Maker Faire Bay Area, the world’s largest DIY festival, is right around the corner, taking place at the San Mateo Fairgrounds on May 22nd and 23rd. One of the biggest new projects coming to the Faire this year is the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, pictured above and hand-crafted by a large and dedicated crew. We sent […]
Dr. BP Agrawal has won the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability, and for good reason! He’s innovated a new rainwater harvesting system for communities in India: Aakash Ganga (AG) is one of the signature innovations that Dr. BP Agrawal developed under Sustainable Innovations (SI), a non-profit organization. SI harvests innovations in systems, technologies and entrepreneurship […]
Silicon Valley software engineer Ari Krupnik makes what he calls “pixel mosaics” as a hobby. Besides dice, he’s also used bullet casings and M&Ms. You may have seen Ari in this full-page ShopBot ad in MAKE 14. His rendering of Che Guevara, above, uses 400 black dice. He’s also done one of George Orwell. (“Maybe one day my prose can be as fluid as his,” says Ari–hear, hear!) This page includes another dice example and some good detail on Ari’s process.
There are three movements, controlled from 3 axles, and the gears on the axles have prime numbers of teeth (23, 43, 59). So technically the movements will only repeat every 58,351 turns of the small gear. There’s also a semi-random toggle on the head motion, so it will never really quite repeat. Almost all the parts press fit and/or lock together, so the whole thing can be disassembled to a pile of parts, then reassembled, adjusted, and set going again without tools.
That’s perhaps a bit unfair, as the PET from which designocrat Marcel Wanders’ prototype “Sparkle” chair is made may well come at least partly from recycled sources, for all I know. What I should say, really, is that the chair suggests direct recycling without actually doing so. It looks like it’s made from actual bottle parts, even though it isn’t. Which is a rather strange kind of eco-marketing, IMHO. Still, I like it as a purely aesthetic object. Is it because I’ve been programmed to desire bottled water, and thus respond favorably to an object that mimics its form even in a totally irrational way?
Maker Faire veterens ArcAttack recently persuaded Grant Imahara to enjoy one of their really high-voltage tunes from within an oh-so-cozy Faraday cage – looks like good times to me! [Thanks, Joe!] More: Happy Birthday Tesla – from ArcAttack (and MAKE too!) ArcAttack performs the theme from Doctor Who Talking gear with ArcAttack
The obvious caveat, here, is that these are CG renderings of a concept design. Even relatively simple devices and mechanisms tend to breed unexpected problems in the transition from virtual to actual, and, IMNSHO, the cat’s not really in the bag until you’ve made a real one in the real world. Still, pretty delightful mechanical design here. It’s called “Grand Central,” from Swedish freelance designers Sanna Lindström and Sigrid Strömgren. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
