USB Motion Detector

USB Motion Detector
Turn your PC into an ambush multimedia
Ken Delahoussaye | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

Gone are the days when people's interest could
be held by simple radio or television. Today we're
bombarded with information and we crave interac-
tive experiences that don't waste a single second
of our time. Advertisers recognize the difficulty of
presenting messages that cut through the clutter,
and they've come up with creative ways to capture
our attention.

One example: the multimedia kiosk, now common
in shopping malls, movie theaters, and airports.
Complete with an internal computer, sound card,
and video graphics monitor, these dazzle stations
can be a powerful advertising tool --- especially
when they have motion detection circuitry that
triggers a video presentation at the precise moment
an unsuspecting patron comes near.

This article explains how to construct a USB
motion detector that will give your computer this
hey-you ability, using a free Windows presentation
applet I wrote, USB Multimedia Presenter, so that you
can start your own kiosk advertising campaign. You
can also use the setup for practical jokes, or just to
amaze or amuse your friends.
...

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Hacking The Glade Wisp

Hacking The Glade Wisp
Make your own scent output peripheral from a piezo air freshner
Wayne Holder | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 1 mb

Not long ago, my 11-year-old daughter Belle wanted
to create a gadget that would amuse her dog Panda
by dispensing different scents for him to sniff. I had
no idea how to control the dispensing of fragrances,
so we took a trip to the local pharmacy and checked
out the electric air fresheners.

Most of them diffused fragrances with heat or fans,
but one, the Glade Wisp, claimed to use a microchip
to "automatically puff" scented oils into the air.
Intrigued, I bought one to see what made it tick.

The Glade Wisp runs off a single AA battery, which
powers a vibrating piezoelectric disc that atomizes
and disperses aromatic oil in short, smoke-like puffs.
The Wisp turns out to be easy to hack --- for less than
$10 you can make a computer-controlled aromatic
atomizer for all sorts of practical and artistic projects.

Here's how I modified a Wisp to be controlled by an
Arduino board running just a few lines of code.
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The Disembodied Voice of Judy Garland Speaks!

The Disembodied Voice of Judy Garland Speaks!
How to make a Ghost Phone
Greg MacLaurin | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

Currently, I'm obsessed with analog telephones.
I don't know why. My last obsession was with the
severed hands of mummies, but let's not get into
that. Today it's phones. And these Ghost Phones are
fun. The idea is simple: hide an MP3 player and its
headphone inside an old analog telephone, and you
can listen to someone talking to you!

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Chumby Phone

Chumby Phone
Daniel Gentleman | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

There's no simple explanation of the Chumby. It's an
alarm clock on steroids, a digital photo album, a tiny
Linux box, an internet radio player, and more. Owners
can set up a queue of personalized software widgets
through which the Chu mby continually cycles. These
widgets, made interactive through the Chumby's
touchscreen and motion sensors, include news,
weather, email notifications. Flickr feeds, Facebook
friend status, and even Netflix queue status.

Above all, Chumby's open design welcomes
hacking and crafting. The creators of Chumby
offer not only their entire base of source code,
but the schematics to their hardware as well, at
chumby.com/developers/hardware (login required).
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Paulownia Archery Bows

Paulownia Archery Bows
Dan Albert | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 2 mb

When we took possession of our humble London
home, I was shocked to find that all the window
treatments had been removed. So we suffered
the rat-in-a-maze Ikea gantlet to get a good price
on new Venetian blinds. I hung the new blinds
immediately but it took me months to get around
to tailoring them by removing the extra slats.
As soon as I did, I realized that I had a maker's
trifecta win in my hands: easily worked hardwood,
prefinished and free.

First I built a new box for our kitchen plastic wrap,
then my daughter wanted some doll furniture. Next
was a laminated beam to repair our baby stroller,
and a few slats to serve as drawer dividers for the
clothes dresser I'd built ages ago but never quite
finished. But the piece de resistance was a set of
archery bows that I whipped up to the delight of the
neighborhood kids.
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Remote Volume Knob

Remote Volume Knob
Paulo Rebordao | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | 1 mb

There's nothing like hard work to get your mind
running. Having to get up from the couch to adjust
the volume on my old stereo amp several times
each night got me thinking. I didn't want to buy
a new stereo, so I came up with a plug-in remote
volume controller that you can easily adapt to
anything with a reasonable-sized volume knob.

My circuit uses a Picaxe-08M microcontroller,
which is programmable in BASIC, and a TSOP2238
infrared receiver, which sees signals from any
Sony (or compatible) TV remote. The removable
device hangs off the volume knob, attached with
velcro.

At the top, an R/C servomotor turns the knob
through about 180° of travel, which should be
enough range for most environments. At the
bottom, 3 AA batteries act as a "keel," weighing
that end down so that the knob is forced to turn.
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Twinkle Toes

Twinkle Toes
Add a flashing, tricolor UFO to your roller skates
Dan Bassak | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

Skatetown is our local roller rink in Bloomsburg, Pa.
For years, it's also been my artistic LED experiment
laboratory. I started by taping single-color LEDs to
skates. They were so popular that one session on
the floor looked like a swarm of fireflies.

My latest LED invention is the UFO Toe Stop. It
uses a disk-shaped "flying saucer" unit that con-
tains a red, green, and blue (RGB) LED. I wanted to
blend the colors in interesting ways, so I wired it to
a PIC-controlled RGB microcontroller that comes
with programmed routines such as fixed colors,
fast-changing rainbows, or dazzling strobe effects.

I also used some translucent jam plugs (small
bolt covers used in skate dancing) that I bought in
the rink's pro shop as light diffusers.
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G-Meter and Altimeter

G-Meter and Altimeter
Double-duty aerospace instrument on a shoestring budget
David Simpson | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

Here's an aerospace instrument you can build for
$5 that will measure the crushing forces that a
model rocket withstands and the rarified strata it
attains. It isn't exactly six-sigma technology in
terms of accuracy, but it's darn fun.

The device, which you install in the rocket's
payload compartment, uses 2 small bands of
heat-shrink tubing that slide over a dowel to record
the maximum G-force and altitude attained. As
the rocket accelerates, the G-force band is pushed
down by washers on a spring, and as the rocket
rises, the altitude band is pushed down the rod by
the expansion of a pressure chamber made from a
pill bottle and a rubber-balloon membrane.
...

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Pole's-Eye View

Pole's-Eye View
William Gurstelle | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 9 pgs | 3 mb

A POLE-MOUNTED
AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY RIG

Sometimes nothing is as important
as perspective. My goal in photography
is often to find a view no one else has
found, to be able to see things from
unusual and insightful vantage points.

The most practical way to obtain the
elusive aerial perspective is by attaching
a camera to a pole. While not trivial, it's
not complicated, either. Making a pole-
mounted camera rig like the Sky Eye
takes about a day, not including trips to
the store. You can make the rig and
use it the same day.
...

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Chatter Telephone

Chatter Telephone
Surprise! A classic pull-toy phone that realy works
Frank E. Yost | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 2 mb

I remember making pretend phone calls on my
Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone when I was 7 or 8,
and wondering if it was possible to turn it into a
real phone. That question stayed with me, and when
I saw a Chatter Telephone and a Crosley Princess
Telephone recently at Target, I knew the answer was
yes. I brought them home and made it work, and it
was easier than I expected.

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Chladni Plate

Chladni Plate
Edwin Wise | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 11 pgs | 3 mb

BEATIFUL ACOUSTICS
Use a broken speaker, bits of wire, and
tape to prepare a coneless voice coil
driver, then use it to generate standing
waves on a sheet of metal, making
sound visible. Magic!

My knowledgeable friend Robin once
said that you don't need to worry about
having too big an audio amplifier,
because speakers are usually damaged
by under-powered amps working too hard
and clipping the signal, creating rough
square waves with too much power.
I learned that this is true when I melted
a speaker's coil by running a strong
20Hz signal through it, to drive a vortex
cannon (MAKE, Volume 15, page 114).

On the bright side, I now had a nice
speaker magnet to use as the foundation
for something else I wanted to try,
a Chladni plate!
...

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5-Minute Foam Factory

5-Minute Foam Factory
Bob Knetzger | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 9 pgs | 3 mb

FRY BY WIRE
What keeps your coffee warm but also
rides the cold Pacific surf? What's in the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but makes an
annoying, squeaky sound? Even though
it's banned in over 100 cities, you can
find it just about everywhere. What is it?
It's expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam.

Styrofoam is a great insulator (for hot drink
cups and wall insulation), lightweight and
stiff, and impervious to water (great for
surfboards). Unfortunately, it's also
impractical to recycle and can be an
unsightly part of the waste stream. Our
landfills and waterways are filling up with
discarded coffee cups, store meat trays,
and take-out packaging.

With this easy hot-wire foam cutter, you
can reuse this leftover EPS foam to create
treasures from trash!
...

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DIY-brary

DIY-brary
Rick and Megan Prelinger couldn't find a library
with what they wanted, so they made their own
R.U. Sirius | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | pgs | mb

It's an overcast Monday afternoon as I arrive at
8th and Folsom in San Francisco's seedy, bohe-
mian SOMA district. I find 3018th Street and then
buzz Room 215. A voice says hello. I tell him who
I am and he buzzes me in. I take an elevator to the
second floor, walk past several closed offices, and
enter a small room packed to the rafters with four
rows of shelves filled with books stacked 15 feet
high. This is not your typical 21st-century urbane.
haute-culture library.

The Prelinger Library (prelingerlibrary.org) is
the brainchild of Megan Shaw Prelinger and Rick
Prelinger. Founded in 2004, it's a DIY, appropriation-
friendly, intuitive, and highly personalized context for
organizing and sharing this couple's books, periodi-
cals, printed ephemera (like obscure government
documents from the Department of Indian Affairs),
and - most of all - their obsessions. In addition to
its physical presence in San Francisco. it has an on-
line presence of more than 3.000 scanned volumes
at the Internet Archive (archive.org).
...

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Wheelchair Safety System

Wheelchair Safety System
Bryant Underwood | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 1 pgs | .4 mb

My daughter Katy uses an electric wheelchair
and last year she went off to college. Her mom and
I were concerned about Katy's safety in navigating
the campus -- she might get her chair stuck or have
some other type of trouble and not be able to get to
her cellphone.

So I used a Parallax microcontroller to control
a GSM cellphone as a "telematics" system for her
wheelchair. Inside the gray box mounted on the
back of her chair. I use the phone in speakerphone
mode with an external microphone and speaker.
...

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Alien Projector

Alien Projector
Brian McNamara | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 1 pgs | .2 mb

This simple projector shines an image of an alien
on the wall. It uses an LED as the light source and
projects an image varying in size from a few inches
to several feet.The simple circuit consists of only a
battery, resistor, switch, and LED.

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