I would love to make one of these for my house. A gigantic LED that is actually built using 12 real LED’s for the light and are a 20 to 1 scale. These LED’s were designed and built by Kei Yamamoto.
I just received an email about ponoko.com. What is it you ask? I had a hard time trying to figure that out myself at first, but after toiling through the site to find the FAQ, I found out that it is a very cool application/product. Ponoko is a laser cutting site that allows you to design something to be laser cut, whether it’s 2d art or a 3d piece of furniture. They have great starter templates that you can download and use in multiple different applications. Then, when your design is ready you have 3 options: You can ‘Browse & Buy’, ‘Make & Sell’, or ‘Mingle & Share’. The site About page says the following:
Ponoko is the world’s first personal manufacturing platform. It’s the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand. The ponoko.com marketplace connects creators, consumers, digital manufacturing hardware and service providers to promote, make and trade products on Ponoko and social networking websites.
I’m not sure how much the printing and laser cutting will cost, but it’s a great idea. Let’s hope people use it.
I’m currently exploring adding an accelerometer to a project I am working on. The most difficult part so far is figuring out how much tilt you should allow before executing an action. Accelerometers can be extremely sensitive, which is great for mainstream applications like the Wii and Nike running sneakers but I need much less sensitivity. That said, I found a great Processing application to visually show what your Arudino and accelerometer are doing, and how fast they are moving.
I found this cool site with lots of Wii and Atmel AVR controller hacks called Wind Meadow. There isn’t really much info on who runs it, other than some posts by ‘Chad’, but there are some great tutorials. Out of all the great hacks and projects worth looking at is definitely the ‘Wiimote Controlled Firefighting Robot’. ‘Chad’, also has a great tutorial (code included) showing you how to hookup a Wiimote to a microcontroller. If you’re wondering why there is so much interest in doing this vs just buying an accelerometer, it’s because the Wiimote costs $39 and there are lots of goodies inside including a 3 axis accelerometer which is $40 alone from most electronics sites. Anyway, check out the site when you have a chance.
I just got my fancy new LilyPad Ardunios. I have a few ideas for fun projects I can make with them, but I think to start out with I am going to aim for a practical execution: Idea #1 A heated jacket with different levels of, well, heat. I’d probably have to use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to make the different heat levels, but I’ll figure that out later. Idea #2 A jacket with LED arrows that I can activate when I’m riding my bike at night, that way people behind me know which direction I am going to turn. Don’t steal that idea, patent pending.
UPDATE: We just found out that the software to program the LilyPad is not available until October 10th from ardunio.cc
These guys made a punching bag out of homemade sensors. They took pieces of wire mesh and soldered them together with some foam in between to create pressure sensitive foam. It’s all hooked up to the Arduino in a matrix and they were nice enough to post the code, tutorials and Processing files needed to recreate this project. I don’t think I have the need, or the space for that matter, to build a pressure sensitive punching bag, but I could definitely use a concept like this on some wearable clothing hooked up to a LilyPad.
October 11-13 next week is the 11th ISWC (International Symposium on Wearable Computers). This year it’s being held in Boston and they have some great tutorials scheduled including Building Soft Computers: 1. Materials, Techniques, and Tools. 2. Introduction to Designing Mobile Applications with On-body Sensing. 3. The Role of Design in Wearable Computing, and 4. Wearable Technologies for Persons with Autism Spectrum Conditions.
It seems like a really interesting conference with an impressive lineup of speakers, workshops and discusssions. I’m going to be in Boston around the same time giving a talk at SND so I might try and sneak over there and see what they are up to. Anyone planning on attending this?
When it comes to micro controllers most of us at NYC Resistor really love the Arduinoâ€â€it’s fun, CHEAP, easy to use and it’s all the rage these days. So, when we found out about the new LilyPads ($19.95 from Sparkfun), wearable Arduino’s, you can imagine how excited we were. LilyPads are fully functional micro controllers that you can sew into clothing or any other type of interesting material. The board is based on the ATmega168V (the low-power version of the ATmega168). We’re currently working on some ideas and projects we can use our Lilypads for, right now we have a ‘belt that points north’ and a ‘heated jacket’ so we don’t have to worry about paying those heating bills this winter!