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Make: Live Episode 05: Kinetic Contraptions (preview video)

Becky Stern — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:00:48 +0000

Join us Wednesday evening for the fifth episode of Make: Live, our streaming show and tell!

Make: Live 05 – Kinetic Contraptions
Wednesday March 23rd, 9pm ET/6pm PT
Watch at makezine.com/live or on UStream
Please join us in the UStream chat or mark tweets with #makelive to interact live with the show.

We also give away a fabulous prize from Digi-Key to one chat member who can solve our photo challenge. We can’t wait to share some of the joy of making with you, live 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, on Make: Live.

Featuring the lovely and talented:

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – Tabletop Mechanical Pong
Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay show off their tabletop representation of the 1972 video game PONG. They challenged themselves to realize the properties of the game in a physical space using motors, solenoids, and other surplus parts. Discover the subtle nuances and smell the physics jokes by these prolific and delightful makers. Lenore and Windell are also on the MAKE technical advisory board.

Dustyn Roberts – Wind Lantern
Check out our visit with mechanical engineer and teacher Dustyn Roberts. She gives us a tour of the wind lantern, a turbine-powered LED mechanism and circuit from her book Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the preview video m4v, or watch clips from the show on YouTube.

Maker Faire Detroit Town Hall, Tuesday, March 22, 6:30pm-8:00pm (ET)

Gareth Branwyn — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:01:13 +0000

You are invited to:

Maker Faire Detroit Town Hall
Tuesday, March 22, 2011, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM (ET)

Detroit Public Library
5201 Woodward Avenue,
Detroit, MI 48202

Event Details: Dale, Sherry, Louise and Shauna will be hosting a Maker Faire Detroit Town Hall and Community Planning Meeting on Tuesday, March 22nd at The Detroit Public Library (Main Branch) in the the Old Fine Arts room and would like to invite you to attend. …Read more on EventBrite

Share this event on Facebook and Twitter.
We hope you can make it!

See the EventBrite listing for full details.

Cheers,
The Maker Faire Team

Want to write for Engadget? We’re hiring mobile, classic, European and reviews editors!

Darren Murph — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Oh sure, you love gadgets -- but do you have the chops to write about them? We'd love to know if you think you do, because we're looking to actually pay humans to do this stuff. Professional writing experience isn't necessary (though it doesn't hurt), but what we really care about is that you can write skillfully about gadgets with wit, concision, and authority. And being obsessed with Engadget is good, too. So here's what we're after:

Senior mobile editor - Full-time (salary or freelance), must be based in New York City (or nearby).
HD / classic editor - Part or full-time (freelance), must be based in New York City (or nearby).
Reviews editor (laptops, mobiles, etc.) - Full-time (freelance), must be based in New York City or the San Francisco area.
European editor - Full-time, preferably based in London (or nearby).

Want to apply? Read on.

Continue reading Want to write for Engadget? We're hiring mobile, classic, European and reviews editors!

Want to write for Engadget? We're hiring mobile, classic, European and reviews editors! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Make: Pioneer – Limor “Ladyada” Fried On WIRED Cover

Phillip Torrone — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:14:37 +0000

Engineer, kit maker, entrepreneur, MAKE advisory board member, open source hardware pioneer Limor “Ladyada” Fried is on April’s WIRED cover. This is the first female engineer to appear WIRED’s cover (as well as the first female engineer to appear on such a high-profile tech publication that I can recall).

I met Limor exactly five years ago at South by Southwest. She’s one of the most talented people in the world, she works harder than anyone else I know, she puts more value in the world than she takes.

Limor, everyone at MAKE is so happy for you. This is a milestone for makers, for women, for engineers, and anyone who makes things for a living. No one deserves the recognition and accolades more than you for all you’ve done and will do.

If you look at the media landscape at the moment, it’s interesting to see who we hold as heroes and role models. I took this photo in the bookstore, seeing Limor on the cover makes me think we collectively have a shot at making the world a better place, if we try.

“We are what we celebrate” – Dean Kamen.

Awesome opportunity to work with MAKE!

Gareth Branwyn — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 23:02:56 +0000

MAKE is currently searching for a Maker Shed Evangelist to work with our ecommerce team. This is a contract position. You will seek out and curate cool new products for the Maker Shed store, develop our relationships with independent maker suppliers, as well as commercial suppliers, and evangelizes Maker Shed and its product offerings through social media strategies, blogging, and representation online, and occasionally at events, schools, meet-ups, etc., and help shape our ecommerce merchandising efforts. The ideal person will bring the following experience to the team:

Experience tackling hands-on projects, particularly electronics, microcontrollers, robots and motors, and be enthusiastic with sharing your projects with others.
Must have ready access to a decent range of tools, from basic hand tools to soldering equipment to basic workshop tools, such as drills, band saws, etc.
Excellent project organization skills; able to complete multiple hands-on projects quickly and independently.
Passion for documenting and showing off projects to a variety of audiences; e.g. customers who need step-by-step documentation; teachers, parents and mentors looking for guidance in doing a project with students; magazine and online visitors looking for inspiration and ideas; and online shoppers who also need to understand product features, capabilities, and skill requirements.
Excellent photography skills a huge plus; capable of capturing components and kits in various stages of completion so as to present our products professionally.
Strong network of relationships within the maker community as well as an enthusiasm for meeting new makers and groups.
An engaging, friendly personality comfortable inspiring groups with demonstrations and presentations in both formal and informal settings.

Sound like you (or maybe someone you know)? Send a note to Dan Woods (dan@oreilly.com).

Server Maintenance this Weekend

Stefan Antonowicz — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 05:00:41 +0000

Hello Makers,

We’ll be doing another bit of maintenance over the weekend (WordPress’ development cycle is off the chain!), so we’ll be down for about 15 minutes (knock on wood) starting at 11pm PST on Saturday, March 12th. Hopefully that won’t interrupt your feverish sawing and hammering!

Make: Live Episode 04: DIY Musical Instruments (preview video)

Becky Stern — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 19:43:39 +0000

Join us Wednesday evening for the third episode of Make: Live, our streaming show and tell! Collin Cunningham is filling in as cohost this week for Matt Richardson.

Make: Live 04 – DIY Musical Instruments
Wednesday March 9th, 9pm ET/6pm PT
Watch at makezine.com/live or on UStream
Please join us in the UStream chat or mark tweets with #makelive to interact live with the show.

Featuring the lovely and talented:

Ranjit Bhatnagar – Instrument-A-Day
Ranjit Bhatnagar devotes the month of February to creating a musical instrument every day, documented on his blog. He joins us in-studio with samples from this year’s instrument-a-day series including the 8-bit violin and mechanical synthesizer.

Pete Edwards – Circuit Bending

MAKE contributer Pete Edwards (of Casper Electronics) joins us via Skype to talk circuit bending and shows us some of his electronic creations.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the preview video m4v, or watch clips from the show on YouTube.

RoboGames Call For Papers and Projects

Gareth Branwyn — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 05:30:35 +0000

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

Reminder: Open MAKE — Makers, Kids, and Cardboard — tomorrow at the Exploratorium

Gareth Branwyn — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:31:23 +0000

This month’s Open MAKE/Young Makers program is tomorrow, Saturday, Feb 19, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The theme is cardboard. Featured makers will be interviewed by MAKE’s Dale Dougherty in the McBean Theater between 1 and 2pm.

Makers this month:

The Cardboard Institute of Technology has been building a large installation in the Tinkering Studio since the beginning of the month. They will share their progress and host a “building with cardboard” workshop.
Surfer and laser-cutting artist Mike Sheldrake will bring some of his amazing surfboards made with a cardboard core.
Los Angeles artist Ana Serrano will talk about the incredibly detailed cityscapes she builds out of cardboard, inspired by real neighborhoods.
Puppeteer Dan Tran-Caffee makes giant articulated puppets out of cardboard (some require as many as 6 people to operate!): he will bring some and have them roam around the museum all day long.
And also keep an eye out for the giant cardboard robot costumes by Jason Lentz!

See the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio website for more info.

Bug Labs at the Health 2.0 / MAKE challenge in Boston

Andrew Odewahn — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 19:30:02 +0000

In an update to Making For Health: Calling Boston-Area Makers, Bug Labs’ open source hacker Far McKon just let me know that he’s bringing 5 complete bug bundles to the event for teams to incorporate into their projects. The event is this weekend (Feb 19) in Boston, so register now!

Here’s what Far has to say about the gear:

“The heart of the kit it is the ‘Bug Base’ which has built in wifi, bluetooth, and battery, along with the Cortex A-8 for some raw computing guts. The base is similar to the Beagle Board in power and design, but has a bit more built in, and a runtime plug in system for modules.

Speaking of modules. To extend the base, each kit has a general IO module (the Von Hippel), GPS, and a camera + accelerometer module. For output, each kit has along the LCD and video-output modules, for on device or on screen display. And sample code to use all of them, naturally. We will also have some sensors and components along, so people can use the Von hippel to plug into other projects or platforms through raw IO.

For development, I have a pre-built VirtualBox image, with everything installed. So it should be very fast to get off the ground by coping the VM to coders machines, and launching it.

Everything is open source, from hardware to virtual machine, so a prototype built on using a Bug can easily be remixed into any form factor or new product, using our designs as a starting point.”

Should make for a really interesting day of hacking for a good cause. Thank you, Bug Labs, for the generous support. Hope to see you there!

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