Hello!
It's Fall, holy crap where did the summer go? Congratulations to Amanda and Mike!
Who went to Maker Faire? I went on the Saturday and ran into Thor, Alex and Heather on the subway, which was very cool. I had a pretty good time. I saw a swingset which had pouring water on top but as you swung through the water, it stopped pouring. A motion sensor shut off the water making you think you would get wet but you didn't. I liked the EMF detector which lit up when you used an old cell phone to make a call. Microsoft had a booth there, showing off the $150 Kinect w free SDK. A friend tells me he will lend me a Kinect and I am psyched to play with it. I have a cool idea for projecting avatars.
I also attended the Open Hardware summit the Thursday before Maker Faire. Where to begin! If you are interested in Making, and especially as Making becomes a Real Industry, attend this next year. Unexpectedly, there was quite a bit of business-y convos and how to market and sell your product. Bunnie from Chumby talked about how fast computers will get before they can't get faster using Moore's Law to illustrate (OK I didn't totally get that one). CERN was there. The guy who used to own Instructables gave a talk. Yeah, that's right, Instructables got bought by Autodesk and Makerbot got a 10M investment. So Makerbot is off and running presumably with New Stuff. YEAH!
Burning Man- ahhhhhh, it's always hard to come back to the real world. So much creativity, so many smart people, the projects, the engineering, the love. I brought a project out, shipped 6 boxes full of electronics. My project surrounded you with your own heartbeat by using an oximeter sensor to trigger subwoofer heartbeat sound and light. It was enjoyed by a lot of people, and I enjoyed having a project there even more. I saw a really cool Kinect based music project. you used your body to play an instrument. fascinating. I encourage you all to look up pictures of the BM artwork from this year. Mindblowing.
Sophi
I was at maker faire on Sunday.
One of my favorite things there was the crude mockup of a low tech wind powered generator. It was made with cheap surplus magnets stuck around scotch tape "reeds" that vibrated and induced a low voltage that blinked LED strips. He illustrated it with a fan, and he said that he did not engineer anything, no math, just built it spur of the moment and it's a proof of concept. I immediately pictures these on the sides of highways, lighting up the road in front of you as you sped by...
It was a fantastic day, although very overwhelming. There was at least 100 people running 3-D printers of various types. Also some CNC lathes cutting toy cars and trucks out of wood. I looked for the CNC Laser Cutter sponser Epilog Laser, but I did not find them. I wished the 3-D printer people had more useful display objects to better support the practical uses of a 3-D printer. Most of what they had were trinkets and sculptures, although very cool to look at, I was hoping for more. Next year, I can't wait.
The $100 dollar submarine, and the $100 ultralight RC plane were also highlights.
Would anyone be interested in building the plane as a project?
http://brooklynaerodrome.com/build1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp_z5Kwpdh8
Jeff - I would definitely be interested in building one. I saw something similar a while back where the motivating design point was making the body cheap enough to battle with them. The battles were basically demolition derby style: bash the other guys plane until it doesn't fly anymore. The bodies are cheap enough and easy enough to manufacture that even after a loss you could be back in the air in a few minutes with some practice.
Sophi - Any pics of your piece and/or people enjoying it?
Hahahaha Battle!!!!
There were pics of both Burning Man and the HB dome up on FB, but I just quit FB this morning (naturally in a total hissy fit). I'll put them up on G+
Or here: http://mix-engineering.com/heartbeat-dome/
Sophi