Science Projects

For New Yorkers reading (or for visitors from out of town), check out bitform’s show “Vanishing Point” opening on Thursday, May 30th at 6 PM. The show features work by artists Annie Dorsen, Kyle McDonald, Boris Meister, Elaine Reichek, Sebastian Schmieg, Mungo Thomson, Clement Valla, and Siebren Versteeg. The show is curated by A. E. Benenson, and focuses on problems of scale in the digital age. Benson’s curatorial statement: At the birth of modern computing, a paradox: only after Alan Turing theorizes an infinitely large computer* do we begin to plausibly imagine how our world could be digitally remade as small as possible. That is, it’s only after Turing fixed our technological gaze outwards onto infinity that we began our relentless dwindling inwards, towards miniaturized circuits and virtualization. Taking this contradictory movement as both its content and form, the exhibition Vanishing Point presents views of a contemporary digital vastness that is both boundless and barely there. bitforms is located at 529 West 20th St, New York, NY. More information here.

Peter H. Diamandis on Google+ – 5 Steps to Cutting Costs Through Open Source: DIY Drones. In this blog, I’m continuing my exploration of what Chris Anderson’s company DIY Drones has done in using open-source methods to create products that are exponentially less expensive to make.

Memorial day is 05/27/2013 – Adafruit will be open and taking orders online, free shipping to any military base as always… Orders will ship out on May 28th. There will not be any deliveries or shipping on Monday. Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May (May 27 in 2013). Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in the military service. First enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War (it is celebrated near the day of reunification after the Civil War), it was expanded after World War I.

Amid a number of interesting “print-my-doodle” projects shared lately, from Doodle3D to Doodlesculpt, Cubify has just launched a robust and intuitive Cubify Draw free iOS app for iPhone, iPad, and iPad Mini that allows those just starting out with 3D printing to instantly create a 3D extruded doodle that can be uploaded to Cubify.com for their service to print or send you your processed STL, depending on your interests. Check out the tool for free now to compare to the other sketch-to-object projects you have tried before to get a sense of why this app is worth checking out! Turn your fingers into an instant 3D drawing tool. HOW IT WORKS Step 1: Draw Use your finger to create a shape. Step 2: Make it 3D Turn your drawing into a 3D model. Email the file to yourself or upload it to Cubify.com. Step 3: Print it Using your 3D printer, make it real! FEATURES Turn your fingers into an instant 3D drawing tool Bring your imagination to play and simply use your finger to draw on your iPhone, iPad, or iPad Mini – Cubify Draw will turn those images into a 3D model, automatically. Create a shape, make the line thicker or thinner, then make it 3D! The drawing is turned into a cookie-cutter like shape, and from there you can adjust thickness and height, or make the shape solid, before saving the file. Make a Cube printable .stl (saved in your My Cubify account, or sent to you by email). Print out your file on your 3D printer at home. With Cubify Draw, anyone who can draw (ages 8-80) now has the ability to create unique 3D content. No special software or special skills required! Read more. Get this app from the AppStore here. 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!

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.