First Ever Poughkeepsie Mini Maker Faire

November 17, 2014 by Rich Bremer 9 Comments

This past Saturday was the first Mini Maker Faire held in Poughkeepsie, NY. Although it was the first in the area, the event went extremely well having over 60 makers and countless attendees. It was held at the Poughkeepsie Day School and made use of a large percentage of the indoor area.

Ninth graders of the hosting school [Liam], [Johnson] and [Matt] were proudly displaying some of their projects. One of which was a robotic hand controlled by a glove the user wears. Flex sensors sewn into the glove detect how much each finger is bent. That information is read by an Arduino which then commands 5 independent servos to pull string ligaments to bend the fingers of the 3D printed robotic hand. The kids give credit to this Instructable which was the inspiration for their desire to build such a project.

No Maker Faire would be complete without some 3D printers. On hand was a father/son team that built a Mini Kossel. The design is simple and elegant, and apparently assembly is no problem for even the youngest maker. 3D printing guru [Ed] was on hand with his MakerGear M2 to show some practical uses for 3D printers. They are not just for making Yoda heads! [Ed] also gave a presentation on the matter, explaining why 3D printing is important and useful to people, even the common non-techno-nerd consumer.

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Hackaday Prize Finalist: A Portable SDR

November 5, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 74 Comments

No other project to make it to The Hackaday Prize has people throwing money at their computer screen hoping something would happen than [Michael Colton]’s PortableSDR. It’s a software defined radio designed for coverage up to 30MHz. Amateur radio operators across the world are interested in this project, going so far as to call this the first Baofeng UV-5R killer. That’s extremely high praise.

[Michael] was kind enough to sit down and answer a few questions about how his entry to The Hackaday Prize has gone. You can check that out below, along with the final round video of the project. Anyone who wants their own PortableSDR could really help [Michael] out by taking this survey.

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Voltset Multimeters At World Maker Faire

September 27, 2014 by Adam Fabio 18 Comments

Many tents at World Maker Faire were divided up into booths for companies and various projects. In one of these tents, we found the Voltset booth. [Tom, Ran, and Michael] were on hand to show off their device and answer any questions. Voltset is essentially a multimeter which uses your phone as a display. It connects to an Android phone via USB or an optional Bluetooth module.

Now we’d be a bit worried about the risk of damaging our phones with a voltmeter electrically connected via USB. However, many people have an old phone or retired tablet kicking around these days, which would be perfect for the Voltset. The Bluetooth module alleviates this problem, too – though it doesn’t fix the issue of what happens to the multimeter when someone decides to call.

Voltset isn’t new; both the Voltset team and the similarly specced Mooshimeter were also at World Maker Faire last year. In the interim, Voltset has had a very successful Kickstarter. The team is accepting pre-orders to be shipped after the Kickstarter backers are sent their rewards.

[Tom] told us that the team is currently redesigning their hardware. The next generation prototype board with more protection can be seen in the far right of the top photo. He also mentioned that they’re shooting for 5 digits of accuracy, placing them on par with many bench scopes. We’re skeptical to say the least about 5 digits, but the team is definitely putting their all into this product. We’ll wait until the Kickstarter backers start getting their final devices to see if Voltset is everything it’s cracked up to be.

Starting To Wrap Up Maker Faire

September 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

It’s almost a week since the NYC Maker Faire, and it’s about time for us to start wrapping up all the posts we’re doing on everything we’ve seen.

[Chris Mitchell], hackaday favorite from Cemetech did what he always does at Maker Faire: brought some stuff he’s doing with TI graphing calculators.

The TI-84 with GPS made a showing, as did the graphing calculator IRC client. By far the coolest looking calculator was the wooden casemod. It’s a TI-82 put into a (what feels and looks like) a maple enclosure. The buttons are painted on, and despite stuffing consumer electronics into a handmade case, it’s still reasonable portable.

There were more Hackaday fans at the faire, but I’m not sure if anyone can beat the guys from Protopalette. Wait. One guy could. Find me in public sometime and I’ll tell you about that.

The Protopalette is a board with a bunch of lights, buttons, switches, sensors, knobs, servos, and buzzers for electronics prototyping. Think of it as a stylized version of the old ‘parts and springs and wire’ radio shack beginner electronic kits.

Some of the members of the hackerspace with the craziest group narrative, LVL1 in Louisville, made it to the faire. They’re working with GE to create a ‘maker module’ for appliances. It’s called Green Bean, and GE is actually building support for this into some of their fridges, washers, stoves and dishwashers.

There are a few modules already, like a scale that will send out a message when you’re out of milk. It’s an interesting system, and there are already a lot of appliances that support the system.

Pics below.

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The First Annual Omaha Mini Maker Faire Was Definitely Something To Write Home About

September 17, 2014 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

If you ask me, Omaha’s first annual Mini Maker Faire was a rousing success. I think that the Faire’s coordinator, [Eric] of Omaha Maker Group would readily agree.The event was held at the Omaha Children’s Museum, an energetic and colorful backdrop for the 30 makers who were on hand to present their creations.

The representatives of the [Omaha Maker Group] had a total of three booths. One of them displayed the various fantastic things that have come out of their ‘space, which we will cover in an upcoming post. They brought the PiPhone that I told you about in my Kansas City Maker Faire post, and [Foamyguy] found a melodic easter egg hidden in the menu. [OMG] also brought their solar-powered EL wire logo sign, a quadcopter, a giant brushbot, a hexapod, a cigar box guitar, a really fun marble run, a steampunk Barbie, and KITT, their award-winning Power Racing Series car. And yeah, you bet it has a Larson scanner.

At their second booth, Fairegoers were constructing their own regular-size brushbots using 3D-printed chassis. These were specially designed to accommodate the toothbrush heads, pager motors, and CR2032s they brought to share. [Sarah] of [OMG] had her own popular booth and was showing off her costumes, clay creations, and jewelry.

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LED Light Staffs For The Ultimate Portable Rave

August 28, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 15 Comments

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[risknc] and [mpinner] have been working on a couple of LED light staff designs for a while now and have come up with a prototype that can light up the night with an array of streaming colors. There is even a dial that can turn up and down the brightness.

Originally, [risknc] began developing his own project at SpaceX and dove further into the idea right before Burning Man. The visual effects, when twirled through the air, produced an extremely bright flow of energy that can be seen circling around the user.

The 8ft long carbon fiber staff was stuffed to the edges with RGB LEDs. Neopixel strips at 60 LED per meter were used to alternate between colors, and a whole bunch of white capable LEDs were embedded into the staff as well. One of early designs was purposefully left at a local hackerspace called Crashspace in Culver City, California. Photos of community members trying it out surfaced on the hackerspace’s website. In addition, a description of the staff and a few high-quality photos of the ‘Sparkle Stick’ were uploaded on to the Suprmasv projects page. Searching through the pictures reveal an instance that shows the LED light staff being used during a flow session with a fire poi spinner in the background. Perhaps there is a way to combine LEDs and fire? Anyways, a later version of the staff was tested out at the 2014 Maker Faire in San Francisco.

Full specs and logs of the project can be found on Hackaday.io. A quick video of [mpinner]’s light staff being spun around comes up after the break. In the video, it looks like they are testing it out outside of Crashspace as they run through the darkness of the alleyway in the back, lighting up the area with a nice LED glow. Plans for the future include building a bunch of them and wirelessly syncing them up. CAD models will be uploaded soon as well.

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The Counter-Strike Airsoft Robot

August 24, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 10 Comments

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[Jon] and his brother converted an RC car into a robot that can fire airsoft pellets into the air. The little motorized vehicle was disassembled and a handheld was attached to the top. A pulling mechanism was put in place and a safety procedure was added to make sure no accidents occurred.

The chassis stand was created to hold the handle. The setup was then tested at this point, and a Raspberry Pi server was configured to have a camera that would act as the eyes for the robot. Once everything was in place, the wheels hit the ground and the vehicle was able to move around, positioning itself to aim the servos at a designated target. Footage was transmitted via the web showing what the robot was looking at.

A video of the remote-controlled counter-strike robot can be seen after the break. You could consider this your toy army. That makes this one your toy air force.

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