24 Hours of Make: Television

24 Hours of Make: Television
Building a TV show is a project in itself

Dale Dougherty | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 1 mb
It's already late on a Sunday in September in
St. Paul, Minn. In the studios of Twin Cities Public
Television (TPT), there are ten people working
on Make: television, a new PBS show that will be
a companion to this magazine.

The set is a workshop, within a larger workshop
normally used for set construction. The team is
shooting a build for Maker Workshop, the segment
that shows viewers how to make something in each
episode. It's important to get this segment right. It's
like demonstrating a recipe on a cooking show, but
the ingredients and the process are more technical.
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The Spinning Cylinder Illusion

The Spinning Cylinder Illusion
Donald Simanek | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

I've not been able to track down the origin of
this homemade toy, but it isn't very well known
outside the community of physics teachers. It's
a kinetic illusion, one that depends on physical
motion to make you see something that isn't there.

A familiar example of a kinetic illusion is the
strobe effect sometimes seen in old movies, causing
the spokes of a carriage wheel to seem to be turning
in the wrong direction.

In its simplest form, this toy consists of a hollow
cylinder of rigid plastic. The version in these photos
is 4cm long and 1cm in diameter, with 2mm wall
thickness. It was cut from a piece of polyethylene
plastic tubing that happened to be lying on my
workbench. Whatever tubing you use, be sure to
choose a very straight piece.
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Shadowless Closeups

Shadowless Closeups
A simple setup for better auction photos
Charles Platt | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .3 mb

A friend of mine used to take the photographs for the sales catalogs printed by Sotheby's, the old-school auction house. Since many of the items up for sale were worth tens of thousands of dollars, they had to look good.

When I'm selling little items on eBay, I think it's still worth taking a little trouble to enhance their appearance instead of just using a flash photo of something sitting on a kitchen table. The main thing I learned from my friend is that if you place an object on an elevated glass plate and use a large, diffuse light source, your object will seem to float in space instead of sitting on its own shadow.
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Create an Insect Eye

Create an Insect Eye
Make a multifaceted image from any portrait photo
Charles Platt | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .4 mb

I wanted an insect-eye effect in Photoshop, but I wasn't satisfied with the ones that I found as plugins. So I made my own. This procedure works with Photoshop 6 or later.

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Flipping Faces

Flipping Faces
Reveal the assymetry in familiar features--- including your own
Erico Narita | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .3 mb

None of us is perfectly symmetrical, but our eyes tend not to notice irregularities in faces we see many times. Anyone watching national TV news, for instance, had eight years to get familiar with Dick Cheney's lopsided grin, and a previous generation had an equal amount of time to get used to Ronald Reagan's crooked smile.

To see these features more clearly, select one half of the face and reflect it, so that the 2 sides become identical. Then select the other half and reflect that, and compare the 2 versions. The results will be surprising.

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Warholize!

Warholize!
Turn your favorite blonde into a silk-screened glamour queen
James Grant | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .3 mb

When Andy Warhol made his famous silk-screened prints of Marilyn Monroe, he started with a simple idea: use a high-contrast black-and-white photo, and overprint it with bold swatches of color. Is that idea simple enough for us to emulate it with modern image-editing software? Let's find out. This will work in Photoshop 6 or later versions.

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Surface Mount Soldering

Surface Mount Soldering
Techniques for making modern circuits
Scott Driscoll | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 8 pgs | 2 mb

When cellphones were housed in briefcases,
manufactured electronics had easy-to-solder
leads. Now phones fit in pockets, and the smaller
surface-mount devices (SMDs) inside are driving
through-hole components into extinction.

SMDs can cost less than their old-school equiva-
lents, and many newer devices, including most
accelerometers, are only available in SMD format.

If you design printed circuit boards, using
SMT (surface-mount technology) and putting
components on both sides makes them cheaper
and smaller. This may not matter on a robot, but it
helps a project fit into a mint tin or hang off a kite.

SMDs are designed for precise machinery to
mass-assemble onto densely packed PCBs. Their
tiny leads may look impossible for human hands
to work with, but there are several good, relatively
inexpensive methods that don't require a $1,000-
and-up professional SMT soldering station.

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Sparky 2: No Sellout

Sparky 2: No Sellout
My robotic alter ego steps out -- open source
Marque Cornblatt | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

I spent much of my childhood dismantling toys
and gadgets and cobbling them back together in
interesting ways. One proud example combined
a slot car, a one-function wireless remote, a 9-volt
battery, and a few fabricated gears and bits to
create (in my mind, in the early 80s) the world's
smallest remote control car.

The 2-inch vehicle was top-heavy and had too
much torque, but it accelerated violently to the
right every time I pressed the remote button -- it
worked! - until it finally tore itself apart, like a tiny
top-fuel dragster. In my mind it was a success, and
it sparked my lifelong interest in interactive, kinetic
projects.
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Great Balls of Fire!

Great Balls of Fire!
Keith Hammond | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 5 pgs | 2 mb

It's true: chemistry sets today don't measure up
to the classic kits that once scorched Formica
kitchen tables across the nation. But you can
still find respectable kits if you know where to look.
More importantly, anyone can make their own flam-
ing, fuming, booming DIY chemistry set as good as
those from the golden age - or better.

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