The lovely folks of Machine Project are taking their show on the road. The road to Minneapolis. They will be conducting another “grand ‘musical’ experiment” this Friday from 1-5 pm at the Walker Art Center, creating a concert from as many Apple ][ computers as they can get their hands on. Bring yours and enjoy! […]
Free, handy, download-and-print sticker from Randy Sarafan of F.A.T. Lab.
Lego NXT Wall-E transformable fully self controlled, it uses Lego Mindstorms programming environment. The video shows the transformation which is quite similar to the original Wall-E. See the maker’s Picasa gallery showing build photos. Note that, in typical Mindstorms fashion, the actual transformation takes 4 minutes. [Via Inhabitots]
It’s not a dramatic color shift, but it turns out you can control the hue of EL wire over a narrow range by varying the frequency of the resonating driver circuit. dcroy (upper video) did it back in February using a 555, and Paul Stoffregen (lower video) unknowingly repeated the work recently, having noticed that a single fixed-frequency driver produced slightly different colors in two different lengths of wire.
A selection of robotic limbs from the archives of MAKE.
That’s Hemispherical Omnidirectional Gimbaled wheel. As an idea it’s at least as old as 1938, but it’s lately been re-discovered by Curtis Boirum, an MS Mechanical Engineering student at Bradley University in Peoria, IL.
The makers of the Video Experimenter Shield for Arduino have used their product to create an instantly updating word cloud from over-the-air television closed captioning data. The NTSC video is passed through the shield and the Arduino sends the closed captioning text to the computer via serial. The cloud is generated by a Processing sketch, which makes words larger if they’re spoken more frequently.
