The first particles have been injected into the biggest atom smasher on the planet, marking the start of the countdown to probing the secrets of the universe. Scientists are pushing ahead with powering up the machine, shrugging off speculative fears that it could destroy all life on Earth by sucking it into a black hole. Starting up the biggest scientific experiment ever built is not as simple as flipping a switch.
Earlier this month, the successful injection of the first particles - protons - into part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, took place.
This weekend, scientists are hoping to complete testing of another part of the machine, which sits in a 17 mile circular tunnel approximately 100 metres underneath the Franco-Swiss border, with the aim of seeing particles travel the whole way around for the first time.
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Designed to fit on a breadboard, Ikalogic's frequency meter uses "only 3 components and 8 resistors" including an ATmega16 -
This article shows how to build a small, cheap and simple frequency meter, without any fancy, out of reach components. The simple proposed design can measure frequencies up to 40 Mhz with errors below 1%! This degree of precision will be more than enough to debug most of your analog and digital circuits, and will give you the ability to analyze many aspects that you were unable to see before.
The Touchkit multitouch interface project just released their hardware and software source docs for your downloading pleasure -
TouchKit is comprised of software and hardware components. For both we provide the source files and welcome you to use, study, and appropriate the code and schematics for your work or projects. We are interested in TouchKit being a plug-and-play solution for simple projects and an easily extendable base for experimental and cutting-edge endeavors.
[...]
The TouchKit API is implemented as an addon to OpenFrameworks. With "TouchKit API" we generally mean OpenFrameworks + ofxTouch. Together they form a powerful base for writing innovative multitouch applications. At the moment we specifically support Xcode (mac) and Code::Blocks (windows) with more IDEs following soon.
Ah, the summer. Everyone's a little lazy I guess eh? Get your head back in the game! Come join us for Make:NYC Meeting 8!
Challenge: Wind Power
Teams will battle head-to-head and be honored to build the most superior wind generator! Using basic building materials Make:NYC supplies, designs will be tested for power output and the ability to make us feel warm and fuzzy. Study your engineering books.
Show and Tell
Meet your fellow NYC Makers and show off your creations! Bring your gadgets, gizmos, sketches, ideas, anything you'd like to put in the spotlight. We encourage NYC Makers to collaborate on and discuss DIY projects. If you're planning to bring a project, drop us a note at meetings@makenyc.org.
If you'd like to attend we have plenty of space for everyone, but please RSVP!
Location:
NYC Resistor, 5th Floor (Google Map)
397 Bridge Street between Fulton Mall and Willoughby
Brooklyn, NY 11201
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Tomorrow night, you can get your classic game on at Game Over Videogames' last event of Classic Game Fest '08.
And, there's an outdoor screening of The King of Kong, a great if somewhat sad story of the ridiculous rivalry induced by Donkey Kong addiction.
Here's the full info:
Sign ups are at 8:00pm, but we highly suggest getting here early to guarantee you a spot in the tournament.
We will have a total of 64 player positions available (plus 3 alternates), and believe me, they will fill up FAST!!
In the interest of time, each match will be 4 players at a time (split-screen), and only the winner will advance to the next round. So basically, we'll go from 64 to 16 in round 1, then 16 to 4 in round 2, then the final four will compete in one final round to determine the over all champion.
All final four contestants will win cool prizes provided by Game Over Videogames - Plus bragging rights to all of your friends!!
The tournament will start at sundown (approximately 8:45 PM) and last until around 10:30pm.
Then, from 10:30pm until midnight, we'll be watching the awesome documentary - "KING OF KONG" about the challenger to the Donkey Kong world record. This movie is excellent - you will LOVE IT!!
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Here's a one-motor coat hanger walker I spotted on Flickr. It uses the same single-motor hacked servo and BEAM bicore circuit as the Jerome Demer's project I featured in my book, Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots, but the leg configuration is different than Jerome's and my bots, and the center of gravity is shifted (on ours, the battery packs are on either side of the servo case, here they are behind the servo). I know that some builders from my book ended up getting better traction by adding some weight to the back of the servo case, so some COG shift can be a good thing. I'd like to see this one in action to see the walking gate/stability.
Next time you're wandering around west Texas, don't shoot that feral pig that wonders into your path. Instead, adopt him and gain a cattle-herding, 400-pound friend.
But please don't feed him pizza with pepperoni on top: that's just creepy:
Mark Applebaum is a musician (and professor at Stanford) who makes incredibly complex sound sculptures from found objects. (Via DeepFun)
The instruments consist of threaded rods, nails, wire strings stretched through a series of pulleys and turnbuckles, plastic combs, bronze braising rod blow-torched and twisted, doorstops, shoehorns, ratchets, steel wheels, springs, lead and PVC pipe, corrugated copper plumbing tube, Astroturf, parts from a Volvo gearbox, a metal Schwinn bicycle logo, and, indeed, mousetraps. It was great fun to collect this stuff and particularly satisfying to cause anxiety and suspicion among the hardware clerks who nervously eyed me as I conducted investigations of the acoustical properties of their wares. It was a feeling of accomplishment when, weeks into my research, the same salesmen would excitedly welcome me into the store, giddy with their own myopia-shedding epiphanies: "Mark, listen to how this thing sounds when you hit it with this!" My project became an informal and unexpected arts outreach program.
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The University of Tokyo's Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory focusses their research on sensory information and relevant technologies. The lab's "Haptic Radar / Extended Skin Project" uses body mounted range sensors and small vibrating motors to alert the wearer of any approaching objects -
We are developing a wearable and modular device allowing users to perceive and respond to spatial information using haptic cues in an intuitive and unobstrusive way.The system is composed of an array of "optical-hair modules", each of which senses range information and transduces it as an appropriate vibro-tactile cue on the skin directly beneath it. An analogy for our artificial sensory system in the animal world would be the cellular cilia, insect antennae, as well as the specialized sensory hairs of mammalian whiskers.
The "Wind" project is a real-time digital sonification by Damian Stewart that uses wind to generate musical compositions in real-time. The project was built with a consumer quality DV camera, tripod, and a custom software application that feeds raw data to a Pure Data patch that applies it to an array of oscillators tuned to a pentatonic scale. Interesting use of nature as an input and the resulting sound is pretty soothing.
Arduino polishes up its navigation skills via an inexpensive compass sensore component -
A small digital compass based on hall effect is connected to an Arduino 10000 board. The logic in the board turns on and off leds depending on direction. There are 4 leds, one for each in N,S,W,E. When two leds are ON the direction is in the middle (es. NW). The digital compass chip (the white cylinder) comes from http://www.dinsmoresensors.com/ and costs 10$
This is the perfect project for all those people who love Twitter. As if sending Tweets about every aspect of your life wasn't enough, now your house can join the fun. It looks like a fairly easy project to implement, and a lot of fun too! You could adapt this project to Tweet almost anything.
This AC motor is really easy to build and the supplies are readily available. All you need are some magnets, wire, and rigid foam. Just be careful when working with AC power!
This project started one night while I was lying in bed trying to visualize how an AC motor worked. I knew that it was different from a DC motor as in it did not require brushes and the speed was controlled by frequency instead of voltage. After some research I came up with this project to better my understanding of AC motors.
Formants is an interactive artwork by Erin Gee. The piece plays .wav files when magnetic sensors detect the hair being brushed. It is all powered by our favorite little micro-controller, the Arduino.
