Tinkerlog

Yay, here is my second article, this time published in the famous Elektor magazine. It’s about the synchronizing fireflies.

I met Jerry at last years HAR2009 and we chatted about the fireflies and all things electronics. He works for the Elektor magazine in the Netherlands and asked me, if I would like to publish an article about the fireflies. And here it is. Thanks Jerry, for making this possible!

A couple of months ago, some nice guys of the IFISC (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems) contacted me. They saw the Synchronizing Fireflies and wanted them to demonstrate how simple rules can make patterns emerge from chaos. The main research of the institute is in Nonlinear Physics and Complex Systems.

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Last weekend, a small group of tinkerers of Palo Altona built a MakerBot Cupcake CNC. Simone and Christian from Good School bought the MakerBot and asked Palo Altona for assistance with the assembly. Of course we were happy to help out.

We startet on Saturday and made good progress. We assembled the CNC and the extruder and made the first tests with stinking hot ABS. Yeah!

Next day was for learning firmware and tools. We switched X, Y and Z directions of the stepper motors a couple of times and managed to drive the heated nozzle into the platform at first try. *sigh*

This is the very first print out. Although it is not tight enough to drink from it, I was really impressed by the result. What a cool machine!

Here are some more pictures:

• My Flickr set
• Good School on posterous
• Christian on posterous
• Palo Altona on posterous
• Marcus Flickr set

Thanks Simone and Christian for inviting us, it was a pleasure!

This is a Pong clock for your Android phone. It tells the time by playing Pong against itself.

Sander Muller came up first with the idea to have a Pong Clock. A really great idea and a fantastic device. Then lately Lady Ada designed a wonderful hackable clock platform, called MONOCHRON. The first implementation on the platform was, of course, a Pong Clock.

As I received my new Android phone, a Motorola Milestone, I was looking for a simple project to get my hands dirty. So what could be more obvious than writing a Pong Clock.

If you want to take a look at the source, check out my PongTime repo at github. The code is not pretty as can be, mostly because of optimizations to get rid of object creation and thus garbage collection.

If you are reading this with your Android phone, you can grab the Pong Time app directly in the Android Market. Otherwise search for “Pong Time”.

• Pong Time market://search?q=pname:com.tinkerlog.android.pongtime in the Adroid Market
• PongTime repository at github
• Original Pong Clock by Sander Muller
• MONOCHRON by Adafruit

It took a while since I first posted about the new ATmega header board but finally, here it is.

The board is great for prototyping on a solderless breadboard. It is compatible with the common 28-pin AVR controllers like ATmega48, ATmega88, ATmega168 and ATmega328. On plus it is Arduino compatible.

Some of the features:

• Space efficient, occupies only on more row than the controller itself
• Has no voltage regulator on board, so you choose, at which voltage you want to run it
• It has SMD resistors and LEDs (size 1206) to make it a great starting point to learn how to hand solder SMD
• Has a sticker to tell which pin is what. Thanks Tod!
• Blinks blue!

Check out the detailed howto page and grab a kit at the shop, if you like.

What is a remote accelerometer? It’s a tiny device that has a three axis accelerometer and transmit the acceleration values to a remote host. And what is it good for? There are various uses for it. One is you attach the sensor to someone and let him jump around. On your remote machine you can use the data to produce sound or modify music. Think of it as a simplified Wiimote.

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If you’ve missed Marcus post, here is another on the same topic.

Nearly every other Thursday Marcus and I are hanging out together for having a beer and chatting about all things geek, especially electronics, CNC, 3D-printing, micrcontroller and Arduino. But there’s no limit, everyone interested in tinkering and making is welcome. It takes place at Saal II in Schanze. Try us, we’re kind

You can take a look at Marcus’ or mine twitterfeed to checkout when the next #palo_altona will be.

We already had guests sometimes but yesterday’s drinkup was great as we had two new guests. Feels as if there is something moving in Hamburg. Yeah!

Update 2010/02/16: Palo Altona is now scheduled biweekly. Every Thursday was a bit stressing for everybody.

Update 2010/03/20: Palo Altona has now a Posterous page for news and schedule.

It’s Advent season. And what do you do to let your geek shine? An LED Advent wreath of course.

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A couple of weeks ago Jan came to me and asked me if I could build a special kind of twitter wall. At our company CoreMedia we do an Open Space every 3 months or so. This time we had a Hacking Day as well, so we needed something special. After throwing some ideas around, we came up with a twitter client that should print out tweets with an electric typewriter. A short google showed, that that has been done already (of course!). See it at oomlout.

But that couldn’t stop us. Jan scanned ebay for a nice electric typewriter and found a Commodore SQ 1000. It was in really good condition, probably rarely used. It worked as advertised.

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Niklas did an amazing job, letting fireflies play some tunes. It’s almost as if they are alive.

Niklas, I owe you a beer (or Club-Mate or whatever), should we ever met. You made my day!