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Tymm has developed a low-cost, breadboard-based Arduino. His Diecimila-compatible design separates the programming adapter (which you only need one of) from the Arduino board to keep costs down.
So after an initial investment of under $25, you can put together cores for breadboard-based Arduino prototypes for $8-10… the Diecimila auto-reset works… and you actually get 2 I/O pins out of the deal
Cool project, Tymm!
When you are building a digital library to provide Universal Access to Human Knowledge, how to you hold all the data?
You start with a few racks of machines to hold the data using redundant storage:
The red boxes are built by Capricorn. Each one is a 1U half-depth low-power server that can hold four 1TB hard drives:
Add a bunch of homemade routers:
And some BigIron: (this thing pushed 6Gb/s today!)
Now you need to power it up:
And cool it down:
And fill it with books:
For some reason, you need a 1980′s-era Connection Machine:
Finally, no Archive is complete without a world-class Linux kernel hacker:
May, Peliom, Barbara, Sasha, Mang, Greta, Furry, Lisa, Mr. Foo, Dodger, Herve, Jess, and I went to opening party for The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama at YBCA. Paba Phree and Catweasel worked on this 32-channel sound/video installation:
The installation was wonderful, but it was too loud to fully hear the soundscape. We’ll have to go back when it’s less crowded. The other pieces were great as well!
Here are a few more pics I took before a security guard came and told me there was absolutely no photography allowed at YBCA.
Check out this awesome project:
Using an IR led array and some reflective tape, you can track fingers in thin air using the Wii Remote by Johnny Lee, Carnegie Mellon University
neat!
Here is a short video of a test run of the Open Content Alliance’s Espresso Book Machine, an automatic print-on-demand robot that makes perfect-bound paperback books. The Espresso Book Machine was created by On Demand Books.
This video was shot during configuration of the machine, so you can see the printing/binding process, but the book gets stuck and comes out mangled.. I’ll upload another video after the machine is set up..
(press play to start video) (link to other sizes)
Check out this impossibly-cute fake laptop keyboard. Someone call TikiRobot HR.. We need to hire this kid, stat!
Apparently the pet keys are shortcuts for webkinz. Via Shifted Librarian
dangerous! there’s a button for “immediate buy”
Made From Scrap is moving into the rANch! They seem like a pretty neat organization and a good ranch addition..
This means that the ranch will now be open to the public, instead of being a semi-underground art warehouse.
We found our nesting ground by partnering with the sexiest underground behemoth of San Francisco imagination: The Cataclysmic Megashear Ranch on 1433 Van Dyke, in the Bayview neighborhood.
Energizer A23 12V [[batteries]] sell for under $2 for a pack of two. Inside each A23 are eight 1.5V button cell batteries. Perfect for tiny LED projects :)
After I moved out of the rAnCH, I had no place to work on projects, so I built this workbench in the garage. It is huge. Now I don’t have an excuse for not making anything for the upcoming Bernal Heights art show!
I made it using Simpson StrongTie metal connectors and cheap 2x4s. I used a modified version of the workbench plans from the StrongTie website. It doesn’t have a bottom shelf yet, but it does have a whiteboard!
I used the free version of the SketchUp modeling program to draw it out first so I knew how long to cut each of the 2x4s. You can download the SketchUp model from 3D Warehouse.
I spent *ALL DAY* installing this garbage disposer. It was supposed to take an hour, but like all my projects, it took forever, and I had to run to the store half way through. To top it off, I just found out that most dishwashers these days come with food disposers built in!!! ARG! The whole point of getting a disposer was so that we could later get a dishwasher! It seems that dishwashing technology has advanced since the eighties… The last time I installed a food disposer, Regan was still president.
On the bright side, it seems that no Bosch or Miele dishwashers have built-in food disposers, and we’ve been considering getting one of those. Plus, we already had a circuit and switch wired for a disposer. Here are some pics!
Before:
After:
who is your photo stylist? The lighting is perfect! Nice job. Ken
Amazing install. How do you keep it so clean under there? My under-sink is kinda gross, though I do clean it out whenever I change the Reverse Osmosis filters.
I hear you about making a parts run in the middle of the project. That’s such a pain. Glad you made it through. Grind away!
i have to concur…that is one fine looking garbage disposal! :-)
It looks clean because Jess does a great job keeping it that way :)
Also, in that second picture, all the trap work is hidden behind the disposer, which helps give it a clean look.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that disposers are made for people who don’t compost.. We certainly could have done without one.
In May, I installed the exact same unit (I think, looks the same) chez nous after we killed our old one with artichokes (don’t ask). I’m not handy. Really not handy. This one hour project took me all day too and I had scrapes to prove it.
The Miele dishwasher is great (read my review and comparison between the Miele and the Bosch), but it doesn’t need a disposal. (It doesn’t have one, and it doesn’t need one installed.) We don’t have a disposal, and it’s never been a problem. The Miele completely pulverizes every particle of food using only the water pressure. I’ve never found even a speck of food inside the dishwasher, and never had any problem with the drain, in about five years of Miele ownership.
Wow, thanks. That is the best dishwasher review I have ever read! I can’t wait to get the Miele :)
Chicken John and friends are working on a coffee-ground powered pickup truck!
Right now the truck runs off hydrogen gas (Wood Gas) produced by gassifying wood pellets, but when Chicken John gets $5000 for a pelletizer, it will run off coffee grounds. Check out the pics!
We also shot a couple videos of us driving from Dolores Park to Ritual. After we get started on gas, Chicken shuts off the fuel pump and we start running on wood. The second video has a few details of how the engine works..
that would be awesome. i wonder if the fumes would smell like coffee…mmmmmm
This is a great idea.. an adjustable crescent wrench with a slider instead of that stupid thumb screw thing! Here is Dodger, professional Spokeswrenchwench, showing it off:
I wish I had known about this sooner! We should tell mang and jim and spot and our other NYC friends!
Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city. As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel approaches, it’s worth taking a look at the remarkable sequence of events that takes place between the time we click “deliver” on the burrito.nyc.us.gov website and the moment that our hot El Farolito burrito arrives in the lunchroom with its satisfying pneumatic hiss.
omg that’s amazing thanks raj!
if only it were true.
The Tech Shop looks an awful lot like a dreaded office park building from the photo on their website and it’s in Menlo Park…BUT it has a full range of equipment for building just about anything (including a 3d printer that can make ABS plastic thingies from your CAD file) and classes on things like How to Use a Plasmer Cutter, Single-Beam Holography, and Choosing A Microcontroller. Ever since my friend Doria gave me this bracelet that she made with a laser cutter, I’ve been wanting a necklace / choker to go with it, so I think I’m going to check out this class after work!
This shop is very cool. ABC 7 News profiled it Sunday, July 1.
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=drive_to_discover&id=5441047
You would think that being producer of three newscasts a day would keep you so busy that you wouldn’t have time to spam two-bit blogs with links to your product. However, recent trends in news, such as blindly regurgitating press releases, have made producing a newscast a whole lot faster!
Today my AVR USBKey dev board finally came and I’m on my way to making an open source clone of my beloved TouchStream keyboard. I’m using the Cypress CapSense parts for the multitouch sensing and AVR parts for doing the processing and communication. The first prototypes will have most the processing done in software, actually, and then I’ll decide between AVR and ARM7 later.
Here is the roadmap:
oh wow, can’t wait to see!
Hi rajbot I find this article very interesting and I would like to contact you. I am sorry I don’t see any contact information here at TikiRobot. Is there any institutional mail I can send my mail whith my contact information?. Thanks lot. Kind regards. Jose.
PS: If anyone knows a site mail plese tell me so i can send my contact request email.
I’ll send Jose an email..
I would love to hear about any progress that you make in this endeavor…the cable in my touchstream is fraying, and replacements are ridiculously expensive on eBay, so any alternatives would be much appreciated!
You can replace the TouchStream ribbon connector very cheaply. A bit of soldering is involved. Here are the instructions and the part ordering information:
Dodger came over yesterday with a Vex Robotics kit and we prototyped a Shaker Robot! It’s the first step in making a a fully-robotic tiki bar. We got the robot shaker to kind of shake up a drink, so we declared it sucessful and went to celebrate at Jasmine Tea House with mang and about 20 other people. Yay! Here are some notes for going forward:
I got my FlyTech Dragonfly today. I had forgotten I ordered it … opening the box was a brief flash of genuine excitement … A dragonfly!!!!!!
Co-workers were as shocked at the $50 purchase as I was shocked that they couldn’t understand how cool this was … an RC dragonfly that flies by flapping its wings? … dude …. it has blue LEDs for eyes!!!
I found the FlyTech Dragonfly is tough to navigate in the two indoor spaces I tried: my open floor plan office and my apartment. They recommend 16×16 feet minimum for indoor flight, but I found even that to be too little. The ‘fly has large swings of pitch and yaw that I find difficult to control in small spaces. On the other hand, the ‘fly crashes into walls just like a real bug crashes into windows ;-) SMACK!!
But I had a great time just now taking the dragonfly out to the local park. His wings got wet from the dew on the grass. The ‘fly has about 10x more charm than an RC airplane or helicopter. Zipping by, close in, it felt more like a friend swinging by than a drone airplane.
Like the iPod, the ‘fly itself seems to have a non-replaceable internal battery. Interestingly, the way it works is you put 6 AA batteries in the remote control, and then you connect a cord to recharge the dragonfly’s internal recharchable battery. Charging takes about 20 minutes … flight time seems to be about 5-10 minutes. Never enough.
I think with some practice I will be able to launch Dragonfly from my 4th story balcony, fly around a bit, and then turn around for a SMACK!! landing against the sliding glass door. Naturally this will probably annoy my snotty neighbors
Link to FlyTech Dragonfly on Robots Rule
i love the wings! you could attach a note to the dragonfly and fly it into a *cute* neighbor’s apartment window :-)
This talk of remote control dragonflies reminds me of the book Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy. I read it in the late 80′s and it was written in 1974.
I want one! I’m buying one! How dose it do outside? Is it still stable or is it more of an indoor thing?
You should be at tronix showing us your robot. But you are not . So we are standing around talking about you instead.
My most creative act with the DragonFly was installing the batteries. When I actually *make* a robot I’ll bring it to ‘tronix.
T-WIL – the DragonFly does well outdoors if there is no wind. The slightest breeze will change the bugs course, which I think makes it fun.
Flying indoors is fun too but you need a lot of space, I would say at least 30×30 ft of unobstructed space, maybe your schools theater ;-)
Well I’m ordering one! I will take a video of it and post the link here!! Thanks fro the info! I dont want the wind to take it away! Off to school! lol
I love this! Do you think we could fit a couple in the rAnCH??
So, an artist makes some blinky adverts for an upcoming major motion picture, featuring a well-recognized cartoon character, and the Boston police go ballistic and have the bomb squad detonate one of them. Pretty typical for Boston.. Well, then they arrest the artist who made the blinkies! They are holding him on terrorism charges, and calling a bunch of LEDs connected to some batteries a PIPE BOMB! Crazy, right?
Well, last year San Francisco police detonated a flashlight that was left in a Starbucks bathroom by a homeless guy. A fucking flashlight! From CNN:
SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) — An explosive device was found in a Starbucks coffee shop in central San Francisco on Monday. The building was evacuated and a police bomb squad disarmed the device, authorities said.
A Starbucks employee found the device about 1:15 p.m. (4:15 p.m. ET) on the coffee shop’s bathroom floor, police spokesman Neville Gittens said.
“If it had detonated, it would have caused damage,” Gittens said. “It was what we consider an IED,” an improvised explosive device.
Acutally, it was just a flashlight. And guess what? They arrested the flashlight dude too.
I would’ve blown them up too! That mooninite looked pretty threatening and blinky. At least adult swim had the decency to make a formal apology for causing such a ruckus. Watch out Jess, Rajbot and I are going to take you to watch the whole ATHF movie in the theater! Mooninites and all!
Here is the Boston Hearld’s take on it, in which they refer to Berdovsky as Borat:
Hey Borat, you’re not a citizen? That’s too bad. How does five years at Cedar Junction sound, followed by a steerage-class flight back to the Third World hellhole from which you came, to annoy the taxpaying citizens?
Also, Berdovsky happens to be a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend..
So apparently (from reading many of these articles) anything with wires and batteries is a bomb. Blinky lights make it even more explosive.
So does that mean the Ranch is like a nuclear blinky bomb just waiting to go off?
Just think what might have happened if those guys had had access to 3.1 ounces of hand cream. THAT stuff is scary. But maybe it wouldn’t explode unless it was at the airport. Terrorism science is so hard.
A ruckus, indeed! Bob, I am considering myself warned, and I will be preparing my mooninite costume for the above mentioned movie-viewing. Urgh! I wonder if the movie will play the opening theme song every 15 minutes like they do on cartoon network. =)
Bunnie Huang has some stickers available for artists who have the misfortune of living in Boston:
I spent 10 good years in Boston while I attended MIT, and I carried around plenty of devices that could be classified as “suspicious looking” by Coakley’s standards, such as the “nerd kits” that we used to build our electronics labs.
So, for the hackers, students, and artists in Boston, here’s a little something for you. Give the Boston authorities a clue, because it seems like they need one:
This reminds me of the This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb stuff from last year. For a photo of the sticker in action, go here.
I’m totally gonna get some of those stickers from Bunnie Huang and stick them on EVERYTHING in the electrical engineering department.
We can only hope they play the theme song at LEAST every fifteen minutes during the movie. It’s gonna be sweet…
Here is the Wooster Collective take:
Fuck you guys. You’re acting like you’re some cool iconoclast artists who should become some mythic heros for all of us because you can mock the media and show that you’re above them. You’re not Abbie Hoffman. You’re acting like all you did was put up some renegade art. But you didn’t. You were employees and employees only. You did it for money. Don’t act like what you did was counter-culture and renegade. I don’t give a fuck what your hair looks like, you’re more “mainstream” then my mother is.
Here are some pics that show size comparisions between the OLPC and the 12″ powerbook. I’m trying to figure out how to design great ebooks for the OLPC form factor. Although its screen is quite a bit smaller than the powerbook, it has more pixels!
| OLPC | powerbook | |
| resolution | 1200×900 | 1024×768 |
| dimensions | 6″x4.5″ | 9.6″x7.3″ |
| dpi | 200 | 106 |
Make apple crisp of course. Tom Dickson demonstrates much better on his ipod below (though i think he’s blending up a smoothie).
I tried this recipe today and it was good, but the “crisp” was not as crispy as I would have liked. Anyone got tips on how to make the “crisp” part extra-crispy???
Try the recipe in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. The crisp part is always crispy!!
thanks a bunch! i will look that one up :-) i was also thinking that I might add crushed cornflakes to the topping next time (it seems to work for fried chicken so maybe…) I’ll report back if that works out!
Tom sent a link to this neat Etch-A-Servo project, which reminded me of the completely reduckulous Digital Doodle Dome!
The Doodle Dome was a toy made by Tyco in the early 1990′s. It is basically an Etch-A-Sketch type deal, except that instead of a flat rectangle, it is (most of) a sphere. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, there are two knobs that move a little pointer around a drawing surface, and it scrapes some silver dust-like stuff off to draw a picture.
Many years ago, I bought an old analog HP X/Y plotter in an auction. It reminded me of an Etch-a-sketch, but it was built like a tank and weighed a ton. It followed me back and forth across the country until a few years ago, when I took it to the RanCh. Mr. Foo, the resident wizard, popped open the plotter, blew off 30 years worth of dust, and after some poking and probing we got it too move. Foo wrote about the old plotter on this blog, which unfortunately hasn’t been updated in a long time. I’m going to copy his entire post here.. It’s too good, and it would be a shame if it disappeared into the ether.
The problem with Utopias is that they are perfect. The problem with perfection, is it’s static. The problem with being static is that the Universe keeps moving. And the problem with that is no usuable information comes from the future.
Further the boundry of now is chaotic. What that means is you can predict the future, but not exactly. Eventually the future becomes something quite different than what you predicted.
Thus the problem with Utopias. You can only design them to last forever with the information you have now. But you can’t see the future and you can’t really predict the future from the past very well. Which sucks if you’re trying to build a static Utopia. Cause eventually things become unperfect as the universe you thought you were going to have drifts from the universe that you really end up with.
Well actually it’s even worse then that. Because the universe is big and chaotic, and our minds are really small, usually what we end up with isn’t really a Utopia, it’s hell on earth. In fact there is a positive cooralation between how perfect the utopia was supposed to be and how shitty it actually ends up as. It’s because only fools think they are smart enough to build a Utopia.
So what to do….
Well if you can’t build a staticUtopia, then how about a dynamic one? Well the trouble with that is that a Utopia is ‘perfect’ and dynamic means that it deviates from perfect. Thus damm it all! it’s not perfect Arrrggggghhhhh!
So what to do…. Poink! Well if something eventually fails, then it can’t really be perfect can it? Or maybe failure is part of being perfect. Hmm….
So there is this machine at the Ranch. It’s an old plotter. And it’s in hell. The demons at the ranch are poking at it, trying to get it to plot porn. It’s old, everything built out of descete parts, resistors, capasitors, and old transistors in metal cans with GE stamped on them. The Y axis ain’t working, but the X axis does. The interesting thing is that if you put your hand on the X-axis motor you can feel it vibrate. Thats the dithering circuit, moving the motor ever so slightly back and forth to keep it from sticking.
It’s perfect, even though it’s not quite right. Because over the long run it works better, because it’ll still work even though the bearings get sticky.
There is a leason here. Perfection in the real world is imperfect, and better chaotic. That is the perfect society is one that is just fucked up enough.
This explains everything, why we die and why the ecconomy of France underperforms. In a utopia we’d still be building plotter like this old dead one. But we’re not, we’re fucked up. Everything is done half assed if we have an ass at all. Cause we’re fucked up.
And only Perfect
MacBooks appear to be dropping like flies. It’s so frustrating to have this supposedly “premium” computing gear just flake out. I had to get “the box” from Apple Support in order to send in my MacBook Pro for service – there is a ghost in the hard drive that starts corrupting sectors even after a fresh install of Mac OS X (yes, zeroing all blocks first).
Just now the backlight on my white MacBook is kaput. I can see the display is working back there but just barely because there is no backlight. Apparently I am not the only one. A failed backlight almost certainly indicates a loose connection or a failed inverter board. This means … you guessed it, I have to get “the box” for my MacBook now.
I have three mac laptops. Only one of them is functional right now, all due to hardware failures that are not my fault. I’m really glad I kept this PowerBook 12″ with which I am composing this post. It has worked like charm for the nearly two years that I’ve owned it. And at the moment it’s the only mac I own that works at all.
It’s very frustrating but still, I would *much* rather be dealing with Apple Support than Dell or HP. I am noting down some techniques for how to get the fast path through Apple Support when you know you have a hardware issue and just want to have them send you “the box” with minimal amounts of BS.
Link to a helpful “my backlight is broken!” Apple Discussions thread
Further proof that with Apple products you should always wait one or more version iterations before purchasing/updating. Apple puts the “bleeding” in “bleeding edge.”
Did you know that you can order EL wire from Amazon? Well I didn’t until recently and was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s also pretty cheap! at least cheaper than I remember it being elsewhere. $17.90 will get you 20 ft in red, green, or white and that includes the battery pack. I’ve been having some dangerously close encounters with cars while riding home from the train station at night so I just ordered some for my bike.
I just saw the Wii on our sidebar. From that page there is a link to a ‘special promotion’ page where you have until tomorrow to sign up for Wii lottery. If you win, you get the privilege of being able to buy a Wii from Amazon. I guess their marketing works, because I just signed up. They say I have a 1/6 chance of winning.. Please take my money!!!
Odds are now 8:1…
19:1
19:3.
(Me and mom)
You know how you’re always telling us you never took a math class in college…?
missed it! :-(
the signup period is now closed
i was trying to help you out. me, mom, you. three. jeez.
mangtronix is discussing. 
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bobslobster, 
mangtronix 7:40 pm on December 4, 2007 Permalink |
That no photography thing is a bummer. You should add the pics here :) http://www.strictlynophotography.com/