FORMING LASTING IMPRESSIONS
From take-out coffee lids to airplane
interior panels, vacuum-formed plastic
is everywhere. And for good reason:
vacuum forming makes light, durable,
and cool-looking 3D parts. Here's how
to cook some up in your kitchen.
You know what irritates me? I drive out to the dump, pay my five bucks to get in, and the only bikes laying around are those goofy granny bikes from the late 1970s. OK - enough whining - a real chopper artist can chop any bike, even a crusty old codger cruiser.
Here's how I hacked and welded a granny bike into something evil. Normally, I wouldn't even bother with a bike like this because it has a lugged frame. This means that the head tube and bottom bracket are just press-fit and brazed into place, rather than welded. You can't salvage lugged joints for most projects because they have holes where the tubing fits together, and brazing filler metal interferes with arc welding. But this project was doable as long as I kept most of the frame intact.
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After buying an Pod mini a couple of years ago, I started experimenting with ways of extending its battery life. First I tried the Perfectmate hand-cranked flashlight/charger, only to find out that it takes up to 20 minutes of cranking to generate just enough power to boot the device. As well as making me appreciate how much power today's lithium-ion batteries can hold, this got me thinking about otherways to human-power my Pod.
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Faced with an assignment to make a plush night
light. I thought, "Why light?" and brainstormed
reasons for a stuffed toy to light up. In a glowworm
toy, for instance, the light mimics nature. I'd been
reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma,
and this got me thinking about the chain of refrig-
eration, labor, and irradiation involved in American
beef production. So I thought. glowing irradiated
meat! I know that irradiated meat doesn't glow, and
neither does toxic waste unless it's in a cartoon, but
plush toys typically represent cartoon characters
anyway, so it made sense: Plush Irradiated Sirloin.
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One thing that disappoints me about computers is
how little character they possess. Antique instruments
of information display, like Victorian pendulum
clocks, barometers, and compasses, and Babbage's
calculating engines, have a presence that modern
computers lack.
I dig the look of the iPod as much the next guy, but
even the best manufacturing design today doesn't
match that old brass-and-hardwood handcrafted
love. Desktop widgets replace the need for clocks,
barometers and stock tickers, and multipurpose
display hardware like the Ambient Orb also per-
form these functions. But because these things have
little presence and are so easily reconfigured, it's
easy to forget what information they're displaying.
Does the meter's sudden plunge mean my Gocgle
stock tanked, or that it's going to rain tomorrow?
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These days, many people don't even have landline-
based telephone service; they get all their calls on
their mobile and office phones. But once I settle in
at home, I want people to be able to call me on a
nice, comfortable cordless phone, even if it's Iost in
the couch. At home, the cordless battery is always
charged, and it doesn't matter if I'm in a fringe
mobile service area.
If you already have a broadband connection, you
can get a home phone without paying for POTS
(plain old telephone service) cra Vonage style
digital phone service. Here's now to do it the easier
way, without having to run your own private branch
exchange (PBX) Asterisk server.
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In the expanding universe of microcontroller boards,
the MAKE Controller Kit fills the space between
the easy, cheap Arduino and the more complex,
powerful Gumstix devices.The low-powerArduino
runs 8-bit machine code and can only do one thing
at a time. The Linux-based Gumstix can do what a
Linux-powered PC can do.
The MAKE Controller has the advantages of both,
thanks to its FreeRTOS operating system; it can
run multiple tasks simultaneously but also lets you
allocate processor time more explicitly than you
could under Linux. Because you need to know C, it's
a little more complicated to program than Arduino,
but still easier to use than the Linux-based Gumstix.
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For this project. I wanted to make something
that reminded me of many beautiful phenomena
of summer nights: crickets, chirping frogs. and
fireflies. By day, the lamps seem ordinary; they sit
and charge their batteries like all their unaltered
cousins. But as the sun goes down, each one
starts blinking and chirping. The sound and rate
of their song are determined by the temperature,
the amount of sun they receive, and the natural
variance of their components. The emergent quality
of dozens together can be fascinating. This project
has a certain affinity to BEAM robotics (see MAKE,
Volume 06, page 76).
Kids want night lights, they just don't want them
to look like night lights because that makes them
"babies." Here's a shining star made from things you
can pick up at a dollar store. Call it a "mood light,"
and no one has to admit that they use a night light.
Solderless protoboards are a convenient way to
build electronic circuits, but interconnecting several
boards gets messy. Adding input and output (I/O)
components such as switches, potentiometers,
jacks, and LEDs requires drilling, wiring, and stuffing
it all into a box, where it's hard to debug and modify.
A nicer approach, which I borrowed from early
analog synthesizers, is to build handy modules that
carry one protoboard each and plug into a rack.
Each module carries its protoboard underneath,
and the circuit's I/O components are on a visible
and easily reachable front panel, just like any other
device that hides its complex circuitry inside and
exposes only the controls and connectors.
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Acoustic instruments radiate sound in a wonder-
fully complex, 360° fashion, while conventional
loudspeakers project a boring spotlight of sound.
You can spend a ton of money on a fancy spherical
audio array, or you can build one for cheap out of
2 IKEA salad bowls and 8 surplus car speakers.
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Punkin Chunkin (punkinchunkin.com) began
officially 21 years earlier, when its three founders
met informally to build hurling machines capable
of flinging leftover Halloween pumpkins. Little by
little, the hurlers improved their machines, and
every year the pumpkins flew a bit farther. Things
changed radically in 1995 when Trey Melson, one
of the co-founders of the event, upped the ante.
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This competition isn't about money or trophies or
even the teardrop-shaped mass of gooey pumpkin
flesh a mile away in the middle of a Delaware farmer's
field. It's about pride. It's about being the best, about
setting a goal and achieving it. When told of the time
and money invested in making these guns, a lot of
people simply smile and shake their heads. But not
real makers. Real makers understand.
