The nice thing about Maker Faire is all of the fun projects you can try out for yourself. Trevor Blackwell brought his balancing scooter and electric unicycle for people to ride. We’ve got more photos from the Faire on Flickr.
Maker Faire Tomorrow
Will and I arrived safely in San Francisco and headed over to the Maker Faire to check out the setup. Well, we already found one thing we like FIRE. The venue is huge and we can’t wait to see everything tomorrow.
Iridium Flare Tracker
Iridium is a constellation of 66 communication satellites. Each one features 3 large polished antennas. The reflection of sunlight off of these panels causes brilliant flashes of light. Since the satellite’s orbit is known the time and location of these flares can be calculated ahead of time. C.L.I.V.E. is a project designed for Burning Man to assist in observing these flares. It has a DPSS laser mounted to a turntable that automatically points at the location of the next flare. A large clock counts down the time till the event. Everything is controlled by an Xport 2.0 FPGA development board for the Game Boy Advance. All power is provided by a solar array and wind turbines.
Barcode Scanner Based Line Follower
Brody thought it was high time we featured another robot project and directed us to his site: bfrdesign.com. For his line follower bot he used an old barcode scanner he found cheap at a junk shop. The scanner has a 2088 pixel ccd linear image sensor. Several red LEDs are used to illuminate the image and the data is fed to an ATmega8. The wheels are then driven using two Sanwa servos modified for continuous rotation. He’s got a couple other projects on the site and I’m sure we’ll see more in the future.
Touch Probe For 3D Scanning
Graham calls this touch probe his first useful milling project. He had already built the CNC mill and once he built this probe on the mill he essentially had a 3D scanner. The central hub is supported by three shafts spaced evenly around its axis. These shafts each rest on a pair of ball bearings to make a complete circuit. If the probe bumps into anything, one of the shafts will lift, breaking the circuit. TurboCNC has a built in routine for scanning with a touch probe. The program generates a point file which Graham pulled into Rhino for modeling. His example application was cloning a model airplane prop that had gone out of production. The TurboCNC routine isn’t very quick since the probe always returns to the same height so he’s coding a faster algorithm. This type of touch based scanning was also employed in agiecco’s LEGO 3D scanner.
Phase Change Cooling System
Chris Morrell has an impressive write up on all the ins and outs of building a phase change cooling system. Vapor refrigeration moves heat from one area to another by changing the phase of the working fluid. Chris used propane as the working fluid in his system. He’s got instructions covering all of the work involved from brazing the copper tubes, to building and lapping the evaporator blocks, to the final tuning. With no load it’s can hit -45DegC.
This story reminded me to check back on extremecorvette’s cascading cooler from last fall. He started receiving parts last month for a brand new design. I can’t wait to see how that turns out.
[via Paul Stamatiou]
$20 Fisheye Digital Camera
I know the camera pictured looks kind of wonky, “They just glued a peephole to a digicam, right?” The fisheye camera guide from Aggregate.org goes much further than that. They’ve tried out the $4 peephole lens on almost every camera in the office and have built dedicated ones using $15 pen cameras. I don’t plan on building one of these, but I did find their guide for removing “dark noise” from images really interesting. Sensor noise can be fairly consistent from shot to shot. So with some smart subtraction of a black frame from an image you can remove noise without blurring the image. They have information on masking and projection conversion as well.
