This past Saturday, I stopped in at NYC Resistor looking to really start learning how to program electronics using the Arduino platform. I’d taken Zach’s Intro to Arduino “If funky get loopy” course (he says there will be more after the new year!), but hadn’t really made any of my own projects. Figuring that Raphael’s twitchie kit had some good servos and a little Ardunio based board in it, I started taking apart.

It turns out that Bre was already in the middle of a similar project, and had fashioned a DIY robotic arm out of servos, a twitchie board (which uses the same firmware as the Lilypad) and Popsicle sticks. We joined forces and put together this amazing little thing:

Things – Eric Skiff and Bre Pettis created a Popsicle Stick Robotic Arm from Bre Pettis on Vimeo.

We hacked an old Atari joystick to control the arm, and each servo is manipulated in turn as you press the red button. It really was a ton of fun to bring this project together, and I’m amazed at what we did in a few hours. Huge thanks to Bre for having the hardware all set to go and to Raph for his awesome Twitchie kit and all his advice along the way.

If you’d like to embark on a similar project, here’s the code for SuperRobotArm v0.2.

Bre is debating keeping the popsicle stick aesthetic or making a slick laser-cut body, and is taking votes via comments on his blog. Let him know what you think!

By the way – this video is part of Bre’s excellent “Things” series, where he features a new awesome thing each day. You can check out the archives at bre.blip.tv, or Subscribe in itunes to get new episodes as they come out!

Thursday nights are open to the public from 6-9pm for Craft/Hack night!
Bring your projects people!

Craft/Hack nights happen every Thursday with the exceptions of the following:

Thanksgiving: Nov. 27th

Xmas: Dec. 25th

New Years: Jan 1st

Marisa Olsen pointed me to this interesting panel. I won’t be in the country, but I hope someone can go and report back as to how it went!

Craft Hackers is a panel discussion among artists who use crafting techniques to explore high-tech culture and the relationship between needlework and computer programming. Panelists include Cat Mazza, who translates moving images into stills knit in yarn; Christy Matson, who uses Jacquard Looms (some of the earliest computers) to knit landscape images from computer games; Ben Fino-Radin, whose witty needlepoint sculptures translate the World Wide Web into yarn and plastic, one pixel at a time; and Cody Trepte, whose embroidery of retired computer punch cards rekindles an old-fashioned love affair with the hand of the artist.

Link

For the last two weeks Thingiverse has been in stealth mode. Zach Hoeken and I schemed it up and he’s been coding like crazy to bring it to life. Invite your friends to the thingiverse and share the universe of things with folks you know!

Fred over at Creative Commons wrote up a very nice article about Thingiverse!

Thingiverse is an “object sharing” site that enables anyone to upload the schematics, designs, and images for their projects. Users can then download and reuse the work in their projects using their own laser cutters, 3D printers, and analog tools. Think of it as a Flickr for the Maker set.

Besides implementing our licenses, Bre and Zach have also gone the distance and allowed users to license works under the GNU GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses, as well as allowing them to release works into the public domain. Thingiverse uses our license wrappers for each of these licenses thereby enabling automatic indexing by machines like search engines.

Pushing the envelope even further, Thingiverse also fully implements our RDFa specification (just take a look at the source of any page with a CC license to see RDFa in action) for expressing licensing and authorship information on the semantic web. This means that aside from telling machines that a work is licensed under CC, Thingiverse also tells machines the title of a work, its author, and other interesting semantic information.

If you’re looking for a fantastic example of how to implement the commons on a platform designed for sharing creativity, look no further than Thingiverse.

Thanks Fred! We’ll keep doing our best to make this a great place to share things!

fry an LED with them…

So a month or so ago I caught a solid minute of random moments at NYCR on a sunday evening…. THIS is a solid 7 minutes electronics are destroyed. Witty comments are made. And the random crazy things that result from idle hands are observed.