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Every other week, MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next.

Part 1. Setting up a background for your project.

By Ed Troxell, photo intern

As a DIYer, you share your projects to show off your expertise and to help others find theirs. But building a project and writing the steps is only half the battle. The other half is capturing images of your work that clearly show what you’re talking about and what you’ve done in your steps.

As the photo intern for MAKE, I shoot lots of projects for the magazine and website. Here are my steps for setting up a background for photographing your project clearly to show it off in its entirety.

1. Set up your project and mini studio.
Find a well-lit area that’s clear of visual distractions and provides you with enough room for shooting. If you’re shooting on a workbench, clear off all the clutter and if necessary, drop a bedsheet or paper backdrop to hide everything that’s not your project. The camera doesn’t want to see your mess, it just wants to see your masterpiece. Extraneous items on the bench or in the background will only confuse the viewer and make a good project look bad. Clean up before you shoot.

Clean bench good (but what’s that junk in the corner?):

Cluttered bench bad:

2. Know your “light temperature.”
Light temperature means the color of your light, and it affects your “white balance.” Most cameras react best to daylight, which is a bluish light, and I strongly recommend shooting in daylight. Shooting your project near a big window (with no direct sunbeams coming through) is a good place to start. Shooting outside in smooth shade is good option too (but not in speckled tree shadows).

Your flash is daylight balanced, so you can use your flash as a “fill” or secondary light to fill shadows. (Your flash should never be the main source of light, unless you’re using a real strobe system.) Also, most of those compact fluorescent light bulbs are close to daylight balanced. They can be a nice fill too.

Just be careful not to mix the color of your lights. The white balance on your camera will get confused if warmer light is in the room (like a normal household tungsten filament light bulb), conflicting with the daylight or CF lights. Choose the light temperature you’re shooting with, and stick to it.

3. Choose a clean background.
Use a plain, simple background, nothing too distracting. You want clean backgrounds that show off your work. Pick colors that go with your project or make it stand out. We tend to use bright colors. We recommend not using red, as red is a very difficult color for digital cameras. Do not use black. White is fine.

Instead of a distracting background pattern like this:

Use a clean background color like these:

4. Place your project on a level and straight surface.
Here’s the photo booth we use here in the Make: Labs for shooting indoor shots, when we’re not shooting on the workbench:

5. Test your settings.
Take a few shots, then check the images on your computer (ideally in Photoshop) just to check focus, brightness, file size, grain (ISO), and other details. Sometimes a setting can be off. It’s best to know now, rather than find out when you’re done shooting.

For example, if you’re submitting projects for MAKE magazine or Make: Online, you’ll need to take high-resolution photos at an aspect ratio of 4:3. High resolution means they can be printed on paper at 300dpi. (Yes, even web photos — because we might want to print them later.)

In my next post: Shooting your project in high resolution.

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Every other week, MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next.

By Tyler Moskowite, engineering intern

I recently received my first smart phone, an iPhone 3GS, from my brother who just got back from Iraq. It has turned into my PDA, map, social networker, and a boatload of other stuff I didn’t even know it was capable of doing. Let’s just say simply, I love this device. Which has prompted me to want it to be on every moment of everyday, and let’s be honest, the iPhone 3GS eats through battery life at a decent rate. Being a somewhat outdoors-active person, and because I enjoy the planet that I live on, I decided to build a solar charger for my iPhone 3GS.

When I started researching best way to build one of these, the simplest way was obviously to start off with a MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v2.0. Make sure to pick up the v2.0 and not v1.2, as the iPhone 3GS will not work with a v1.2 kit. This is due to the voltage on the D+ and D- pins that the iPhone 3GS uses to connect to USB. (Malaysian student Chen Tzy Wen has posted a good guide explaining how the voltage on each pin works, and the comments have good information in them as well.) Using the two 100k? resistors worked fine to charge the iPhone.

This design allows for a power source to be attached to the MintyBoost to charge your iPhone 3GS via a USB cable. Included in the kit is a 2xAA battery holder, but I wanted a more renewable and longer lasting energy source.

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Every other week, MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next.

By Eric Chu, engineering intern

There aren’t many low-budget ways to customize one’s yo-yo. The most common ones are either painting or dyeing, but they’re limited: paint chips off with time, and dyeing is only for plastic yo-yos.

Being a yo-yo fanatic, I regularly visit the blog yoyoskills.com for yo-yo news. There I recently read a post about spin-activated LED side caps that fit into the side of yo-yos. They’re low-cost ($6) and look very cool; a perfect customizing add-on for a yo-yo. Unfortunately, they only come in one size, thus only fitting a few yo-yos.

I thought it’d be a fun project to make my own set (and it was!). I used a One Drop Project yo-yo.

How It Works
Using the centrifugal force generated by the spinning of the yo-yo, the spring, acting as the switch, is pulled outward. It makes contact with the positive leads of the LEDs, thus completing the circuit, turning the LEDs on.

It looks great in action, day or night. Check out the video:

I’ll be writing up the project as a DIY article soon. Look for it in MAKE Volume 22 this spring.

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Every other week, MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next.

By Meara O’Reilly, projects intern

I’ve been tinkering with the electronics on various cigar box guitars for a while, but I’d never had the chance to build one from the ground up. So when MAKE editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder wrote up a new how-to for an acoustic version of the guitar for the upcoming issue (MAKE, Volume 21, “Traditional Cigar Box Guitar”), I jumped on the chance to test-build it.

Mark Frauenfelder’s new acoustic cigar box guitar in MAKE Volume 21, coming in January.

As always here in the Make: Labs, it can be quite an adventure trying to sniff out all the possible interpretations of instructions while at the same time learning new skills, and this guitar build was no exception! I made two orientation-related mistakes based on an early manuscript and had quite a time trying to finish the build. In retrospect, the misunderstandings seem silly, but once made it’s really easy for mistakes like these to compound — due to structural weakness, later on my guitar neck snapped, twice! — so I thought I’d write about them here, even just as an ode to those mistakes you think you’d never make, but somehow end up making anyway:

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Every other week, MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next.

By Kris Magri, engineering intern

How I designed Makey, Part II: Creating the “stretchy” robot body in Inventor

When designing Makey the Robot for MAKE, Volume 19, I ran into a problem that plagues all kinds of designers — how to continually redesign a body to accommodate changes in whatever’s crammed inside it?

Once I’d sketched out Makey’s configuration and modeled the major parts in Autodesk Inventor 3D modeling software, I really got into some of Inventor’s awesome features. Inventor has three basic design types you work with: sketches, parts, and assemblies. Up to this point I had designed each individual component, including Makey’s robot body, as a part, as shown in Figure A.

Fig. A: Makey’s sheet metal body, near-final version, shown as a single part in Autodesk Inventor. Because I designed it as a component of an assembly, all the mounting holes and dropouts are perfectly aligned to internal robot components; if I move the components, Inventor automatically moves the holes.

Once I had these parts modeled, I placed them together into an assembly, as in Figure B. Then, I attempted to stretch the robot body as needed by making that part “Adaptive” inside the assembly. (That’s what Inventor calls “stretchy” parts, and it’s a powerful feature.)

Fig. B: Makey’s body shown as part of an assembly in Inventor, constrained to the edges of the motors (at bottom, in blue). If I move the motors, the body automatically stretches to accommodate the new motor positions. Similarly, I constrained the battery boxes (at top, in tan) to the body, so wherever the body stretches, the battery boxes follow automatically. Nice!

Also, I cut holes into the body where I needed them for mounting the motors. This was the wrong approach! It seemed to work, but when I looked at the robot body as a part, outside of the assembly, the holes I had made weren’t shown. They had simply vanished.

The reason for this is that Inventor can’t know ahead of time how you’re going to use a part. You could design one part that could be used in multiple assemblies, so if you alter the base part in any way inside one particular assembly, the alteration exists only in the assembly, but the base part is unchanged. Thus, my changes didn’t “take hold.”

The key was to create the robot body from inside the assembly. You can actually be inside an assembly and make a brand-new part. To do this, in the Assembly Panel area, instead of selecting Place Component, choose Create Component.

I ended up first creating what I called a “base plate,” which existed solely to help me anchor all the parts, including the robot body. It would not be a part I would actually fabricate. I then placed the base plate, the motors, the Arduino, and the batteries into an assembly, using Place Component, and assembled it all by anchoring everything to the base plate (using constraints). This was pretty much what I had been doing before.

Now, still inside the assembly, I created a new part, via Create Component, which would become the robot body. I selected the material type Sheet Metal.ipt, since it’s a sheet metal part, and created each bend and flange step by step, inside the assembly. This robot body now “belonged” to the assembly, and was adaptive inside the assembly. Any editing of it, from that point on, was always initiated from within the assembly.

Instead of making the body a specific width, I just made everything extra large with no dimensions. Once the body was formed, I finished editing, and now I was back inside the assembly with my new robot body. I then constrained the side of the body to an existing “edge” from another part, for instance, the sides of the motors (Figure B). When the constraint went into effect, the sides of the body “snapped” into place next to the motors. To make holes, I projected the motor mount holes onto the robot body, again edited the robot body part (from within the assembly), cut holes there, and then the holes “stayed put,” so to speak.

Success at last — I had modeled a fully adaptive robot body that I could easily modify to accommodate all the robot components I would be cramming inside it.

Next up: The battle to fit the brains inside.

More: How I designed Makey the robot, Part I: The first design

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