Category Archives: Engineering

BAMF2014: Makesmith CNC

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Part of our continuing coverage of highlights from the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire

Let’s file this under “intro machines.” The Makesmith CNC, currently available on Kickstarter for just $195 including everything but the Dremel tool. It makes very clever use of appropriate technology: Three tiny hobby servo motors, modified for continuous rotation, turn gears that turn the lead screws (well, all-thread) to drive the XYZ stage. An magnetic encoder monitors the rotation, making a high-resolution, closed-loop control system.  No bushings, melamine-coated MDF parts, Arduino control.  Planned for future open source hardware+software release, too.

Perfect?  Nope, but the creators of the project seem to be keenly aware of its abilities and limitations (many discussed here), and oh does it have affordability on its side.

BAMF2014: A Cocktail Glass for Zero Gravity

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Part of our continuing coverage of highlights from the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire.

The Zero Gravity Cocktail Project from the Cosmic Lifestyle Corporation aims to make a cocktail glass suitable for drinking fluids in zero-G:

The Zero Gravity Cocktail Project is an attempt to bridge the gap between the space tourism vision and mainstream reality. By creating a fun object that appeals to many people, we hope to show that space tourism is not an abstract concept but a stepping stone for improving the way people live, work, and play beyond planet Earth.

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Fluids don’t behave the same in outer space, so a glass would have to have quite a different design, relying on capillary action not gravity to move them from point A to B. Channels guide the fluid from stem to rim.

These are 3D printed prototypes of white plastic. Future versions might be 3D printed from clear biocompatible plastic, or made of glass or stainless steel.

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The glass has bulbous bottom with a hollow stem, for balance and fluid delivery.  A rubber one-way valve can be inserted into the bottom to allow the glass to be refilled as you drink. They have also made an earthbound variant of this glass that has a more traditional base, allowing it to be set down, when gravity permits.

We’re secretly hoping that the next version includes a way to suspend your olive in the middle of the conical section, no toothpick required.

Highlights of the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire

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The 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire was an amazing, amazing event. We took hundreds of photos, which we have posted in a flickr set here. Here are just a few of the highlights— both technological and artistic, and we’ll be featuring several more over the course of the next week or so.

(Above: Rolf and Abhishek show off the new Arduino Zero in the Arduino booth.) Continue reading Highlights of the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire

Beautiful Drone Video of Maker Faire

A Drone’s Day at Maker Faire gives a beautiful perspective of an amazing event. You can see me as the drone goes follows me into Expo hall near the beginning of the video. Highlights include overhead shots of the crowds around the large outdoor art pieces and a drone’s eye view of the drone battles.

We’ll be sharing more from Maker Faire soon!

EE Times Interview on Open Source Hardware

Windell and Lenore and Three Fives kits
Photo by Rick Merrit, EE Times

EE Times came by and interviewed Windell in advance of his upcoming Maker Faire talk about best practices for Open Source Hardware.

…Big semiconductor companies are jumping on the bandwagon of open source reference boards. But their chips’ intellectual property remains carefully guarded corporate crown jewels. …

A WaterColorBot Water Clock

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We built a evaporating-hand water clock using a WaterColorBot fitted with a Buddha Board. The Buddha Board is a black board with a gray ceramic coating that becomes transparent when wet, so you can paint on it with plain water to make black marks that disappear as the water evaporates.  (And, it fits nicely in a WaterColorBot with the appropriate jig.)

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As a clock, once a minute it draws the minute hand, then the hour hand, and finally the outline of the clock face.

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As the water evaporates over the course of a few minutes, the old minute hands fade away. It’s a neat effect.

And of course, video:

Continue reading A WaterColorBot Water Clock

555 kit, version 2.0

555 Kit v 2.0

Today we’re introducing version 2.0 of our “Three Fives” Discrete 555 timer kit.  Version 2.0 has a number of little tweaks and improvements, with a cleaner design and — coolest of all — an all-new set of smooth anodized aluminum legs.

555 Kit v 2.0

The Three Fives kit is a faithful and functional transistor-scale replica of the famous 555 timer integrated circuit — one of the most popular and well-loved chips of all time. (An original NE555 IC is shown above for scale.)

We are also releasing the first version of our educational supplement for the Three Fives kit: A detailed description of how the 555 circuit actually works, with plenty of opportunities for further exploration.  You can find it on the downloads section of the product page or on our documentation wiki.

 

 

Maker Faire Bingo

With Maker Faire coming up next week, @techninja42 suggested that Maker Faire Bingo would be a great way to get ready! With the help of some friends, he put together a site where you can grab a bingo card to play during your visit to Maker Faire. We tried it out with the WaterColorBot, but you can use your preferred automated printing method to make your own, or maybe even find a robot at Maker Faire to draw it for the ultimate Maker Faire Bingo!

Send your maker bingo suggestions to @mfbingo for inclusion in the bingo card generator.

Stealth Fighter Guitar with Octolively Lighting Effects

Stealth plane guitar with octolively lighting

Herb wrote in to say:

When I saw your Octolively LED circuit, the first thing I wanted to do was incorporate it into our electric guitar project.

I teach a basic senior physics class for non-science majors and wanted to try something different; a year-long design project.

We made a guitar from scratch that resembles a stealth fighter. We even wound the humbucker coils in the guitar… Your circuit is used to drive the exhaust lights in response to playing motion…It works well and offers a unique visual effect based on the selected setting…you can even hear the circuit through the amplifier when it drives the blue LEDs…

The Octolively is wired up with the LEDs pointing down from the bottom of the guitar (back of the plane) and the sensors pointing toward the neck to respond the motion of the guitar player.

Stealth Octolively guitar in progress

His student, David, added:

Thank you for making such a great educational product to learn about LED’s and simple circuits. Our class worked together to put all of the parts in the correct place and it was a wonderful collaborative learning project.

Octolively assembly for incorporation into guitar

StippleGen and a low-power DIY laser cutter

Jens demonstrates using StippleGen2 with his low-power (300 mW!) DIY laser cutter and a classic image of Louis Armstrong.

After letting StippleGen2 crunch the numbers for a while I imported the resulting vector graphic file into inkscape and generated the G-code so that I could use my laser cutter to cut the image into a black paper. 2 hours and 23 minutes later I had a 20×20 cm piece of paper with about a 1000 holes in it and it looks awesome! Would be perfect for a lamp shade or just nice to put up in a window and let the sun shine through. I can highly recommend StippleGen2 it’s super easy and a lot of fun.