traditional embroidery techniques, using contemporary conductive materials, such as conductive threads, fibers, fabrics and yarns, to create highly decorative circuitry with unique functionality.

Electricity Has Expensive Taste

The workshop not only introduces a range of e-textile techniques, but also draws attention to issues surrounding electronic textiles, such as e-waste, diminishing resources, the industrialization of craftsmanship and the impacts of globalization. By raising these topics we hope to start a discussion among the makers of electronic textiles in order to project a more futuristic future vision of skilled craftsmanship as it may be applied to electronics. The workshop will last 2 or more days and will be open to the general public. A maximum of 15 participants will be able to attend the workshop, and while previous experience working with either textiles or electronics is encouraged, the workshop is open to everybody eager to learn and master a new set of skills.

100,000 LED Spheres Flowing Down a Japanese River via Colossal.

Alexander Weber over at Tinkerlog.com shares his work 3D printing a battery adapter for a Canon Powershot SX200.

Last year I bought a Canon PowerShot SX200 on ebay. I wanted to play a bit with CHDK, the Canon Hack Development Kit to make some timelapse things. Problem was, the battery would hold only up for 2 hours or so. Even worse, the camera has no power jack to attach a power supply. The solution is to buy a battery dummy that has a jack on its back. That costs like 30 euros!

3D printing to the rescue!

This is exactly what makes home 3D printers so wonderful.  Why spend $40 for an adapter, when you can make one for just a few dollars.  Make sure to read the full article, as he has lots of great information and pictures.

How a Bicycle is Made (1945)

funkyguy4000 writes in the forums:

Its been a while since I’ve posted, primarily cause I’ve been busy with finals. But in the midst of all that, my girlfriend and I made an LED dress for a fashion show that was at our university. The LEDs weren’t diffused so the light would shine on everything so it really grabbed the attention of everybody. It was run off of a 3.7v LiPo battery (which I clocked in at 4.0v).

My approach differs slightly in that I use a lookup table instead of the logarithmic formula given in the Adafruit tutorial. I didnt make any measurements, but it could very well run faster, since it doesn’t depend on a lot of complex floating-point math. In any case, Lookup tables are useful sometimes, and my example not only shows how to do a lookup, but also how to interpolate between the two closest entries to the measured value.

You will also find a helper spreadsheet that was used to create the LUT used in the sketch, along with some interesting charts that show graphically, the relationship between temperature and thermistor resistance, as well as temperature versus ADC voltage.

Check out the rest of his post in the forums, and get the updated library here.

Need to measure something damp? This epoxy-coated precision 1% 10K thermistor is an inexpensive way to measure temperature in weather or liquids. The resistance in 25 °C is 10K (+- 1%). The resistance goes down as it gets warmer and goes up as it gets cooler. For specific temperature-to-resistance, check the lookup table.

These are often used for air conditioners, water lines, and other places where they can get damp. The PVC coating of the wires is good up to 105 °C so this isn’t good for very hot stuff.

We even toss in an additional 1% 10K resistor which you can use as calibration or for a resistor divider.

In stock and shipping!

Another great episode of MakerBot TV, wherein you’ll get a preview of the robots in the DIY Robot Petting Zoo MakerBot’s got planned for this weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo, California.

Lauszus posted a great video of his mbed based balancing robot on Youtube.

I have for a long time wanted to build a remote controllable balancing robot aka Segway – that’s was actually the main reason why I created the PS3 Bluetooth Library both for Arduino and the FEZ Devices. It has been a long time since the sneak peak and the performance has been improved a lot since then. The original one had a FEZ Rhino as the main processor, but I discovered that it was not fast enough to read the encoders, as it is not running embedded code. Also I was already using more than 10ms per loop, which I used as a fixed time loop, so I decided to step up a notch and go for a much more powerful device: the mbed microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-M3 running 96MHz.

There is a great writeup here, including links to the original code (and an Arduino only version).

Becky and Tyler have got the keys to the blog this week while Limor and Phil are out at the Hardware Innovation Workshop and Maker Faire in California. We promise to return her with a full tank! Photo from Richard-G on Flickr.

Call it Monday Morning AutoMata. This great simulation of Conway’s Game of Life which runs a smaller game inside itself. phlipping writes:

A video of Conway’s Game of Life, emulated in Conway’s Game of Life.

Inspired by this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77qsLrpw I made a similar video, but with the speed and scale varying smoothly over time, rather than in discrete jumps as the original video did.

The life simulator used is Golly – http://golly.sourceforge.net/ which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose “metafier.py” from the scripts list). For more information about the metapixel pattern, see http://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/

The actual video is exported from Golly using a custom Python script: http://pastebin.com/8vVGCgKE (since Golly built-in only supports rendering the view with a scale which is a power of 2, for performance reasons – this is not a particularly well-optimised or fast script to run).

The audio track is a Shepard Tone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
This is also generated by a Python script: http://pastebin.com/vxVeNtWc

I can’t help but think how cool this would be projected (or installed) on the side of a building opposite a waterfront or canal.

[via G+]

editor’s note: original quote contained a bad link to the Shepard Tone WP page, so I fixed it. All other quote content is directly from the YouTube video.

TicTocTrac via MakerBot:

Thoughts like, “Time flies when you’re having fun,” or “Lecture lasts forever,” originate from our highly variable sense of time. You have experienced this if you have ever checked your watch to discover that much more (or less) time has progressed than you expected. TicTocTrac is a wristwatch that doesn’t just keep time, but measures your perception of it, allowing you to track changes over the course of days or even months.

Awesome documentation, BOM and schematic included!

littleBits is looking for a Community Manager / Adafruit Jobs Board

littleBits is looking for a super talented and energetic Community Manager to join the team. You have to have a lot of energy, wit and social skills and understand the littleBits mission and brand very well. You also have to be a geek at heart, and have lots of geekiness to show for yourself. Tasks include managing the online community including forums, community platform, all things social media, newsletter and dreamBits. Tasks also include answering email, customer support, blogging and edits to the website.

Hello! My name is Justin Cooper, and this is my first official day as an Adafruit employee. I’m really excited to join such a great team, company, and community. I’m the other half of Coobro Labs, joining one week after my brother (Tyler Cooper), so he’ll have some serious seniority over me! Tyler is the one on the left, and I am one of the other two guys in the picture above.

I’ll be focusing on software and web development, as well as many other exciting things. Looking forward to hearing from you and continuing to build the maker-community.

Michael shared this awesome hand built motion sensing Arduino night light that he made for Mother’s day.

A few years back I made a motion sensitive night light as a Mother’s day gift and while it worked pretty well it really chewed out the batteries.  And as with all devices that eat batteries it eventually fell out of use.  The standby current was around 4 mA due to the common LM324 opamp that was used to amplify the PIR motion sensor signal.  The original enclosure was CNC milled from a bit of re-purposed apple which had a former life as a guitar body I built as a child.  Apple happens to be my favorite wood, it’s rich and creamy and the project just needed some new electronic guts.

Really great craftsmanship on the enclosure, and I really like the choice of wood.  You can pick up a similar PIR motion sensor in the Adafruit store.

Nick made this awesome project combining  Jeff Keyzer’s Geiger counter, a high altitude balloon, and a custom Arduino Mega shield, so that he could log radiation in the atmosphere. He writes:

The geiger counter went on a high altitude mission last week.
It traveled together with a (arduino) transmitter under a high altitude balloon up to an altitude of 30km.

…

I designed a shield for the arduino mega containing a GPS, SD, Temp Sensor, 433Mhz transmitter and some IO.
I’m now working on a single board version.
Condensation could indeed be a problem as temperature rises again at this altitude.
Going to look into it .
The radiation should keep rizing with altitude as its cosmic radiation.
But its also something I have to look into.

More photos over at the MightyOhm forums.

Great project, Nick!

Welcome to the Era of Design @ Forbes.

All businesses, no matter what they make or sell, should recognize the power and financial value of good design.
Obviously, there are many different types of design: graphic, brand, packaging, product, process, interior, interaction/user experience, Web and service design, to name but a few.
In this post, I am referring to design as a broad and deliberately applied discipline, with the aim of creating simpler, more meaningful, rewarding experiences for customers.

The weekly show-and-tell is SATURDAY NIGHT 5/12/12 at 9:30pm ET!

NEW INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO BE ON THE SHOW AND TELL. If you are on Google+ and want to join, post a message/comment on Limor’s post on Google+ and say you want to show off a project and she will add you the “Show and Tell” circle. Then just look for the hangout announcement on the very same page later for your invite. There’s an 8 to 10 (at the same time) people limit per hangout, so if it’s full try later or just pop by next week same time. Some weeks are packed!

At 9:30pm ET you will see a link to the hang out. Just keep your mics muted until we call on you and have your project ready.

For those who just want to watch, you’ll be able to watch it live on Google+ ‘s broadcast feature on Ladyada’s page AND it will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube automatically (1st test is up). The Muppets and the Dalai Lama are up if you want to see other types of hangout examples.

Google is allowing some accounts to broadcast and record – Ladyada is trying this out, with your help

Previously we broadcasted the hangouts on Google to Ustream using their Producer tool to capture the hangout. We’re still using Ustream for “ASK AN ENGINEER”.

So if anything goes wrong, it’s all very new, but that’s also part of the fun

SEE you soon!

ASK AN ENGINEER 10PM ET – 5/12/12 – TONIGHT!

What is “Ask an engineer”? From the electronics enthusiast to the professional community – “Ask an Engineer” has a little bit of everything for everyone. If you’re a beginner, or a seasoned engineer – stop in and see what we’re up to! We have demos of projects and products we’re working on, we answer your engineering and electronics questions and we have a trivia question + give away each week. Mosfet the cat stops by too. Previous chats can be viewed at http://www.adafruit.com/ask

Chat details!

• Visit our new “Ask an Engineer”section on Adafruit at 10pm ET, Saturday nights
• Or visit our Ustream page
• For old schoolers, you can use IRC, you’ll need a Ustream log/pass, check out the Ustream IRC how-to here
• We are #adafruit-industries6796 on IRC server chat1.ustream.tv
• Watch the show with an iPad, iPhone or Android phone!

And don’t forget, 30 minutes before the show we’re doing our weekly show-and-tell. If you are on Google+ and want to join, just add/follow +Limor Fried’s (Ladyada) page and post a comment so you can be added to the show and tell circle. At 9:30pm ET you will see a link to the hang out. Just keep your mics muted until we call on you and have your project ready.

For those who just want to watch, you’ll be able to watch it live on Ustream here and we usually have a recorded version posted later.

Adafruit forum regular, Stephanie, has another amazing project to share with us.  She ripped most of the guts out of a toy Star Trek wall communicator and turned the enclosure into a custom home thermostat, the Thermostat Three.

The red circle ‘red alert light’ is wired to the XBee’s RSSI so when the XBee receives a wireless command, the red light comes on for a few seconds.

The white gridded rectangle is the DHT22 sensor (temperature and humidity). I felt it would ‘blend in’ enough that it should be mounted right up front for all to see. The little black hole to the right of the DHT22 is for the light sensor.

Why is there a light sensor? Why not? Also: because I had an extra one laying around.

The screen display is mostly self-evident. Time, day, date. Heat/Cool. Run/Hold/Override. Target temp (small) and actual temp (large). Fan status (on/auto) and humidity.

Spotted in the build are plenty of Adafruit components: 2.2″ 18-bit color TFT LCD display, Adafruit XBee Adapter, ChronoDot, and a TSL2561 digital luminosity / lux / light sensor.

Hacked Chocolate Box has Blinking LEDs controlled by an ATTiny13 via Hacked Gadgets.

Way too late for the Valentine’s Day yet maybe just in time for the Mother’s Day this year, I’d like to introduce an electronics project that came about as a result of my reluctance to throw away a nice looking empty box. This year Valentine’s Day came around just about the time I was playing with ATTiny13 micros – I was setting my Arduino IDE up to be able to write code for and burn the program into smaller 8-bit AVR MCUs like ATTiny13. Once the box of chocolates has been freed of its original content by my dear wife Tanya, on the way to the trash I turned it over and realised that there’s a lot of space available inside the plastic insert. I could easily tuck a battery, an MCU and a bunch of LEDs in there for a nice blinking light effect.

SobiGuy over at sobisource.com has put together a great 10 minute video tutorial on interfacing the Adafruit 2.8″ TFT LCD with touchscreen breakout board.  Here is what he has to say about the LCD:

This Screen though not large in size it is quite spectacular in ability and ease of use because of Adafruit’s extensive libraries for it.

You can pick up the Adafruit 2.8″ 18-bit color TFT LCD with touchscreen breakout board here.