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Make: Online Maker Shed Arduino Giveaway: The Envelope, Please…
We could not be more pleased with your response to our recent Projects Pack for Arduino giveaway. The contest opened for entries last Friday, and closed last night, and during those five days the comments on the landing page logged more than 600 entries. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who took the time to tell us about either the coolest thing they’ve ever built with a microcontroller, or the coolest thing they dream of building, someday. We’re still collating all the fantastic projects and project ideas, but here are a few our faves:
And on and on! But we know you’re impatient to hear who actually won. So, without further ado, the winner, chosen by random lot, is Kelly Cooke. Kelly says:
Congratulations, Kelly! Send us your mailing address and we’ll get the kit out to you. And thanks again to everyone who entered! More:  Model It, or Make It Modelable
This past summer I had two great interns in my lab. As usual, they taught me more than I taught them. One in particular helped me refine my thoughts on the theme that pervades my every day. When Geoff first arrived in my office, I described his summer project to him. I had written 2,000 lines of code in MATLAB to model the Ackerman steering geometry of a tilting (leaning) vehicle. He was to take that code, check it, improve it, and finish it, and we’d build the vehicle as a tilting, steering, cargo-carrying tricycle. He said, “It’ll take three days.” I countered, “I’ll bet it takes six weeks.” Geoff dove into the code. He only looked up from his computer for two reasons: to hear instructions for using the vintage hand-pulled espresso machine, and to go stare at the physical prototype of the tilting trike to orient himself to the problem. He missed his own three-day target, but crushed my six-week estimate when he proudly showed me the first working computer model in just two weeks. And that’s the theme pervading my whole life right now: computational modeling. Why? Here’s how I see it: Galileo Galilei arguably did more to usher in the scientific revolution than any other. The quote “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so” is attributed to him. In my mind, 19th- and 20th-century science did exactly that, and the scientific method — the cornerstone of thoughtful progress in knowledge — is heavily dependent on good measurement. We measured everything we could about the scale of the universe. We probed the atomic then subatomic structure of the elements with incredibly elegant, single-parameter experiments that isolated things like the mass of an electron. This type of science has been so successful that now it seems the true frontiers of science exist less in the study of easily reducible, measurable things, and more in the study of complex, multiparameter systems — like biology, climate, metabolism, and ecology. In these systems, understanding is built with models that can be tested for their validity and correspondence to the messy, complex real world. Like many physical systems, there’s no perfect answer to a tilting tricycle, only “optimal.” You can optimize the parameters, but because of the limits of physically realizable machines, it can only ever be “almost perfect.” Success is being closer to almost perfect than other people’s models. But here’s the beautiful thing about modeling. Computational models are digital, and that makes them inherently shareable, independently verifiable, and easy to collaborate on and improve. Whereas my inclination was to immediately start to build something physical, Geoff’s approach — the approach of a new generation of engineers and scientists — was to begin with a model. Start with bits. Make them perfect, beautiful, defendable, sharable bits, then render them physical once you’ve reached an optimum. Sure, someone might figure out a better optimum one day, but because they can start with working, executable code, they’ll get to it faster. There’s an even more important reason to encourage this culture of shared models. The more people who have experience simulating the world with success, and making things from those models, the more people will trust in the models of our physical world that will guide how we shape our future. I read once about the science of perception and the humble practice of catching a falling ball. A ball moving 60mph travels almost 90 feet in a second. The only reason we can catch it is because we have a mental model of where the ball will be when our hand intercepts it. Throughout the course of our lives, we’ve built a mental computational model, which we’ve refined thousands of times, that helps us predict the future position of a ball so we might catch it with our relatively slow reflexes. We have enormous faith in the ability of a professional baseball player to model the future of a ball, under complex windy, rainy, and noisy conditions, and to catch it. It would be nice to build similar public faith in the ability of our professional scientists to model the future — the future of the oceans if we continue to pollute them with toxins, of the atmosphere if we continue to emit carbon dioxide, and of other problems that require humanity to have a faster response time than its cultural reflexes. Saul Griffith is a new father, entrepreneur, and regular columnist for MAKE magazine. otherlab.com This column is excerpted from MAKE Volume 24, page 13. Check out MAKE Volume 24:
Dale Dougherty to Host Maker Faire Detroit Town Hall in Grand Rapids on Tuesday
Here are the details: When: Tuesday, April 26, a town hall meeting from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Where: GRid 70, 70 Ionia Ave. SW, Grand Rapid, MI What: Town Hall meeting in Grand Rapids, open to the public and free of charge. This is an opportunity to meet Dale and to discuss the maker movement and the upcoming Detroit Faire. Maker Faire Detroit 2011 will draw together inventors, craftspeople, artists, and musicians for two days at Detroit’s Henry Ford Museum. We hope to see you there! iGeigie, an iPhone-Connected Geiger Counter
If you’re not following along with the great work RDTN is doing to create networks of radiation sensors, check out just one of their projects: iGeigie, a geiger counter that plugs into your iPhone.
If you like what you see, be sure to support RDTN’s Kickstarter project. More: Top 10: Electric Bikes
#10
#9
Neodymics Cyclemotor Electric Bike Conversion Kit #8
#7
Electric Bicycle – Battery Upgrade
#6
YikeBike – The World’s First Super Light Electric Folding Bike… #5
#4
Sekret Stealth Electric Bicycle #3
#2
Eric Peltzer’s Electric Bicycle #1
Did I miss a good one? Let me know, below! Fiddle Tunes on the 8-Bit Violin
Make: Live guest Ranjit Bhatnagar writes: “These guys at the Thingamajigs DIY Instruments Tailgate Party really know how to operate a pointy rectangular fiddle!” More:
Make: Live 3/9/11 – DIY Instruments 555 Contest Winners Announced
Jeri and Chris of the 555 contest have announced the results: Artistic
Complex
Minimalist
Utility
Under 18
iPad Dry Erase Template
Building a tablet app? Then you’ll dig this cool iPad Dry Erase Board from Design Commission. It even comes with a couple of pens and a handy list of icons on the back. [via SwissMiss] More Recent Articles |
MAKE blasts into orbit and beyond with our 
Scene from Maker Faire Detroit 2010, from RDECOM’s Flickr set
