Ephemeral Photographs Staged With Artful Inventions

[Gordon Kirkwood’s] focus as a photographer is in capturing ephemeral phenomena, that is, things that are exhilarating to see but also fleeting. In the pursuit of documenting such blips of beauty found in the natural word, he has taken on engineering the circumstance through which they occur by means of technology.

One of the amazing mechanical creations he’s constructed to aid in his photography is a large computer controlled, bubble blower. A few stepper motors work to dilate three segments of soap-soaked rope engaged at 120 degree angles to create a triangular aperture. When the aperture closes, the segments overlap slightly, covering themselves with a consistent coating of suds. When the segments stretch apart, a fan blows a current of air towards the center, pushing the sheath of fluid into ginormous glimmering orbs which he uses as the focal point in some of his photographs.

bubbleAparatus

More currently, [Gordon] has been developing a body of work that involves zapping botanical subject matter with a quarter-million volts from a portable arc producing device he’s created and capturing the reaction with an ultra low-tech camera (the kind with the bellow and sheet you hide under while exposing the film). Using a method all his own, the shots recorded on large format film are claimed to turn out with even more clarity than any current digital camera in use today. [Gordon] has launched a crowd funding campaign to support a pilgrimage to the majestic island of Hawaii, where he’ll use his lightning producing apparatus on ten different specimens of tropical plant life so that he can record the outcome with his tried and proven technique. (see below an artsy shot of his lightning summoner)

lighteningAparatus

Sometimes Kickstarter isn’t so much about commercialism as it is starting a dialogue with the world and beginning a personal adventure. May the journey lead to new inventions and larger, more ambitious projects! Oh yeah- the bubble blowing machine is a must-see in action. Wicked cool:

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An MSP430-based Automatic Fish Feeder

[Dmitri] wanted to buy an automatic feeding setup for his aquarium, but he found that most off-the-shelf feeders are really inaccurate with portion control. [Dmitri]’s fish is sensitive to overfeeding, so an off-the-shelf feeder wouldn’t get the job done. Since [Dmitri] knows a thing or two about electronics, he set out to build his own microcontroller-based automatic feeding machine.

[Dmitri]’s machine is based around a MSP430 that starts feeding at scheduled times and controls how much food is dispensed. The MSP lives on a custom PCB that [Dmitri] designed, which includes a stepper motor driver and input for an endstop sensor. The board is wired to a stepper motor that advances a small wooden board with a series of holes in it. Each hole is filled with a single serving of food. The board slides along a piece of U-channel, and food drops out of each hole into the aquarium when the hole reaches the end of the channel.

The whole build is very well documented, and [Dmitri] explains each block of his schematic in detail. His firmware is also open-source, so you can build your own fish feeder based off of his design. Check out the video after the break to see the feeder in action.

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Making T-Glase Crystal Clear

There are 3D printing filaments out there with a lot of interesting properties. Whether it’s the sanded-down MDF feel you get from Laywood, the stretchy and squishy but somehow indestructible feel of Ninjaflex, or just regular ‘ol PLA, there’s a filament out there for just about any use. Even optically clear printed objects. Yes, you can now do some post-processing on printed parts to make T-glase crystal clear.

The big advance allowing translucent parts to be made clear is a new product from Smooth-On that’s meant to be a protective and smoothing coating for 3D printed objects. With PLA, ABS, and powder printed parts, this coating turns objects shiny and smooth. Strangely – and I don’t think anyone planned this – it also has the same index of refraction as T-glase. This means coating an object printed with T-glase will render the layers invisible, smooth out the tiny bumps in the print, and turn a single-walled object clear.

There is a special technique to making clear objects with T-glase. The walls of the print must be a single layer. You’ll also want a perfect layer height on your print – you’re looking for cylindrical layers, not a nozzle that squirts out to the side.

The coating for the pictures above was applied on a makeshift lathe built out of an electric drill and a sanding pad. This gave the coating a nice, even layer until it dried. After a few tests, it was determined lenses could be printed with this technique. It might not be good enough for 3D printed eyeglasses, but it’s more than sufficient for creating windows for a model, portholes for an underwater ROV, or anything else where you want nothing but light inside an enclosure.

EDC CONTEST ROUNDUP: Musician’s Assistant AND BitMasher!

We’re getting all sorts of entries in the Trinket Everyday Carry Contest! Today we’re featuring just a couple of the awesome entries dedicated to creating music!

ma[johnowhitaker] is hard at work on A Musician’s Assistant. [John] is creating a device that does anything a practicing musician might need on the go. The Musician’s Assistant will include a metronome, tap/temp counter, and tuner. He’s hoping to also give it the ability to play back arbitrary notes using the Pro Trinket’s on-board ATmega328. [John] is trying to do all this with just LEDs and buttons as a user interface, though he is willing to go to an LCD or OLED if he needs to.

masher[Michele Perla] is working on BitMasher, portable lo-fi music sequencer. The BitMasher will allow a musician on the go to create music anywhere. [Michele] began with a SID based sequencer in mind, but he’s currently trying to do it all on the Pro Trinket. He’s already got [Roman’s] BTc Sound Compression Algorithm working on an Arduino Leonardo. Lo-Fi for sure, but that’s what makes BitMasher fun! [Michele] envisions the song entry to be similar to that of the classic Roland TR-808.  The primary user interface will be an Adafruit Trellis 4×4 button+LED driver board.

Don’t forget that our second random drawing will be held on Tuesday, December 9th, at 9pm EST.  To be eligible you need to submit your project as an official entry and publish at least one project log during the week. This week’s prize is a Cordwood Puzzle from The Hackaday Store. Check out the contest page for the full details!

Compiling Your Own Programs For The ESP8266

When the ESP8266 was first announced to the world, we were shocked that someone was able to make a cheap, accessible UART to WiFi bridge. Until we get some spectrum opened up and better hardware, this is the part you need to build an Internet of Things thing.

It didn’t stop there, though. Some extremely clever people figured out the ESP8266 had a reasonably high-power microcontroller on board, a lot of Flash, and a good amount of RAM. It looked like you could just use the ESP8266 as a controller unto itself; with this chip, all you need to do is write some code for the ESP, and you have a complete solution for your Internet connected blinking lights or WiFi enabled toaster. Whatever the hip things the cool kids are doing these days, I guess.

But how do you set up your toolchain for the ESP8266? How do you build projects? How do you even upload the thing? Yes, it’s complicated, but never fear; [CNLohr] is here to make things easy for you. He’s put together a video that goes through all the steps to getting the toolchain running, setting up the build environment, and putting some code on the ESP8266. It’s all in a git, with some video annotations.

The tutorial covers setting up the Xtensa toolchain and a patched version of GCC, GDB, and binutils. This will take a long, long time to build, but once it’s done you have a build environment for the ESP8266.

With the build environment put together, [CNLohr] then grabs the Espressif SDK from the official site, and puts together the example image. Uploading to the module requires pulling some of the pins high and some low, plugging in a USB to serial module to send the code to the module, standing well back, and pressing upload.

For his example image, [CNLohr] has a few WS2812 RGB LEDs connected to the ESP8266 WiFi module. Uploading the image turns the LEDs into something controllable with UDP packets on port 7777. It’s exactly what you want in a programmable, WiFi chip, and just the beginning of what can be done with this very cool module.

If you’re looking around for some sort of dev board with an ESP8266 on it, [Mathieu] has been playing around with some cool boards, and we’ve been looking into making a Hackaday version to sell in the store. The Hackaday version probably won’t happen because FCC.

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The Last Week Of The Mooltipass Approacheth

A year and two days ago, [Mathieu] started out on a quest to develop some hardware with the help of Hackaday readers. This project became known as the Mooltipass, an open source offline password keeper that’s pretty much a password management suite or Post-It notes on a monitor, except not horribly insecure.

The product has gone through multiple iterations of software, [Mathieu] flew out to China to get production started, and the project finally made it to a crowdfunding site. That crowdfunding campaign is almost over with just eight days left and just a little bit left to tip this project into production. This is the last call, all hands in, and if you’re thinking about getting one of these little secure password-storing boxes, this is the time.

You can check out the Developed on Hackaday series going over the entire development of the Mooltipass, made with input from Mooltipass contributors and Hackaday readers. The Venn diagram of those two groups overlaps a lot, making this the first piece of hardware that was developed for and by Hackaday readers.

Even if you have a fool-proof system of remembering all your passwords and login credentials, the Mooltipass is still a very cool-looking Arduino-compatible board. Note that (security device) and (Arduino thing) are two distinct operating modes that should not be conflated.

[Mathieu] and other contributors will be in the comments below, along with a bunch of ‘security researchers’ saying how this device ‘is horrifying’, ‘full of holes’, and ‘a terrible idea’. One of these sets of people have actually done research. Guess which?

Toilet Sink Saves Water

Saving The Planet One Flush At A Time

Water is a natural resource that some of use humans take for granted. It seems that we can turn on a facet to find an unlimited supply. That’s not true in all parts of the world. In the US, toilets use 27% of household water requirements. That’s a lot of water to only be used once. The water filling the toilet after the flush is the same as that comes out of the sink. [gregory] thought it would make sense to combine toilet tank filling with hand washing as those two activities happen at the same time.

To accomplish this, a DIY sink and faucet were put in-line with the toilet tank fill supply. The first step was to make a new tank lid. [gregory] used particle board and admits it probably isn’t the best material, but it is what he had on hand. A hole was cut in the lid where a metal bowl is glued in. Holes were drilled in the bottom of the bowl so that water could drain down into the tank. The faucet is just standard copper tubing. The curve was bent by hand using a wire wrap method to keep it from kinking. The only remaining part was to connect the fill line (after the fill valve) to the faucet. Now, when the toilet is flushed, the faucet starts flowing.

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