Science Projects

Once every 17 years, a population of cicadas ranging from Connecticut to the Appalachian highlands of North Carolina emerges to annoy everyone within earshot. The last time east coasters saw this brood was in 1996, making 2013 yet another year of annoying insect pests. The only question is, when will we start to see this year’s cicada brood? Radiolab, the awesome podcast and public radio show, has put together an awesome project that asks listeners to track when the cicadas in their area will emerge. Cicadas generally enter their loud and obnoxious adult stage when the ground temperature 8 inches below the surface reaches 64º F. Armed with an Arduino, thermistor, and a few wires and resistors, any Radiolab listener can upload soil temperature data to Radiolab servers where all the data will be correlated with documented cicada sightings. After following the page’s instructions for wiring up a bunch of LEDs and a thermistor to an Arduino, just upload the most well-commented code we’ve ever seen and go outside to take soil temperature measurements. The temperature is displayed in a pseudo-binary format on nine LEDs. To decode the temperature without counting by powers of two, Radiolab has an online decoder that also allows you to upload your data and location. Filed under: Arduino Hacks

Check out this piece on the iconic mathematical structures sculptor, jeweler, and artist Bathsheba Grossman from the Shapeways “Designer Spotlight” series! Via Boing Boing. This weeks Designer Spotlight focuses on Bathsheba Grossman, a long standing and influential community member here at Shapeways, whose beautiful mathematical designs have inpired many designers, not to mentions a few past designer spotlights! Tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? Where are you located? I’m a designer for 3D printing, and my day job is trying to sell what I come up with. I’m bicoastal, usually spending winters at Santa Cruz, and summers at the trendy hacker hotbed of Somerville, near Boston. I’ve been working with 3D printing as an art medium since 1997, that’s been quite the roller-coaster! Overall I can’t say I’m getting rich (or at least not quickly) but the toys are great and my time is my own. What’s the story behind your designs? What inspires you? I was originally a math major interested in geometry and topology, when as a college senior I met the remarkable sculptor Erwin Hauer, and suddenly it was obvious that what I had in mind was more art than math. Symmetry is the foundation of what I do: there are many more ways to be symmetrical in 3-space than the familiar ones, but not so many that you can’t explore them all and delve into the most interesting ones. Over the years I’ve moved away from literal math — as the field has grown I no longer feel called on to make nifty math models simply because no one else is doing it! — and into more freewheeling biomorphic shapes. But although now I play more with suggesting and breaking it, now I believe I’ll always be working in some way with symmetry. What brought you to 3D printing with Shapeways? When Shops were launched I already had some reputation as a 3D printing artist, and I was offered the chance to join early, so I leaped at it. The chance to sell in a new venue with easy setup and no cost was very appealing: running a retail website was never part of my artistic vision, and this solution just has no downside. Other people selling sculpture while I’m sleeping? That’s my kind of business. How did you learn how to design in 3D? I’m self-taught, which arguably means I never did learn. In the mid 90′s Rhinoceros was in beta, and you could download it for free so I did. It has a command line and my day job was programming, so it wasn’t a completely unfamiliar environment, and slowly I figured out how to do some things. Since then I’ve used all sorts of design software, and written some of my own, but I’m still more comfortable with a command line than a GUI. How do you promote your work? Mostly I just hang it up on my site, and of course on Shapeways, and hope. Sometimes I buy magazine ads, either in STEM-focused journals like Scientific American and Science News, or more general cultural magazines like Atlantic and Smithsonian. I’ve experimented with various kinds of online ads, but never seen any measurable effect, so I no longer buy banners or AdWords or anything like that. On the social media side I only have enough juice for one outlet, and I picked Facebook. It’s good for the late-night moments when I’ve just finished something and I’m dying to show it to someone; in art school I used to rush out in the corridor waving the model, and now posting screenshots to Facebook feels a little like that. I think readers respond to that feeling…it’s the best part of being an artist, so it’s nice to be able to share. Who are your favorite designers or artists? Of course I feel close to people who work with geometry and algorithms: Henry Segerman, Oskar van Deventer, Virtox, unellenu…and I’m especially awed by both the mathematical and marketing of Nervous Systems. Overall I try not to surf

Fans Lose Their Heads in Pursuit of Daft Punk Helmets @ WSJ.com. …as fans awaited the release of Daft Punk’s first new album in eight years, demand has soared for facsimiles of their iconic headgear. Some cash-strapped fans are proposing long-term payment plans; others are fretting over whether they will be able to find models that fit their heads. “Price is not an object,” wrote 27-year-old Boston-area fan Trevor Bates in a recent posting on a popular Daft Punk fan site, saying he was prepared to spend at least $2,000 and warning he also had “a large head.”

This project is a wonderful example of what can be accomplished with a rather complicated logic circuit. It’s an Etch-a-Sketch made from a 16×16 LED grid. That in itself is only somewhat interesting. But when hearing about the features and that it is driven by logic chips we were unable to dream up how it was designed. There’s no schematic but the video commentary explains all. The thing that confused us the most is that the cursor is shining brighter than the rest of the pixels. This is done with two different 555 times and a duty cycle trick. When you turn the trimpots the cursor position is tracked by some decade counters. Pixels in your path are written to a RAM chip which acts as the frame buffer. And there’s even a level conversion hack that let’s the display run at 15v to achieve the desired brightness. Top notch! [via Reddit] Filed under: led hacks

Here’s a helpful project tutorial process showing how to create a delta bot, and drawing on delta bot example projects from the past from Circuit Monkey’s Blog. To get oriented about what a delta bot is and how it functions, check out the Part I of this series as well. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the artwork for the top and bottom acrylic base pieces and brought the file over to SYN Shop for cutting. I used threaded rods at each of the 6 hexagon corners to hold the top and bottom pieces together. I used ViaCAD to create the mounting brackets for the servos and 3D printed them out.  I ended up doing five revisions to get it right. During the process of adding the servo motors I had to re-cut the plastic top to get a better fit for the servos, but also added a few hundred holes in a grid pattern to allow mounting of the electronics as needed….. Read more. Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers! Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D! The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

Create 3D Printed Objects In Air: The traditional 3D printers used the regular horizontal surfaces to print objects on. But how cool would it be to have a 3D printer that can take away the surface dependency? Basically that means you can virtually print 3D objects anywhere in the air! This is what the new 3D robotic printer called “Mataerial” can achieve. It’s unique characteristic is to allow users to print 3D objects in the air extending from any surface. It uses the principles of Anti-gravity object modeling and does not require any supporting structures to print objects in air. This unique method enables users to print natural objects by using 3D curves in free motion. The material that comes out of the nozzle is already solidified due to a chemical reaction between two source components. Users can play around with different sizes and shapes giving them good flexibility to print such objects without using any particular surface. This is a collaborative effort of Petr Novikov, Sasa Jokic and Joris Laarman studio. Read more.

RFID readers aren’t very expensive to buy. But if you are real hobbyist and like building instead of purchasing stuff, then Attiny13 based RFID reader might be interesting to experiment with. It was build by Vassilis Serasidis – author of many great projects. As always he tries to keep things simple, cheap and easy to follow. The RFID reader he builds works with standard 125kHz tags that uses EM4100 protocol. There is a good explanation on how the circuit works in physical level. It includes how reader transmits data and receives from passive tag. Reader is assembled on prototyping board using through hole components and hand made coil on the back. You will also get some understanding how to calibrate coil to have great range and reliability. Currently reader outputs the 10-digit Tag serial number via Serial interface 2400 bps 8N1.

Bioresorbable Airway Splint Created with a Three-Dimensional Printer — NEJM. Tracheobronchomalacia in newborns, which manifests with dynamic airway collapse and respiratory insufficiency, is difficult to treat.1,2 In an infant with tracheobronchomalacia, we implanted a customized, bioresorbable tracheal splint, created with a computer-aided design based on a computed tomographic image of the patient’s airway and fabricated with the use of laser-based three-dimensional printing, to treat this life-threatening condition. At birth at 35 weeks’ gestation, the patient did not have respiratory distress and otherwise appeared to be in normal health. At 6 weeks of age, he had chest-wall retractions and difficulty feeding. By 2 months of age, his symptoms progressed and he required endotracheal intubation to sustain ventilation. The workup revealed the following: an anomalous origin and malposition of the pulmonary arteries, with crisscross anatomy; right pulmonary-artery hypoplasia; compression of the left mainstem bronchus between an abnormally leftward-coursing ascending aorta and an anteriorly displaced descending aorta; air trapping; and postobstructive pneumonia. Despite placement of a tracheostomy tube, mechanical ventilation, and sedation, ventilation that was sufficient to prevent recurring cardiopulmonary arrests could not be maintained. We reasoned that the localized tracheobronchomalacia was the cause of this physiological abnormality and made a custom-designed and custom-fabricated resorbable airway splint. Our bellowed topology design, similar to the hose of a vacuum cleaner, provides resistance against collapse while simultaneously allowing flexion, extension, and expansion with growth. The splint was manufactured from polycaprolactone with the use of a three-dimensional printer.

Platige Image and Bridge created BIOSTAGOG – an interactive sculpture which combines algorithmic design, 3D printing, mapping and interaction. This parametrically generated, multicellular form has been integrated with projection and by that it gives a possibility of interaction between installation and its audience. BIOSTAGOG can display creative content made by artists working at Platige Image and by using Kinect technology it may equally involve both the company staff and the visitors.

During Google’s I/O developer conference,Wednesday, May 15th,2013,the company made a popular announcement that a new developer suite called Android Studio was launched, which invoked intense feedback among attendees, for the crowd “ooh’d” and “ahh’d” as screenshots were shown on stage. Android Studio,  based on IntelliJ ,  is specifically designed for  developers  and is exactly...