Sigalon's HowToDoIt Soup

Artist Lorenzo Bravi ran a drawbot class for kids as part of the Minimondi Festival in Parma, Italy. His design uses a battery powered milk frother with pens velcroed to it, making some lovely Spirograph-esque art.

The maker movement is a remarkable new source of innovation. We are starting to see what results from a powerful combination of open hardware + personal fabrication tools + connected makers. Sometimes this innovation is hard to identify in the excitement that surrounds Maker Faire. Yet at Maker Faire, you can find new products and new startups at various stages of development that you will see almost nowhere else. Business people tell me they come to Maker Faire expecting to have a good time with their family but unexpectedly walk away impressed by the creativity and innovation they find there. As the song says, “there’s something happening here.” Even now, the pace of development is quickening and the number of hardware startups is rapidly growing.

Tim O’Reilly has been urging that the opportunity is now to showcase makers as professionals who are starting new businesses and developing new products. So, I’m happy to announce a new business conference during the week of Maker Faire, taking advantage of the makers who are already coming to Maker Faire. Presented by MAKE, the Hardware Innovation Workshop will be held Tuesday and Wednesday, May 15-16, at PARC, a Xerox company, in Palo Alto, CA. (I’m excited to have PARC host us and this event because of its long history as a source of technology innovation.)

The Hardware Innovation Conference will present a number of hardware-related startups and review the major platforms and the new toolset for prototyping and personal fabrication. It’s an intimate setting to meet the leaders of the maker movement and understand how makers are changing the technology landscape, in much the same way that enthusiasts once helped to create the personal computer industry.

Our presenters will include:

• Massimo Banzi of Arduino, an Italian interaction designer and engineer who created this open source microcontroller. The Arduino platform has become the Linux of open source hardware and it is found at the heart of many maker projects.
• Carl Bass of Autodesk, a maker himself whose new consumer division, which acquired Instructables, is exploring the software and services needed by this emerging maker market.
• Jay Rogers of Local Motors is creating an open source car through collaborative design and he’s built a micro factory for assembly of these cars by the owners themselves.
• Ayah Bdeir of Little Bits is one of those non-traditional product designers who has developed a new educational product.
• Allan Chochinov of Core 77 is starting a new program called Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, which is reshaping product design around what makers are able to do.
• Nathan Seidle of SparkFun Electronics runs one of the major suppliers for maker projects. He’s also a partner for makers who have the idea but not the factory to build a new product.
• Bre Pettis of MakerBot will explore the 3D printing opportunity in consumer markets. MakerBot is the Apple II of the personal fabrication revolution. Brad Feld of Foundry Group will tell us why he’s invested in Makerbot.
• Mark Hatch of TechShop, whose membership model for a community workshop has become a hub for hardware innovators.
• Bunnie Huang of Chumby and author of “Hacking the Xbox,” who understands how Asia’s manufacturing capacity might be tapped by makers.

Check our event website for full program details.

The lesson for us from makers is that hardware isn’t as hard as it used to be. It’s benefiting from the same forces that allowed open source to reshape the software industry and create the web economy. Makers are part of a prototyping revolution that is inviting a new audience to design and develop products. Open technologies and new collaborative processes just might change the face of manufacturing by making it much more personal and more automated. Unlike traditional manufacturers, makers are able to pivot easily to serve niche markets. In addition, larger companies are hiring makers and maker advocates to infuse their own teams with creative ideas and keep track of these new market opportunities.

The conventional wisdom is that Silicon Valley investors don’t like hardware startups, but that’s not stopping makers. We even see hardware startups raising capital from non-traditional sources such as Kickstarter. (Twine raised over $850,000.) This is causing some investors to pay attention. As an angel investor said to me recently: “Everybody’s just looking at mobile/social. I want to look at things outside that well-developed space and that’s why I’m looking at makers.”

Please join me along with Tim O’Reilly and the creative team of MAKE Magazine and Maker Faire for a program focused on maker-led innovation at a historic location in the Silicon Valley. Due to the venue, we are limited to 300 participants. If you’re coming from outside the Bay Area, you can stay for the weekend of fun at Maker Faire, May 19-20th.

Event: Hardware Innovation Workshop
Dates: May 15-16
Location: PARC, a Xerox company, Palo Alto, CA

By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

If you are looking for a giant canvas on which to make mathematical patterns, how about fields of snow? Simon Beck has been stomping out giant patterns for years with just snow shoes. Here are some of his more mathematical examples: a Koch curve, a Sierpinski triangle, and the pattern of overlapping circles that everyone likes to make with a drawing compass.

All you need to make your own is some fresh snow and imagination.

More:
See all of George Hart’s Math Monday columns

International “design and innovation consultancy” IDEO threw a cool-sounding hackathon:

Originally we thought of doing a hackathon. Then we decided to push the concept to its next iteration. How could we bring together multidisciplinary weekend project teams—not just software engineers and digital designers, but also industrial designers, architects, and problem solvers from different backgrounds? Could we create a new kind of design-driven collaborative event? Inspired by IDEO’s own maker culture, the DIY community at Maker Faire, and Silicon Valley hackathons, we decided to experiment with the concept. We called this prototype event a “Make-a-thon.”

The result was a unique London pop-up event that produced some truly original concepts and meaningful digital and physical prototypes. We hosted about 60 makers and hackers in the IDEO London studio—including 1/3 IDEOers and 2/3 UK creative community members.

[thanks, Dave!]

Here is a sampler platter, culled from the vast array of project tutorials available over on Make: Projects. Help Make: Projects grow by adding your own tutorials.

Take a Hidden Picture

Make: Projects user kyleclements details how he built a piece of artwork that is seemingly a blank canvas, but actually, there are IR LEDs hidden behind the canvas. The IR LEDs are arranged in a secret design that is revealed by taking a digital photo. The digital camera sensors pick up the IR light that our eyes can’t see.

Speaking Hand Puppet from Recordable Greeting Card

Using a recordable greeting card, Michelle Min made a hand puppet for a friend’s 2-year-old nephew, living far away in Korea. When the puppet lifts its right arm, it says “Bosung!” (the nephew’s name) and plays some music.

Solar Laptop Device Charger

Instead of buying a laptop charging case for $200, make your own using this tutorial from Make: Projects user Matthew.

Cord Curling

“Coiling is a very elegant way of dealing with the problem of unsightly slack cables.” Sean Ragan explains how to curl cord using a heat gun and water.

Using visual markers embedded in an elastic button and some computer vision chops, researchers from Keio University have developed a unique 3-axis joystick that uses a front-facing camera opposed to the standard capacitive touch interface found on most smartphones and tablets. [via Technabob]

Gijs Gieskes wrote in to share a cool project he completed: a synthesizer made from a hard disk.

Daniel Raffel, creator of Snapguide says, “Snapguide is an iPhone app and web service for DIY enthusiasts who want to create beautiful, step-by-step how to guides on what they love. Whether you’re a backyard beekeper, professional chef or gardener extraordinaire sharing your projects with others has never been this easy.”

Dezso Molnar sent me a link to an Economist article on the promise of flying cars yesterday. He commented that it was the “same old article on flying cars.”

Dezso should know. He’s been building flying cars for several years. I asked him to comment on the article. He wrote:

The writer refers to a generation disappointed. Baby-boomers have enjoyed the blessings of technical advancement unparalleled in history, and together traveled trillions of comfortable miles in airliners. Comparatively, they put little effort into making aircraft more personal.

A complete infrastructure for flight already exists, people only need to join in. Look up — the skies are virtually empty. The rules of the air are international. English is the selected language. Easy. We just need a few people like Mr. Dietrich to start punching holes in the pervasive myth that vehicles that drive the roads on rainy days can’t fly when its sunny. They most certainly can, and there is value in that.

And yes, the writer is correct, there have been some recent signs of progress, but to say the Transition is only a step on the way to a “true sky car that can take off and land anywhere”, is to say anything else is useless and dissuade development. The state of the art for any technology is what is now, and all improvements are stepping stones to the next one if people endeavor to go there. Has the auto industry progressed beyond the Model T, which burned gas that could run out, sat in long lines when the roads were full, required a license for the driver, had 4 seats and could get a flat tire? Not really. Perhaps it was good enough, and fortunately Ford did not wait to design a “true car”.

The good news is that the path is clear for flying cars to start traveling – no cel towers need to be built in support as for mobile phones, or steel tracks laid as for locomotives. As such, mass production is not required at this stage, just a fresh approach.

Learn more about Dezso’s fresh approach on his website

Skylar Castator of Boulder, CO, created a car for a Sphero robot (we mentioned it in our Alt.CES coverage this January) using the guts of a trackball, an Arduino, and an H-bridge

In the video, Sphero commands the toy car where to drive. It does this through a trackball similar to the one used in a computer mouse or in the arcade game of golf. Sphero sits on the trackball’s wheels and his weight and momentum cause them to move. The wheels have encoders that then tell the car what direction Sphero is moving by sending out x and y coordinates of the movement to the motors. Roll Sphero forward and the car drives forward. Roll Sphero to the right and the car turns to the right.

Skylar’s Sphero car intractable shows you how to make your own.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/449163977/galileo-your-ios-in-motion/widget/video.html

Josh Guyot and JoeBen Bevirt, creators of the Gorrilapod flexible tripod, went to Kickstarter to fund their latest invention, called Galileo, an “iOS-controlled robotic iPhone platform with infinite spherical rotation capability.” It looks beautiful, and the Kickstarter price of $85 seems reasonable. I’m looking forward to seeing how makers incorporate the device into their own creations.