Application info

See the details for the March 9th Make:SF here

First John showed off the recycled cards he makes.

Check out more of his cards here

Then Jeff demonstrated his Princess and the Pea Alarm Clock.

It is an Arduino controlled air tank the blows up an exercise ball under your bed. Check out his blog for some hilarious movies. He also said that recycled cans make great cases for electronics.

Finally Steve talked about his project interfacing a Mindstorm robot with EEG sensors signals. Basically you can train your mind to send out signals that can control a robot. Pretty Cool. Here are some videos of the project. He is still working on the documentation but it should all be up very soon.  His ultimate goal is to make a project that can introduce school kids to robotics.

There are quite a lot of makers working on EEG projects. One is OpenEEG that is working on making the EEG hardware more accessible to everyone. Another is the BCI Group, a research lab in Albany NY. They have some pretty cool videos of their research that you should take a look at.

After the demos everyone got to work on the art card mini-project.

By the end of the night we got some pretty cool cards

including a talking robot.

Check the rest of the photos from that night and thanks to everyone for coming!!

P.S

For all you interested, this is where we got the the voice recorders

First Andrew showed off a key chain wind up LED light.

You can find them if you Google “crank LED flashlight”. Andrew got his at the Exploratorium Gift shop. Then Mike showed is Pelteir can cooler.

He did all the machining and welding himself. However he said that he could not draw heat way from the Peltier unit fast enough so in fact he ended up with a heater. He is working on a new design with better heat sinking that should take care of the problem. Hopefully when he is done he can come back and show us the results.

After that Sam, our speaker for that evening, described the MakerBeam.

MakerBeam is attempting to create an open hardware mini-T system. It is like 80/20 but at a smaller scale and is for quickly making frames for PCB boards and other equipment. Eventually they want it to be flexible enough that you will be able to make robots using the system. The funding for the project came through Kick Starter. It is a really cool website for funding all types of projects from art and books to crafts etc. Check it out if you have project of your own that you need funding for. Currently MakerBeam has alpha prototypes and are in the process of redesign for the betas. They have lots plans for the future so keep an out eye for them.

After that we had some fun playing with some art cards including

.

We are having another meeting on the Tuesday the 9th at the reMake Lounge where Maker Beam will do another demo and we will have more art cards. For those of you who have not had a chance to see this stuff I hope you can come!

After testing all the bots developed some interesting refinements including various antenni, motor, and battery locations

Then there were some fast and furious races (or at least circles). Check out some of the videos below.

Lets Race!

The Championship

RSVP and info on our Meetup Calendar

Check out the Bristle Bot Racing Finals to see culmination of night heart pumping action. Hat tip Evil Mad Scientists for the instructions.

Rules
- you must have brought something to participate
- the stuff you want to exchange should be wrapped
- choose a number out of a hat to see who goes first
- the first person chooses a present and unwraps it
-(a) the next person can either steal a unwrapped present or unwrap a new present
-(b) if a present is stolen three times it becomes locked and can not be stolen again
- repeat steps (a) and (b) until all the presents are opened

RSVP and info on our Meetup calendar

Check out the link below for more details.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305

Ellen Fullman is a local maker, musician, and composer. For this concert, she has stretched metal strings about 100 feet across the Berkeley Art Museum’s largest gallery, and she will play it along with other musicians.

There are a few details about the specifications of her instrument here:

http://www.ellenfullman.com/TechRider.html

and videos:

http://www.ellenfullman.com/Video.html

There will a concert on December 4th. Should be amazing and it’s a mere $5.