MAKE subscriber Rich Gilbank of Toronto, ON wrote in to share this project: Anthros is a project I began working on as my fourth-year university thesis project for New Media at Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada). It uses open source tech (OpenFrameworks, Arduino) to make large tentacle-like nodes follow a user through a space. It was […]
Stitch London has collaborated with London’s Science Museum to create a Stitch Yourself component for the museum’s Who Am I? exhibit, opening in June 2010. You are invited to contribute a tiny Stitched Self and take part in scientific stitching history. The idea is that you work your stitching science on your blank body to […]
Lubbock, Texas artist Dustin Wallace, whose larger one-off/limited edition transforming robot sculptures I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, also makes these wicked little “robotagami” dudes that are CNC-cut from sheet metal (stainless steel or copper), ship flat, and get slotted together and folded up to make a dimensional figure by the buyer.
Delta robots use their parallel linkages to maintain a level end effector. This means they’re perfect for placing objects in factory settings and for looking awesome all the time. This one’s running on Arduino.
Lady Bank’s Rose is a delicate evergreen rose with tiny, puffy yellow flowers. Currently one is just breaking into bloom above the CRAFT and MAKE offices. The best thing about this evergreen beauty is that she is thornless. Thornless! Lady Bank’s is a vigorous climber and flowers freely throughout spring and summer. It’s easy to […]
A company called Lunatic Construction sells giant Lego-esque bricks made out of expanded propylene for use as furniture. They have 3 different shapes of bricks available in 7 colors. Plus they offer clear or pearlescent ABS, metal, as well as light-up versions. [Via Inhabitat]
Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.
“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.
So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.
Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,’ ” Lawrence says.
