Other ape news

OMG it's like something out of Fallout 3, only real. And I want one. Or at least a Lego version of one, with an awesome hard-hat-wearing engineer minifig at the helm. This photo of GE's "Hardiman" dates to the late 60s. cyberneticzoo.com has more photos, concept drawings, and good back story. [via adafruit]

More:

• Lego RC hand with exoskeletal controller
• Giant cardboard robot suit
• Exoskeleton costume
• Real-life mech awakens, emits flame from appendages
• Pneumatic exoskeleton makes lifting a breeze
• Ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour

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Een tentoonstelling over Amsterdam-Noord waaraan 22 kunstenaars en designers uit het Midden-Oosten, Egypte en Nederland hebben meegewerkt. Tijdens de opening de presentatie van de eerste Arabische reisgids over Noord. Met optredens van prominente noorderlingen als Jeffrey Compier (Love Impression), Don't touch my Croque-Monsieurs met hiphop door Ome Omar, en Harry Slinger (Ik verveel me zo in Amterdam-Noord)

Mediamatic invited 22 Middle-Eastern, Dutch, and Egyptian artists and designers to explore Amsterdam-Noord. Their work has resulted in an exhibition and in the first Arabic travel guide to The Netherlands. We're celebrating with music performances from prominent northerners like Don't touch my Croque-Monsieurs featuring Ome Omar and Harry Slinger (I am so bored in Amsterdam-Noord). Free entrance.

Van 10 september tot en met 9 november 2010 wordt in de Mediamatic Bank het werk van 22 kunstenaars tentoongesteld. Zij maakten deze zomer werk in en over Amsterdam-Noord. Ze hielden zich onder andere bezig met Doner Kebab, inbrekers, slakken en de IJveer. Vind hier meer over hun werk.

From September 10 to October 24, 2010, Mediamatic is exhibiting the work of 22 artists. This summer, they made new works in and about Amsterdam-Noord. They concerned themselves with everything from Doner Kebab to burglars and snails. Find out more about their work here.

This awesome video shows furniture maker extraordinaire Mike Jarvi creating one of his signature steamed-wood benches from a single slab of wood. The video documents the several-month-long process, from chainsawing the log to finishing the bench. Great filmmaking and soundtrack, too. Rock n' roll woodworking! [Thanks, Eric!]

Mike Jarvi

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World Maker Faire NY is taking place on September 25 and 26 at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. We're really excited to be hosting our first-ever large-scale East Coast Faire and as part of the countdown, we're showcasing some of the amazing makers who will be present. Today, we chat with Dr. Ben Dubin-Thaler, founder of the BioBus project, a high-tech science lab on wheels that brings hands-on science education to schools. The bus itself is a modded 1974 San Francisco transit bus that is now almost completely carbon-neutral.

1. Tell us about the project(s) you're bringing to Maker Faire.
The BioBus, in collaboration with DIYbio, will be showing people that you can do hardcore science and be green at the same time! Outside the bus we'll be showing off our new green roof and other green tech and making a new waste grease collection system, while inside the bus you'll get to make pictures and videos of cells on our research microscopes, as well as isolate DNA.

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Detroit Lives is a documentary about Detroit and the renaissance of art, culture, and outside-the-box re-development that's happening there. The film was done by Palladium Boots, the footwear company, and stars "Jackass" Johnny Knoxville. The cursing and rock n' roll posing may be annoying to some, but I think the film does a good job of surveying some of the more exciting and innovative things that are happening in the Po-Motor City. Nice to see Bethany Shorb, of Cyberoptix TieLab and OmniCorp Detroit, and some of our other Detroit maker pals in it.

Detroit Lives

More:

• Read some of our own Making Detroit stories
• See highlights from Maker Faire Detroit

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The Sur Place exhibition is coming to an end. After a great party weekend with MeBike and Subbacultcha!, we dare you to ride the Alleycat race with us one last time. Participating is free. After the finish there is a picnic in the Mediamatic garden. You can visit the exhibition until August 22.

Huge problem: Malaria kills millions, but you can't just spray DDT anymore to wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes (DDT also wipes out, oh, majestic bald eagles). What do do?

You could search for another toxin to spray. Or, if you're 3ric Johanson at Intellectual Ventures Laboratory, you could invent a new gadget. A gadget that tracks mosquitoes and blasts them out of the air with lasers.

IVL's Photonic Fence is audacious making, and only MAKE Volume 23 shows you exactly how they did it. In "Beam Weapon for Bad Bugs," Johanson takes you inside IVL and explains their technology and how his team solved four key problems to make it work: spot the bugs, target 'em, identify 'em (only females mosquitos bite -- you knew that), and then blast 'em in milliseconds.

Along the way you'll learn about computer vision software, mirror galvanometers, mosquito wing-beat frequency, and how to make what can't be made, when you want to do what can't be done.

Bonus: Make: Online has an behind-the-scenes tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab and their ultimate maker workshop for electronics, photonics, machining, culinary arts, and more, at makezine.com/23/mosquito.

From the pages of MAKE Volume 23:

MAKE Volume 23, Gadgets

This special issue is devoted to machines that do delightful and surprising things. In it, we show you how to make a miniature electronic Whac-a-Mole arcade game, a tiny but mighty see-through audio amp, a magic mirror that contains an animated soothsayer, a self-balancing one-wheeled Gyrocar, and the Most Useless Machine (as seen on The Colbert Report!). Plus we go behind the scenes and show you how Intellectual Ventures made their incredible laser targeting mosquito zapper -- yes, it's real, and you wish you had one for your patio barbecue. All this and much, much more.

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I'm generally not much of a kit-buyer, but it seems like each one Windell and Lenore release is better than the last. They almost had me with the Bulbdial clock; I will probably not be able to resist the new Egg-Bot kit. They're taking preorders now, and the first kits are supposed to ship at the end of this month. Looks like new orders are already backed up into October.

More:

• EMSL's interactive Conway's Game of Life exhibit
• Bare-bones evil from EMSL
• Deluxe LED Menorah Kit from EMSL

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Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calendar. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calendar!

Coming up this week:
Open Lab Hack Night @757 Labs
Hampton Roads, VA
Friday, Sep 10, 2010, 8pm +

TCP Hack Foo: NetCat and Nmap Too @Hackpittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Sep 10, 2010, 7pm - 9pm

Pirate Party @Pumping Station: One
Chicago, IL
Saturday, Sep 11, 2010, 9pm +

GET LAMP screening @i3 Detroit
Ferndale, MI
Saturday, Sep 11, 2010, 3pm - 7pm

Baltimore/DC Area RepRap Users Group Meetup @Baltimore Node
Baltimore, MD
Sunday, Sep 12, 2010, 2pm - 4pm

Electronics & Hardware Hacking @Arch Reactor
St Louis, MO
Sunday, Sep 12, 2010, 6pm - 9pm

Simon Kit Build Night @Crash Space
Culver City, CA
Wednesday, Sep 15, 2010, 8pm+

Make:SLC
Salt Lake City, UT
Wednesday, Sep 15, 2010, 7pm - 9pm

Start planning for:

FIRST Lego League Poker Night @Heatsync Labs
Chandler, AZ
Thursday, Sep 16, 2010

Grand Opening @QC Co-Lab
Davenport, IA
Friday, Sep 17, 2010 - Sunday, Sep 19 (all day)

Turn Your Arduino into a Web Server! @NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Sep 18, 2010, 1pm - 3pm

Electronica Fest
Linthicum, MD
Saturday, Sep 18, 2010, 10am - 8:45pm

World Maker Faire
Queens, NY
Saturday, Sep 25, 2010 - Sunday, Sep 26, 2010, 10am - 7pm

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I'm liking Motherboard TV's videos, which focus on cool technological and sociological phenomena that I suspect may appeal to many makers. A couple of readers sent in this one.

In 1991, Cuba's economy began to implode. "The Special Period in the Time of Peace" was the government's euphemism for what was a culmination of 30 years worth of isolation. It began in the 60s, with engineers leaving Cuba for the Unites States, and continues in part today, under the longest trade embargo in modern history.

When Ernesto Oroza, a Cuban-American designer and artist, began studying the technological innovations that have been made during this period, he uncovered a trove of homespun, Frankenstein-like machines that ordinary citizens made for their survival, out of day to day objects. In this episode of Motherboard, we visit Ernesto in Miami to talk about his work and the amazing creations of Cuba's enterprising DIY inventors.

In the 1970s, a group of scientists and mechanics inspired by Che Guevara formed the National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers (ANIR) as a way of organizing and strengthening this homebrew culture, uniting the ethos of the hacker with the needs of an isolated economy and the call of a socialist revolution. Oroza showed us his meticulous collection of these machines, which he has contextualized as art pieces in a movement he calls "Technological Disobedience." Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this!

From NYTimes.com:

Perched high above an industrial stretch of East Williamsburg, a menacing robot nine feet high and seven feet wide surveys the street below, watching cars steal past graffitied factory buildings as if they were prey. Its fierce head sways and dips when a wooden rudder protruding from the back of its neck catches the breeze.

This is the Brooklyn Griffin. It almost never was. An earlier edition was destroyed on orders from an unsympathetic building manager.

“We managed to salvage a whole hand and two thumbs,” said one of the two visiting British artists who built the griffin. The rest was relegated to the trash.

The two men, who make art under the names of Jimmy Bumble and Leonard White, traveled to the United States from London as part an art collective called Giant Robots that constructs walking, talking robots made almost entirely from found objects.

[via Core77]

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Guided by bamboo artist Antoon Versteegde and Dus Architects, a group of participants consisting of architects, designers, teachers and students will build a bamboo city in 3 days.

Here's a neat video rendition of Tom Lehrer's Elements Song, done by Joe Sabia. [via boingboing]

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With all the technology around us there will often come a time when you wish it would work in a slightly different way. Well unless you work as one of the design engineers in the company that made the product chances are you will just have to suck it up and live with what was produced. Well when Matt from Openschemes was in this situation with his Western Digital WDTV he decided to whip up a small circuit to make it work as he wanted. Turns out that the WDTV doesn’t really turn off, it just goes into a mode that looks like it is sleeping. Matt made the WDTV Remote Control External Power Circuit shown above to allow him to remotely turn the darn thing off for real. The board design and construction is well documented, a photo etch method is used etch a  copper clad board and the coding of the PIC chip microcontroller can be seen here in this follow-up article.

“The WDTV remote uses the NEC infrared protocol at 38kHz to transmit commands to the WDTV.  This 38kHz stream of blinks is demodulated by the IR receiver to a relatively slow serial datastream which is then piped to the PIC.

So here’s the (software) scheme.

1. Sit around waiting for the start sequence
2. Decode 32 bits of data
3. If it’s a power cmd, then turn on WDTV if it’s off.  Go back to #1
4. If WDTV is on and we receive a power command, flag that we now need to wait for 10 repeats.  Go back to #1
5. If WDTV is on and we’re repeating, watch for 10 repeats and then turn off WDTV.
6. If some other command comes in, clear our “repeat” counter and start the whole thing over”

sr_adspace_id = 8883907; sr_adspace_width = 300; sr_adspace_height = 250; sr_ad_new_window = true; sr_adspace_type = "graphic";

The new MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v3.0 in the Maker Shed works with the new Apple iPod nano mult-touch (and makes a nice wristwatch).

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It has no display, and that's not a stylus—it's a pen. So you can write important numbers on the paper card pictured, left, and snap it into the clear display pocket on the phone's back. Available in five subdued colors from John's Phone, of the Netherlands. I'm tempted. [via Boing Boing]

More:

• Minimalist nativity set
• Minimalist tilt-activated lamp
• "Retro-minimalist homebrew game console"
• HOW TO - Make a minimalist (and cheap) laptop case

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MIT Media Labber David Cranor writes:

For the FAB6 conference this year, Max Lobovsky and I made a microcontroller-based thin client which uses a NTSC TV as its output device.

It does the NTSC video generation totally in hardware, has a full 480x240 framebuffer, and the code is written all in in c. Additionally, the code is written in such a way to make it easy for applications to draw arbitrary bitmapped graphics to the framebuffer, as well as access the serial receive buffer and keyboard character buffer.

This is my first STM32 project, so it was a fun exercise to make something which uses so many of the chip's peripherals. Doing color is next on the agenda; the only reason this iteration is black and white is that we only had a week from "here's the datasheet, cortex-M-what?" to finished project.

The STM32 used in this project runs at 80 MHz, has awesome peripherals, a DMA, tons of RAM/flash, a built in serial bootloader, and costs about $6 - I'm probably never going to use an atmega for anything again!

Source and board files included!

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Dan Wagoner is playing around with connecting an Arduino to his Asterisk system.

I've been able to get Asterisk grab info about sensors connected to an ethernet-enabled Arduino, but how about the other way around? What if you could allow your Arduino to make outbound calls through your Asterisk system to make a make-shift alarm system, or over-powered doorbell? Well, wait no longer! Here's how it works:

Asterisk: A php script lives on your Asterisk server (hosted up by apache) that, when it's accessed, checks to make sure the client accessing it matches a pre-defined IP of your Arduino. If so, it creates a call file with the criteria that you configure to call a number of your choice and drops it in the Asterisk outgoing queue directory, triggering Asterisk to make a call. Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

NOORD is een internationaal kunstproject over Amsterdam-Noord. Het stadsdeel is Nederland in het klein: een pars pro toto. Conflicterend en heterogeen, maar ook saamhorig en solidair. Noord is onontdekt, en daardoor één van de meest spannende locaties van Nederland. Samen met lokale en internationale kunstenaars, brengt Mediamatic Amsterdam-Noord in kaart. Het resultaat is de eerste Arabische reisgids van Nederland en een tentoonstelling met werk van de kunstenaars. Opening vrijdag 10 september in de Mediamatic Bank.

Mediamatic has invited 22 Egyptian, Middle–Eastern and Dutch artists and designers to explore Amsterdam-Noord. They will map the borough's visible and invisible locations, people and data flows, and research its history and future. Their work will result in an exhibition, and will give rise to the first Arabic travel guide to The Netherlands. Both will be launched on September 10, 2010.