The Å»ak Gallery in Berlin has an exhibition up with an extensive collection of 1960s Polish homemade tractors (photos only, unfortunately). – [via] Link.
Related:
MAKE: Volume 11: Alt Vehicles – Link.
Posted by Becky Stern | Thursday January 31st, 2008 9:00 PM
Categories: Art & Design, Energy | No Comments
I was digging around for an open source statistics package today and came across R, a GPLed statistics and and data analysis suite. Sweet!
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.
One of R’s strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.
So I’ve been messing around with this for the last half hour and it’s really an exciting package, especially if you’re a coder or unix geek. You interface with R through a command line programming interface, executing simple statements, setting variables, and defining functions. It feels similar to issuing commands at a unix prompt, except you’re working with data sets instead of file descriptors.
What’s cool is the robust capability of the standard function set. Want to read in a data set from a tab delimited table you found on the internet? Check this out:
# Read a table in from a URL (tab delimited table with row headers)
Mydata <- read.table(http://someserver.com/table.txt', header=TRUE)# Display summary (mean, median, min, max, etc.) for each column
summary(Mydata)# Get the standard deviation for the values in column "foo"
attach(Mydata)
sd(foo)
Learning the command set is a little daunting at first, but the console even does tab completion. If you don’t know what a function does, just put a question mark before it. For instance, “?sd” will quickly pull up help for the standard deviation function.
I’ve only scratched the surface, but there are links below to some R beginner guides which should help you get started. Anyone out there more familiar with the package? Please share any useful links and tips in the comments.
The R Project for Statistical Computing – Link
An Introduction to Statistical Computing in R – Link
Producing Simple Graphs with R – Link
Posted by jstriegel | Thursday January 31st, 2008 8:35 PM
Categories: Electronics | 6 Comments
Check out this nifty automated strip cutter for surface-mount components built by some Dutch students from printer parts (stepper motor and LCD display), an Atmel ATMega8 controller, and a servomotor.
Posted by Gareth Branwyn | Thursday January 31st, 2008 8:00 PM
Categories: Computers & Mobile, Electronics | No Comments
David Ellis made this owl instrument, inspired by a player piano. – [via] Link.
Posted by Becky Stern | Thursday January 31st, 2008 7:00 PM
Categories: Art & Design, Music | No Comments
Here’s a site with PDFs for making custom cardboard boxes for Poker-, Bridge-size and “big deck” playing card boxes. There’s also a link to an app for generating custom-size “tuck box” templates. I have some tarot decks that could use a new home. It’ll be fun to design custom art for them.
Making Custom Card Boxes – [Thanks, Patti!] Link
Posted by Gareth Branwyn | Thursday January 31st, 2008 6:00 PM
Here’s a note from Sean, one of the people who were in the media last year for the Mooninite event, he sent this in… post in the comments with you thoughts! -
Hi, I’m Sean Stevens, From the infamous Mooninite Madness of 1-31-07. Unfortunately I’ve been totally buried in work and other things so I didn’t have a chance to “celebrate” the anniversary… But if you would, please send a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has remembered the day. It’s a scary world where the people in Office don’t understand the need to change things, Make them how we want. But it’s a basic desire. The desire to Create. The desire to Make things Better. The fact that people have created Bushinites and Binladenites…. Even a Zebblerite! And put them all over Boston…In some of the same spots even… To me it’s a real show of strength and civil disobedience. Of course, I know it’s all in fun too… That’s all it was ever meant as. (Though I prefer the “LOLz” spelling personally) Anyways, I hope that more people will put effort into trying to understand things that they don’t… Fear of things that aren’t understood that is the root cause of Terrorism. Until more people start thinking for themselves and stop letting the government/media tell them what is truth I’m afraid we are stuck with that fear. Government and Police can only write laws and try to stop those who break them. Then they can publish stories of their “Success” and hold press conferences… To make us think we are safe. But we aren’t. Rely on yourself. Rely on Community. Live your life, be aware of your surroundings. The only thing worse than loosing one’s life is giving it up for false safety-Sean Stevens
Posted by Phillip Torrone | Thursday January 31st, 2008 5:27 PM
Categories: Home | 14 Comments
Jared Tarbell is an artist and programmer who does gorgeous computational art, coded in the Processing language. And not only are the finished pieces amazing (and available for purchase), but you can also “run” the art, see it grown in a pop-up applet.
Generative Artifacts – Computation Gallery [Thanks, Patti!] – Link
Posted by Gareth Branwyn | Thursday January 31st, 2008 4:00 PM
Categories: Art & Design, Computers & Mobile | 8 Comments
Here’s a unique circuit for guitar effects builders. It uses readily available SIP sockets to allow easy transistor swapping. Experiment with different values for a personalized sound – and change it up on a whim. You can also recreate a bunch of popular pre-existing fuzz distortions with it:
Some of the fuzzes you can make after building this layout are the Basic Fuzz Face (with R.G. Keen Mods, Roger Mayer Mods, Fuller Mods), the Vox Tone Bender 5/67, runoffgroove.com’s Sili-Faces, fuzzcentral.com’s Axis Face Germanium and Silicon, Joe Gagan’s Easy Face, Aron Nelson’s Hornet, the Gus Fuzz Face, Tim Escobedo’s Many Faces, the Boutique Fuzz, and the Miss Piggy.
Guassmarkov’s site has some great tutorials on using op-amps and other basic electronic parts. There’s a boat-load of schematics, PCB images, and Eagle CAD files on there as well.
Fuzzy logic effects pedal -Link
Related:
Walkman guitar distortion pedal -Link
Posted by Collin Cunningham | Thursday January 31st, 2008 3:00 PM
Categories: Electronics, Music | 1 Comment
Is your canoe too slow? Just add – one car, duct tape, ladder, ironing board, and copious amounts of dry land – Enjoy!
(WARNING: Do not sit in upside-down canoe)
Sports car from canoes – Link
In the Maker Store:
Art Cars book @ The Maker Store – Link
Posted by Collin Cunningham | Thursday January 31st, 2008 2:00 PM
Categories: Energy | 2 Comments
From the MAKE Flickr pool:
Toner-transfer and PNP film transfer etching can be used for more than just circuit boards.
Ed Hume shares images of these etched brass signs used to accent his recreation of the Climax 3/4″ locomotive. Visit the full photo set to enjoy some maker zen.
Etched hobby train signage – Link
Climax scale locomotive photo set – Link
PNP transfer film @ All Electronics – Link
From the pages of MAKE:
MAKE 09 – page 123 -Link
Printed Circuit Boards. Step-by-step instructions for making your own PCBs at home. MAKE 02 – page 164. Subscribers–read this article now in your digital edition or get MAKE 02 @ the Maker store.
Posted by Collin Cunningham | Thursday January 31st, 2008 1:30 PM
From The MAKE Flickr Pool:
Kthxema wore this LED throwie/pendant today in support of technological awareness. – Link
Related:
Aqua Teen Hunger Force shuts down Boston – Link
Posted by Collin Cunningham | Thursday January 31st, 2008 1:00 PM
Categories: Electronics | No Comments
Ever wondered how HTML and image data would sound as beat samples?
Bill writes:
I’ve written a Firefox addon that makes it possible for a monome or arduino to interact with your browser. The url below is a video of me “playing” the raw data in the NYTimes homepage using a monome 40h. The project is called Lily and its a Max/PD style patching language that hooks into the browser and allows you to build multi-media projects (including physical controllers) on top of Firefox.
Each link highlighted actually makes for a nice percussive sound. This makes sense given that many percussive voices are synthesized using noise generators – and web data sounds similarly random to our ears. Awesome project, thanks Bill!
Lily project – Link
Related:
Posted by Collin Cunningham | Thursday January 31st, 2008 12:00 PM
Categories: Arduino, Music, Open Source Hardware | 1 Comment
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