"Laser Engraving, Cutting, Design and Fabrication"

Our pals at Backyard Brains (makers of the terrific SpikerBox kit, which allows you to study the electrical impulses of insect neurons) are developing circuitry to control which direction a cockroach walks.

By modifying the HEXBug toy “Inchworm” circuitry to deliver pulses, we stimulated the antenna nerves of the discoid cockroach to “trick” the cockroach into turning upon command. Stay tuned! as we make the preparation easier, more reliable, and lighter!

Working RoboRoach Prototype

I’m happy to present the first episode of a new weekly MAKE video called This Week in Hobby Robotics, a roundup of interesting things happening in the world of — what else — hobby robotics. It’s hosted by Frits Lyneborg and Rik (no last name, please). Frits (from Denmark), who works professionally in web concept development, is the creator of Letsmakerobots.com, a very popular international source for hobby roboticists. His cohost Rik (from Holland) is part of the team that runs Letsmakerobots.com and assists its online community. Rik says he gets friendly mocking from his friends for not making more robots, but shrugs it off. Some day he will make a robot to do the shrugging.

This month, we’re thrilled to announce our Mechanics Skill Set. Over the course of March, we’ll explore the wonderful world of simple machines, mechanical forces, motors and motion. We’ll have guest authors, including our friend and MAKE contributor Dustyn Roberts, author of Making Things Move, features on the basic tools, materials, and techniques of mechanical engineering that every maker should know, giveaways, relevant Make: Projects, best-of roundups of existing content from the site and the magazine, and lots more. And this month, we’d also like to welcome Craftsman as our Mechanics Skill Set sponsor.

BTW: We hope you enjoyed the February Woodworking Skill Set. We had so much fun with it, we’re extending it by a couple of weeks. We figured February was a short month, so why not?

And, as always, we’d love to hear what you’d like to get out of a month of mechanics education. Please leave your ideas in the comments below.

It wasn’t some creepy-crawly fetish that got me reading The Worm Breeder’s Gazette. Rather, it was talking to Kathryn Hedges — a smart, passionate, and well-credentialed scientist and artist — about The Gazette’s tips on making a GFP illuminator on the cheap. GFP, or green fluorescent protein, is a fluorescent marker frequently used in molecular biology and neuroscience.

During her master’s program at http://www.humboldt.edu/humboldt/programs/descriptions/833/">Humbolt State University, Kathryn, like many other scientific researchers, was challenged with budget cuts. In order to continue her work on nematode neurons with less cash, Kathryn unleashed the power of her “let’s see how can we do this better and cheaper” mentality to hack the DIY GFP illuminator into a better, research-worthy system, one she calls a “Lumbriculus variegatus nerve conduction velocity setup.” In other words, a way to view the nerve responses of worms.

Why was this important to Kathryn? In her words, “one of my strains kept selecting against GFP if I didn’t hand-select the brightest worms each generation. Without a way to see GFP on the “dissecting” microscope where I was picking up individual worms with a tiny wire spatula, I couldn’t guarantee that all their progeny would be fluorescent, which is a problem when I’m trying to see if a treatment damages them to make them lose fluorescence.”

By hacking her own tool, without undergoing the too-high expense of buying an average illuminator for thousands of dollars (even used), Kathryn was able to finish her thesis. The illuminator is useful for any DIY scientists who need to view the expression of GFP or RFP (Red Fluorescent Protein) genes in bacteria or c. elegans. And Kathryn is proof you can do it on a dime.

Details on the basic GFP Illuminator from The Worm Breeder’s Gazette are below (after the jump). To learn more about Kathryn’s improvements, and to see her notes on worms, check out her post on Splendid Colors.

[Credit to Ian Chin-Sang and Weiwei Zhong]

Using LEDs as a low-cost source to detect GFP and DsRED

Ian Chin-Sang1 and Weiwei Zhong
Department of Biology, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, 2Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice University, Houston TX
Correspondence to: Weiwei Zhong (weiwei.zhong@rice.edu)

Fluorescence detection components are too costly to be installed in every stereoscope. Often, our fluorescent markers are very bright and do not require the full capacity of such equipment. Here we present an LED setup that costs only about $100 and can detect bright fluorescent markers such as myo-2::GFP. The setup (Fig. 1) consists of:

• X-acto helping hands or anything that can position the LED (Amazon.com)
• Lamp cord that has a switch (local hardware store)
• 17-watt Xitanium LED driver (LED Supply)
• Xitanium driver connector (LED Supply)
• Heatsink (LED Supply)
• Spot lens (LED Supply)
• Luxeon V Star optic holder (LED Supply)
• Royal-Blue Luxeon V Star LED for GFP detection (LED Supply), or Green Luxeon V Star LED for dsRED detection (LED Supply)
• Optional excitation filter: Roscolux #4290 CalColor 90 Blue for GFP, or #389 Chroma Green for dsRED (Rosco.com | Edmund Optics)
• Emission filter: Roscolux #12 Straw for GFP, or #19 Fire for dsRED (availability same as excitation filters)

Details on how to actually put this device together can be found here and here.

Fig 1. The LED setup

Fig 2. Using the LED setup to detect myo-2::GFP in an mIn1 animal.

Fig 3. Using the LED setup to detect myo-2::dsRED.

When assembling the LED to the driver, make sure that the +/- ends on the LED and the neutral/line ends on the lamp cord match those on the driver. Use a non-conductive glue such as silicone adhesive (Devcon, part No.12045, local hardware store) to put the lens holder onto the LED. The excitation filter can be glued to the lens by applying a small amount of glue on the edge. The emission filter can be simply taped under the microscope objective.

This setup has a long operating life, requires no warm-up or cool-down time, and has no radiation. However, it can only detect strong signals. We have used the setup to detect the following markers: myo-2::GFP (Fig. 2), sur-5::GFP, ajm-1::GFP, and myo-2::dsRED (Fig. 3).

Using LEDs as a low-cost source to detect GFP and DsRED

Bio: Eri Gentry is a biotech entrepreneur, citizen science community organizer, and the co-founder of BioCurious, the first hackerspace for biotech, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We were floored by the number of comments that we got for our Getting Started with Arduino book giveaway (377!). Lots of folks had great questions about the Arduino and some of you pitched in with answers. We’ll sift through this content now and use it to create a crowdsourced Arduino FAQ. Thanks to all who contributed. Five commenters were chosen at random and will be getting a copy of the book. See the giveaway post for the list of winners.

Getting Started with Arduino Giveaway

More:
Check out our Make: Arduino landing page

I held off on “giant,” because, well, there’s really big, and then there’s giant. And, as cool as your Arduino-brained bubble blowing robot is, Instructables user zvizvi, the bubbles it blows are not truly giant IMNSHO. Check out zvizvi’s and the other winning entries in Instructables’ recent Microcontroller Contest.

More:

• Giant Bubbles On The Beach
• Bubble Photography Tips And Tricks
• Out Of This World Soap Bubbles

Sony is jumping into the SDK world and going after all the Kinect hackers out there. After Microsoft’s release of the Kinect, thousands of makers started tinkering on open source drivers/data dumps were released (disclosure, I worked on this with Limor Fried & Johnny Lee). Weeks later, Microsoft announced it would also have an SDK (non-commercial use, commercial use later). Sony has a competing product called the Move and they’re looking to get people hacking with them now (coming soon page). I think it’s unlikely we’ll see much happen with Sony’s efforts, definitely not as much as we’re seeing with the Kinect hacks — Sony is extremely busy suing legitimate makers and innovators. See our previous article(s) – “Sony’s War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators” & “Meet the DIY iPod Case Sony Killed: The RetroPod…”

Who is Move.me for?
Move.me is designed for academic researchers, university instructors, college students, programming hobbyists, and HCI developers. Show us how you can take the PS Move beyond traditional gaming and into areas such as:

- Games and tools that support kids’ physical fitness and nutrition.
- Kid-friendly programming interfaces for computer/technology classes or individual learning.
- Physical therapy and rehabilitation.
- Sports physiology or fitness training.
- Music and the creative arts.

In my opinion, this list has many of the people Sony completely alienated. Here’s a bold power move for Sony, drop the lawsuit(s) against George Hotz and hire the kid to help cook up an amazing SDK just like Microsoft is going to do for the Kinect. This act alone would likely repair a lot of damage out there and something I think everyone would welcome. We can announce it on stage at Maker Faire in May with someone from Sony and George. They can both give a talk about Sony embracing user innovations — it will be wonderful. Think about it :)

Sony, call me. We’ll do this up right: 707-827-7311.

Update: Nevermind, Sony is completely toxic. Steer clear folks–

A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz’s website from January of 2009 to the present.

Thursday’s decision by Magistrate Joseph Spero to allow Sony to subpoena Hotz’s web provider (.pdf) raises a host of web-privacy concerns.

Respected for his iPhone hacks and now the PlayStation 3 jailbreak, Hotz is accused of breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws after he published an encryption key and software tools on his website that allow Playstation owners to gain complete control of their consoles from the firmware on up.

I visited George’s site many time for my article, expect to see me and/or MAKE getting sued by Sony shortly I suppose?

Chris Eckert created a CNC tattoo machine with a twist:

Auto Ink is a three axis numerically controlled sculpture. Once the main switch is triggered, the operator is assigned a religion and it’s corresponding symbol is tattooed onto the person’s arm. The operator does not have control over the assigned symbol. It is assigned either randomly or through divine intervention, depending on your personal beliefs.

Well, “open source electronics” vending machine might be more accurate, as only three of the eighteen stocked items, by my count, are actually Arduino variants. The rest are shields and various other kits. Plus the obligatory Ramen. The vending machine is located at MakerBot headquarters in Brooklyn, and the photo is by our own Matt Mets. You know you’ve been doing this too long when you can identify all these products on sight. For the rest of us, Matt’s Flickr stream has a handy legend.

In true spirit, Make: Live is very much a DIY production. Instead of tripods, we use zip ties to mount webcams to chairs and we jury rig an old monitor to act as our prompter. Along those lines, I decided to create an on air light to indicate when we’re broadcasting. While I could have just wired a switch to a light fixture, I wanted to take the idea a step further. Using Ustream’s API, I set up our on air light to turn on automatically when we start broadcasting. This project was just for fun, but learning how to use the XBee Internet Gateway to get the Arduino online wirelessly will come in very handy for future projects.

Most of my networked projects have used an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield. For this one, I tried the XBee Internet Gateway, which is free ConnectPort software that allows XBee wireless radios to retrieve web pages. This allowed us to hang the light wherever we wanted without the need to run an Ethernet cable to it. Having an XBee Internet Gateway in my home also means that I can easily add wireless sensors and other internet-connected projects without filling up my router’s Ethernet ports.

This project serves as a good template for any kind of wireless notifier; it’s not just for Ustream. You could customize the project to indicate when your significant other is online, when you receive a new @ reply on twitter, or if rain is expected today. The Arduino and XBee Internet Gateway make a great pair for many internet-connected projects. To learn more about XBee mesh networks and the XBee Internet Gateway, Robert Faludi’s book, Building Wireless Sensor Networks is a great resource.

Check out the full project write-up over on Make: Projects:

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.

There is still time to enter the Maker Shed’s Follow, Tweet, & (Maybe) Win an iPad Contest. The grand prize is an iPad with Make: The Complete Collection (PDF). It’s super-easy to enter, and no purchase is necessary. Read all the details about how to enter on the Maker Shed’s contest page.

Really impressed by the turnout for the 555 Contest… something like 238 entries! The above videos show three of the submissions.

Jeri and I are hard at work thinning the pack to pass on to our hack-master judges by next week. And don’t worry, even if you didn’t make the first cut, you’ll still be eligible for some of the door prizes from our wonderful sponsors. We’ll be announcing those judges soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight only a few of the amazing projects we’ve already seen. Why should the aggregator sites get all the fun? We’ll be posting links to all of the entries in the coming days, once the entries have advanced to the next round. Check out 3 videos Jeri and I thought were particularly fun and inventive.

This project is called Take A Picture, by Toronto artists Brad Blucher and Kyle Clements. Though described as “paintings,” it appears that their pieces are in fact IR LED mosaics assembled behind blank canvases. Invisible to the unaided human eye, the IR light is detectable by the CCD in your digital camera and/or smart phone. [via Hack a Day]

Why spend $150-$500 for an LCD viewfinder when you can make one for cheap out of household parts? Instructables user knoptop ">shows us how to make one out of a baby powder container, dollar store magnifying glass, headphone cover, and a couple of hair ties.

http://www.jossresearch.org/tjiirrs/010.html

– In the past couple days I have lased two commercial fountain pen inks.
(How easy can it get?)

Assuming you think that the page is worth blogging, it would be cool
if you’d be willing to use one (or both?) of these as example[s] –

http://www.jossresearch.org/pictures/lasers/dye/n2pumped/g1463c.PrivateReserve_chartreuse-highlight-ink_dil-H2O_lasing.8s.jpg

http://www.jossresearch.org/pictures/lasers/dye/n2pumped/g1498c.Noodlers-Blue-Ghost_dil-EtOH_lasing.9c.jpg

(Those are the fountain pen inks, being pumped by a nitrogen laser
that is off to the right, outside the photos.)

Our buds at RoboGames sent the following announcement about their 2011symposium and competition. They also wrote to tell us that they’d also nabbed Heather Knight from CMU as their academic chair and were super excited about that. Congrats, to RoboGames and Heather.

The Role Of Human-Machine Interaction In Robotics Research
And
Cross-Disciplinary Robotic Advancements And Studies

RoboGames 2011 — Symposium and Competition
San Francisco, California – April 15-17th, 2011

RoboGames (in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon, Cal State Maritime, and the Robotics Society of America) is pleased to announce an expanded presentation format for RoboGames 2011. RoboGames, the world’s largest open robot competition, seeks to promote disciplinary cross-pollination among engineers, programmers, researchers, academics, artists, scientists, and hobbyists in a forum where both academia and the general public participate.

The purpose of the RoboGames 2011 symposium is to facilitate discussion between participants, with an opportunity for the general public to observe and take part. RoboGames has long been a nexus point for a variety of disciplines related to science, engineering, and robotics, and has also been an incubator for innovative approaches to Science, Technology Engineering and Math education. The RoboGames symposium will add an extra dimension to the competition by providing a venue to discuss theoretical and practical applications.

Submissions welcome from designers, engineers, developers and others engaged in any form of human-machine interaction, machine learning, integration of human feedback in robotics development, robotic development via gameplay, competition, or live performance, and innovations stemming from other, unorthodox research in robotics. This symposium will present a unique opportunity to engage in discussion, disseminate information about current and developing technology, and invite colleagues to experiment and field test up and coming theories on human machine interaction.

The Symposium is broken up into two components, Papers and Projects. You do not have to have a physical project if submitting a paper, and you do not need to submit a paper if submitting a project (although submitting both is encouraged.)

See the rest of the announcement after the jump

Papers:
Papers on human-machine interaction and the role of robotics in a human interactive sphere are welcome, as are any papers on the topic of machine learning, human machine interaction, and real world applications of autonomous robotics. The RoboGames 2011 Academic Track Robotics symposium provides an opportunity at the RoboGames 2011 International Competition, for both practitioners and researchers to present advances made through real world robotic interactive scenarios, human-robot interfaces, and machine learning. Both new and existing papers welcome.

In addition, this symposium’s aim is to provide a focused venue for highlighting robotics efforts that have benefited from non-traditional research frameworks, such as gameplay, competition or live performance. Selected papers are welcome to bring demos (especially if they are fire breathing or can make cocktails.)

Projects:
In addition, if you work or play in the academics, gaming, performance, engineering, software, DIY or maker communities, and would like to present your project or survey research at RoboGames 2011, we welcome your submissions. You should also submit if you are interested in introducing new methods and emerging application ideas made possible by these novel frameworks.

Presentation:
Accepted authors/presenters must be able to attend and are invited to share their work with fellow researchers and RoboGames attendees through
1. A dedicated roundtable workshop Saturday morning, April 16, 2011
2. Short, on-stage presentations as part of the afternoon RoboGames speaker series, April 16-17, 2011

*All symposium participants are strongly encouraged to compete in any of the 70 events held at RoboGames.* For those who have a robot that does not fit into a normal category (humanoid, fire-fighting, sumo, RoboMagellan, etc.), you may enter any robot into the Best of Show category. The Best of Show event carries a $2500 prize purse (60/30/10 split), sponsored by Google.

Submission Guidelines:
The RoboGames 2011 paper submission should be a 6-page paper prepared in the ACM Extended Abstract Format, submitted in PDF format (only!) to:
papers@robogames.net You can find the Extended Abstract format template at: http://www.sigchi.org/chi2010/authors/format.html#extendedformat.

Symposium papers would be reviewed and selected for presentation at the RoboGames symposium April 15-17th, 2011. The RoboGames symposium proceedings will be made available on the RoboGames 2011 website after the event. Examples of past papers presented at RoboGames can be found here.

*Deadline for Submission:* Please submit papers via email to papers@robogames.net by midnight PST, March 26, 2011.
Decisions Announced: April 1

Topics of Interest:
We invite participants to submit presentations on topics including, but not limited to:

* technical innovations
* groundbreaking designs
* unexpected breakthroughs
* intersections of fields
* the role of spectators

Reasonable and creative expansions on these themes are encouraged.

Questions:
Please direct any question about RoboGames 2011 symposium to papers@robogames.net.

Committee:
Heather Knight – Carnegie Mellon University
Michael Strange – California State Maritime Academy
David Calkins – The Robotics Society of America
Ed Katz, PhD – Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley
Jonathan Foote, PhD – IEEE
Larry Klingenberg – San Francisco State University
Erico Guizzo – IEEE
Simone Davalos – Robotics Society of America

MAKE Volume 25 contributing writer Chris Reilly loves yogurt but is impatient. He writes, “My impatience often leads me to botch important steps when I make yogurt. So to get better control over the fermentation process, I made a crockpot thermostat attachment to precisely control the temperature.” Enter the Arduino microcontroller. From the introduction:

You can buy electric yogurt makers, but most of them only incubate; the heating/sterilization step still has to be done on the stovetop. I wanted to experiment with Arduino microcontroller programming and electronic circuit design in Fritzing (an open source circuit layout tool that lets users document and share designs), so why not combine them into something I enjoy doing?

With my old-school yogurt recipe (adapted from wikihow.com/Make-Yogurt), I’d use a stovetop and a candy thermometer to heat the milk to 185°F and cool it to 110°F, then use a warm oven or radiator to ferment it at 100°F. That takes a lot of attention, and more containers than I care to wash later. Even with a commercial yogurt maker, I’d probably have to heat the milk myself, and that’s the step I’m most likely to botch.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s a great recipe as long as you’re diligent. But the combination of boring, time-consuming, temperature-sensitive steps puts my diligence to the test; that’s why the automation of an Arduino-controlled crockpot yogurt maker makes perfect sense to me.

Time to geek out on your fermentation process, and you can get started right away building your own Yobot by checking out the entire project on Make: Projects. If Arduino sparks your interest, MAKE Volume 25 features a ton more Arduino projects, from getting you started picking out the right microcontroller to making your own Arduino.

Check out MAKE Volume 25:

MAKE Volume 25: Arduino Revolution
Give your gadgets a brain! Previously out of reach for the do-it-yourselfer, the tiny computers called microcontrollers are now so cheap and easy to use that anyone can make their stuff smart. With a microcontroller, your gadget can sense the environment, talk to the internet or other hardware, and make things happen in the real world by controlling motors, lights, or any electronic device.

» BUY or SUBSCRIBE

Gavilan of On Shoulders is building an excellent looking 3d-printable dogbot, using openSCAD. But the awesomeness doesn’t stop there: He’s also producing a TV show about his projects, such as how to mill PCBs and print your own 3d printers. Well done! [via MakerBot]

Yesterday, we introduced the Syntheos grblShield, an Arduino Shield, created by MAKE contributors Riley Porter and Alden Hart, that allows you to control three stepper motors and run grbl, the motion-control language, for CNC operation. To show the grblShield in action (two motors of it anyway), Riley decided to try his hand at our Drawbot project. Here’s a video of what he was able to bodge together in short order. It’s funky around the edges, but good proof of concept of some of the quick fun you’ll be able to have with the grblShield. Love the little bracket he laser-cut to hold the binder clip and the control lines.

Don’t forget: Our Drawbot prize drawing ends at midnight PST tonight! To be eligible, all you have to do is upload your Drawbot images (just getting started, in-progress, or finished) to the MAKE Flickr pool to be eligible for hundreds of dollars in prizes. See the Make It Last Build Series landing page for details.

Because you might as well have something to show for it. Also: Woohoo! Beer!

#10

Actual Beer Goggles

#9

How-To: Make A Bottle Cap Dragon

#8

How-To: Beerquad DIY WiFi Antenna

#7

Beer Bottle Solar Water Heater

#6

Beer Can Padlock Shim

#5

Chainmail Armor Entirely From Beer Tabs

#4

How-To: Ultralight Camp Pot From Heineken Mini-Keg Can

#3

How-To: Knap An Arrowhead From A Beer Bottle

#2

Reblown Beer Bottle Glasses

#1

Miwaukee’s Best Samurai

Did I miss a good one? Let me know, below!