[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v80VvQLj4Xc&w=580]
Why not round out our two-week Bay Area Maker Faire coverage with a Links post? This time around it’s video links. We mixed together a bunch of interesting clips that didn’t get their own video, as well as a dose of what it feels like to walk around the Faire all weekend. Join us after the break for the links.
Continue reading “Video Links: Hunting For Hacks At Maker Faire”
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge4H4Uw630o&w=580]
Meet the second version of [David’s] sand manicuring CNC machine. We saw version one about six months ago which he built for a science museum in Canada. This offering is much the same, except for the controller. The initial version demanded a full-blow computer to drive it but now that has been swapped out in favor of a Beaglebone Black.
The software has no feedback on the position of the plotter, which is an aluminum slug that [David] machined at Calgary Protospace. It needs to be in a specific position when the machine starts out, and from there patterns are traced by calculating how much spooling or unspooling of the four strings will move the slug.
There’s a bunch of other really neat art installations and projects on [David’s] webpage, it’s worth clicking through!
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXW76ESIv6k&w=580]
We spent a little bit of time at the TI booth at Maker Faire to film a pair of interviews. The first is with [Bill Esposito] who is grinding away on his PhD. at Stanford. He’s showing off an Analog Shield for Arduino. He describes it as “an attempt to bring the analog bench to an Arduino shield”. We think this is a fantastic idea as most who are learning digital electronics through Arduino have little or no experience with analog circuitry. This is a nice gateway drug for the concepts.
The analog shield has a supply good for +/- 7.5 volts, 4-channel ADC, 4-channel DAC, and gets 100k samples at 16-bits. He showed us a spectrum analyzer using Fast Fourier Transform on the incoming signal from a microphone. He also built a function generator around the shield. And finally a synthesizer which plays MIDI files.
In the second half of the video we take a look at [Trey German’s] work on a PCB-based quadcopter. His goal is to reduce the power consumption which will equate to longer flying times. To this end he chose the DRV8312 and a Piccolo to control each sensorless, brushless DC motor. The result should be 10% lower power consumption that his previous version.
We went to “the dark room” at Maker Faire once more for an interview with [Sarah] of Robot-Army. She and [Mark], who handles software development for the project, were showing off 30 delta robots who know how to dance. Specifically they’re dancing in unison to the movements of another faire-goer. A Kinect sensor monitors those movements and translates them to matching motions from the deltabots.
You should remember seeing this project back in November. Now that the standards for this model have been worked out it was just a matter of sinking about three-weeks into assembling the army. We’re happy to see that the Kickstarter made it to 250% of the goal at the beginning of March, and with that there are even bigger plans. [Sarah] says the goal remains to fill a room with the robots and a we may even see a much larger version some day.
The interview is a bit short since the Robot-Army booth was right next to Arc Attack (hence the noise-cancelling headphones) and we had to try to get in and out between their ear-drum-shattering interruptions. But you can see a ton more about the project in this huge build log post over on Hackaday.io. Also check out the Robot-Army webpage. There’s a nice illustration of their adventures at MFBA and the foam Jolly Wrencher made it into the piece!
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We had [Mark] on our “dance card” for people to find at Maker Faire. But before we could track him down he bumped into us holding the TIQ Probe in one hand and a testing box in the other. TIQ is conceived in the form factor of a traditional logic probe but thanks to the Cypress PSoC 5LP inside it’s much, much smarter than the decades-old bench tools. Sure, it can tell you if that uC pin is a 1 or a 0, but it can also detect what type of signal it’s probing and has built-in protection for over-voltage.
The point of the tool is to bridge the gap between things which would be measured with a DMM and those measured with a proper Oscilloscope. We think he did a pretty good job of including the things that someone just starting out without expensive bench equipment might want. For instance, you can set it to trigger on common data protocols like i2c, and use the probe itself as a rudimentary pulse generator.
The bulk of the details on the probe can be found on its Kickstarter page (which has just a few days left). You may also be interested in his company page. We’re curious about the insides of the test rig he was hauling around. [Mark] is a regular reader so hopefully he’ll leave a comment below with the details of that black box.
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Hanging out at one side of the Atmel booth at Maker Faire was [Pamungkas Sumasta] who was showing off his Arduino cellphone called Phoenard. We really like the form-factor but its hackability is where it really shines. [Sumasta] showed off the menu system which is quite snappy and makes it simple for you to add your own applications. Software isn’t the only thing you can customize, as there’s a connector at the bottom of the phone. He showed off a breadboard attachment which was hosting LEDs of various colors. Their intensity can be altered using a simple slider app on the touchscreen. But there’s more power if want it. Also on exhibit was a self-balancing robot body which has a connector at the top for the phone.
[Sumasta] won the Atmel Hero contest and we assume that’s how he made it all the way to San Francisco from The Netherlands for Maker Faire. You can learn a few more technical details about Phoenard on the Facebook page.
We ran into [Garrett Mace] at Maker Faire. He wasn’t exhibiting, but in keeping with the fun he made something to show off. This pair of RGB LED Shades was assembled the night before. They may have been hacked together, but they were in no way a hack. Especially of interest to us is the hinge design which is made of PCB substrate and a few machine screws.
Our video above does a pretty good job of showing off the blinky patterns he coded. What’s surprising to us is that the wearer is almost no view of the light the specs are emitting. The slots aren’t that hard to see out of either, and they hide [Garrett’s] prescription glasses quite nicely. This pair steps up from the single color version we saw a couple of years back. That set was also on display, but you really do need to get a closer look at the newer design. Luckily it took us so long to get this video edited that the Macetech blog now has complete details.
