Sqweak!

My good friend Jarg bought a Casio digital horn today, for only 2.50 euro. In some secondhand shop he ran into the thing, and being a true music lover immediately recognized it's coolness...
the thing is not really esthetically pleasing, but casio, it's like the Who said: "You are forgiven"
The thing is way cool, cause it can output Midi. So you can hook a digital drum kit (or a eclectic collection of bird sounds) to the thing, and blow your very own drum kit from hell (or forest, for that matter).

Thing was, these casio horns apparently have a common sqweak problem... when some weird hardware problem occurs, the thing only wants to produce this high pitched irritating sound, trough which you are still able to discern some correct sounds, but makes you want to trow the thing out of the window sooner than later.

But a! aren't we living in the Fablab age? don't we fix thing's ourselves? Hell yeah!
A couple of days ago I tore apart an old Imac, an lo and behold, there was the 47 micro farad capacitor we needed to replace the weaker original component... so after only 3 minutes of soldering, we have an incredibly cool digital saxophone!

Moral of the story? Fix stuff yourself before consulting some 'specialist' who, in this case, charges 45 dollars for the fix. And you miss out on all the fun...

check out the ugly but way cool (working) gadget:

How would you like your egg? Scrambled, cooked, flying?

And yes, it is that time of the year again, time for the Fablab annual Easter egg competition!.
My colleague Ales Schaub is working hard to get his entry finished before the deadline tomorrow night at six. At that time we will all log on to the Polycom conference (the MIT lab is running a continuous online conference) for the judging. And I guess I will be one of the judges... Probably going to be a though job! I heard that they are working on a flying egg in Norway...
So make sure to check back in here for the entries and of course the winner, who will be awarded with a free trip to the Norwegian lab... How I miss that place...

Mom, our display died. Again.

In Norway, I met a really nice guy working on an ambient light display, which consisted of little round transparent patches containing oil and water. If one applies a (probably quite high) voltage to the patches, the oil will move to the side, thus letting light shine trough. If you line up an array of these things, and apply a current to specific ones, it's possible to display information. Kind of like E-ink is supposed to work i guess, but surely way cooler... you can build it yourself.
Then, last wednesday, I met this guy at the lab at Pakhuis de Zwijger, who is also trying to build an display, only he is using bacteria! Apparently, if you lower (or raise, not sure which) the PH value of certain bacteria, you can get the suckers to glow. So using these fluorescent bacteria, one can in theory create a display... how cool is that? You will have actual dead pixels!
I don't think our houses will be equipped with this technique for some time, because the stuff dies rather quickly, and is not really easy to handle. Real cool project though.
Check out his site: biodisplay

Also:

Great! Marvelous!
Somebody is using psychedelica and Star Trek...

Keep yourself busy

E-mails tell us that by now most of the boot camp participants returned safely back home. And home is, among other things, where the work is. I started working on our project at the HKU, which deals with designing a 'concept room' for the dutch tax services. Nice challenge there, cause those guys really fucked up on software the last couple of years, and are now trying to make up for that, which asks for quite the attitude change on account of the workers.
I'm also starting conversations about fab related projects here in Holland, so more on that to come.

Still miss Norway though...

On a different note, anybody seen this weird article? I was thinking that this big earth changing event was going to happen around 2013 or so... when the last of the Mayan calendars ends. Could be those guys where not so precise in retrospect... just a couple of years of. In Norway iI was really enjoying the darkness (no, not the rock band), so could be the earth rotates in such a way that Holland will also have 2 hours of light a day... wouldn't that be marvelous?

speaking of Mayans, I've just seen the movie 'The Fountain' by Darren Aronofsky (director of 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a dream') and I must say, great movie. Perhaps not for those among us who don't like fairy tales or to much interwoven story lines (or indeed Mayans), but for them who like dreaming, love, life and death and the occasional meditative moment... do watch it.

Back home

So I'm back home... no more cold, no more snow.
But luckily there is enough to keep me occupied the coming weeks...
There are plans on continuing the multi-touch project (yes, STFF) in a slightly different form, I probably have a lot to do on the already running project at the HKU (school I'm attending), and I want to start doing a lot of stuff at the Fablab in Amsterdam, and maybe in Den Haag as well.
I hope to return to Norway soon though, because it's an incredible beautiful country, with really nice (and in some cases also beautiful) people.

If there are projects out there that can use the help of a fablab, or are just in general interesting... drop me a line and maybe I could help, or learn something. The lab in Den Haag is still looking for a lab manager, so if you have become interested in this fablab stuff on a deeper level, same thing: let me know, perhaps you can join the fun.

D/A conversion

Yesterday we started building the Fab@Home 3D printers...
With these printers, that you can build yourself, you can print 3D objects using material that hardens after being squished from a syringe... rubbers, clay but also icing for your cakes and desserts.

We worked in teams, about 5 per team at the beginning, slowly diminishing in numbers as we went along. some people (me) worked at the wiring, soldering, cutting wires and connecting stepper-motors to controller-boards. others began assembling the acrylic, while still others started on assembly of the mechanical parts (ball-bearings and the likes).

Today, at around 4, our first models where being printed. One of the teams made a square block with a hole, but I wanted something more difficult... so i found a model of the Penrose Triangle (see this site for the model) to print.
Since this model contains overhangs it was not possible to print (people who know about 3D printing or CNC machines will understand this problem). So I first tried to make a support structure in Blender, but since that would also contain overhangs or be incomplete, we decided to print into a layer of water, and see if the material would get enough support from that.

The model still has to harden, but it's looking good.
Click on one of the pictures for more.