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alphadogg writes "Google on Monday released a website and video regarding its Solve for X project, which the company says is 'a place where the curious can go to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems.' It's got a TED-like think tank feel to it, but possibly with oodles of Google resources behind it. It appears related to Google's up-to-now largely secretive Google X research lab that the New York Times recently shed some light on."

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Meet Doug Paradis, a member of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group and Dallas Makerspace. In MAKE Vol 29, Doug wrote about making the Tiny Wanderer, a beginner-level robot that autonomously navigates with a $2 microcontroller. Doug is interested in microcontrollers, robots, crafts, and fishing.

What’s your background?

I live in Richardson, TX, a suburb of Dallas with my wife Susan. I am an Electrical Engineer by profession. I backpack, fly fish, build robots, play with microprocessors, do some leather work, and build clocks. All of these activities provide interesting projects.

Why do you like making things?

Making things is fun. I constantly find myself asking “How could this be done differently?” when engaged in almost any activity, I take great pleasure in learning a new technique or skill. With each skill I learn, more possibilities open up.

Tell us about your Tiny Wanderer project, which you wrote about in MAKE.

The Tiny Wanderer was built as a demonstration tool for a series of lectures held by Dallas Personal Robotics Group (DPRG) in early 2011. It turned out to be a great training aid and beginner project. The lecture series covered; PCB fabrication using the toner transfer method, Using KiCAD, Programming the ATTiny, Using Inkscape, and State Machines. Videos of all the presentations are available on DPRG’s YouTube channel.

What are your upcoming projects?

I’m currently building an autonomous navigating robot for an inside environment. The next step will be a robot suitable for outdoors roaming. My hope is to be able to allow it to go off into the woods and have it return to its starting point. I am also very interested in designing my version of a homemade CNC router. I have to fight to stay focused, because there are so many interesting projects to build. I attempt to follow a philosophy of having a main project that I drive to completion, while using some real simple projects to help me recharge my ideas on the main project.

Can you tell us about one of your favorite tools?

As a member of Dallas Makerspace and Dallas Personal Robotics Group, I have access to a Full Spectrum laser cutter. This tool, along with Inkscape, has allowed me to quickly explore ideas and design choices with incredible speed and accuracy.

Here are more Tiny Wanderer Videos:

Video of Tiny Wanderer (Make kit) in avoidance sensor configuration

Video of Tiny Wanderer (Make kit) in line following configuration

Video of Tiny Wanderer (not Make kit) doing line following

Video of Tiny Wanderer on table (not Make kit)

From the pages of MAKE Volume 29:

We have the technology (to quote The Six Million Dollar Man), but commercial tools for exploring, assisting, and augmenting our bodies really can approach a price tag of $6 million. Medical and assistive tech manufacturers must pay not just for R&D, but for expensive clinical trials, regulatory compliance, and liability — and doesn’t help with low pricing that these devices are typically paid for through insurance, rather than purchased directly. But many gadgets that restore people’s abilities or enable new “superpowers” are surprisingly easy to make, and for tiny fractions of the costs of off-the-shelf equivalents. MAKE Volume 29, the “DIY Superhuman” issue, explains how.

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This is a bit of a follow to some ongoing posts about 3D printing… Pirate file-sharing goes 3D @ New Scientist:

Tony Rodriguez, who works for Oregon-based digital watermarking firm Digimarc says that valid 3D files could be marked by subtly altering the 3D design without changing the printed object. This would let a 3D printer distinguish between a manufacturer’s file, which contains the alteration, and one made by scanning an object, which does not.

Perhaps such techniques will not be relevant. Michael Weinberg, staff attorney for Washington-based intellectual property (IP) advocacy groupPublic Knowledge, says that while text, music and video are automatically copyrighted, “the vast majority of physical objects aren’t protected by any sort of IP right”. Copying inventions protected by patents is illegal, as is replicating a trademarked logo, but measuring a desk and building a replica is not.

Panicking companies may push for stronger IP laws if 3D printing becomes more widespread, but Weinberg says this would be a mistake. He suggests companies learn from the media industry’s mistakes and embrace the new opportunities it affords, perhaps by encouraging the legal downloading of object files. “If everyone has access to a 3D printer I can go online, pick an object that I want, customise it and print it out,” he says. “That’s an incredible opportunity for companies.”
They will not want to miss the boat again.

Read more…

Begun the Clone War has.

New submitter albinobee writes "The Kinect for Xbox 360 isn't only about gaming; it can also be used to help compensate for impaired vision, as a team of Indian engineers is working to prove. A device called viSparsh, still in its nascent stage, is a motion sensing belt that can help alert the blind to obstacles that lie in their path."

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crookedvulture writes "Intel continues to partner with third-party controller makers for high-end SSDs. Its new 520 Series drives pair the latest SandForce controller with Intel's own firmware and 25-nm NAND. HotHardware, Tech Report, and PC Perspective all have reviews of the drive, and the verdict is pretty consistent. While the Intel 520 Series offers slightly better performance than competing SandForce solutions, it also costs 30-40% more. That's a steep margin even considering the Intel SSD's five-year warranty."

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Hugh Pickens writes "Anna Leach reports that Siri support has been a contentious issue for owners of earlier iPhones, but a recent filing from Audience shows that Siri won't run on the iPhone 4 because the phone's chip can't handle it. Linley Gwennap of the Linley Group cracked one of the secrets of the new iPhone's A5 chip after working out that it packs some serious audio cleaning power not available on the iPhone 4's A4 chip. Audience has developed technology that removes most or all of the background noise when someone places a cell-phone call from a restaurant, airport, or other noisy location. The iPhone 4S integrates Audience's 'EarSmart' technology directly into the A5 processor, improving its technology to handle 'far-field speech,' which means holding the device at arm's length rather than directly in front of the mouth. Apple has also licensed the Audience technology for a 'new generation of processor IP,' which may mean that the forthcoming A6 processor will appear in the iPad 3 and iPhone 5. 'Why Apple has not simply purchased Audience is unclear. An acquisition would prevent Audience's other major customer, Samsung, from using the technology to compete with Apple,' says Gwennap. 'The company may be hedging its bets, as it could switch to Qualcomm's Fluence noise-reduction technology in the future.'"

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Trailrunner7 writes "Adobe, which has spent the last few years trying to dig out of a deep hole of vulnerabilities and buggy code, is making a major change to Flash, adding a sandbox to the version of the player that runs in Firefox. The sandbox is designed to prevent many common exploit techniques against Flash. The move by Adobe comes roughly a year after the company added a sandbox to Flash for Google Chrome. Flash, which is perhaps the most widely deployed piece of software on the Internet, has been a common attack vector for several years now, and the attacks in some cases have been used to get around exploit mitigations added by the browser vendors. The sandbox is designed to prevent many of these attacks by not allowing exploits against Flash to break out into the browser itself."

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An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the Universities of Southampton and Penn State have found a way to embed electronic components into optical fibers, in a breakthrough that could lead to the creation of super high-speed telecommunications networks. Rather than trying to merge flat chips with round optical fibers, the team of scientists used high-pressure chemistry techniques to deposit semiconducting materials layer by layer directly into tiny holes in optical fibers. This bypasses the need to integrate fiber-optics onto a chip, and means that the data signal never has to leave the fiber."

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You probably all remember Printrbot, the quick-build, low-cost 3D printer design from Brook Drumm that took Kickstarter by storm, last year. Brook’s stated funding goal for the project was $25,000, and it ended up netting more than $830,000.

Since that time, unsurprisingly, Brook has been a very busy man. Saturday we got the interesting news that he has officially published the first set of printable Printrbot parts on Thingiverse. There are eight of them. So far, the only instructions about how to put them together, however, seem to be in this Flickr set. You can follow Printrbot’s progress at Brook’s official blog.

More:

• DIY Manufacturing Spotlighted at Kickstarter
• Best of Make: Our Year in Crowdfunding
• Best of Maker Business 2011
• Predictions for 2012 – Add Yours!
• Prototype Quick-Build, Low-Cost 3D Printer

New submitter Hector's House writes "'Nothing is certain. Nothing is secure,' reflects one of the characters in Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl. In 23rd century Bangkok, life for many hangs by a thread. Oil has run out; rising seas threatens to engulf the city; genetically engineered diseases hover on Thailand's borders; and the threat of violence smolders as government ministries vie for power. Environmental destruction, climate change and novel plagues have wiped out many of the crop species that humanity depends on: the profits to be made from creating — or stealing — new species are potentially enormous. After a century of collapse and contraction, Western business sees hope for a new wave of globalization; Thailand's fiercely guarded seed banks may provide just the springboard needed." Keep reading for the rest of Aidan's review.

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judgecorp writes "A research team at Manchester has taken a big step toward building transistors with graphene. So far graphene's marvelous conductivity has actually proved a drawback, but the team has sandwiched a layer of molybdenum disulfide between layers of graphene to provide a high on/off ratio. Also, the British Government is finding £50 million to fund Manchester as a center for graphene study and development, led by two professors there, Sir Kostya Novoselov and Sir Andre Geim, who shared the 2010 Nobel prize for Physics for their work on graphene."

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By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

Here is a simple way to make the small stellated dodecahedron on a large scale. Jim Watters suggests weaving together thirty dowels, so you can make it fairly large if you want.

The connectors are made from short lengths of rubber tubing that have been sewn together at the tip. This makes it easy to assemble, disassemble, transport, store, and reassemble

What other star polyhedra can you make with this technique?

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

Orlando is a destination for rollercoaster lovers, but apparently there are unstated requirements for riders. A 17-year-old-girl was told that she could not partake in some of the city's most thrilling rides because she does not have hands.

A woman who says she was incorrectly accused of sharing copyrighted material on BitTorrent has filed a harassment lawsuit against a copyright troll. Porn outfit Hard Drive productions had demanded $3,400 to make their threatened lawsuit go away but their target not only says she's innocent and harassed, but also that porn cannot be copyrighted. So, does filmed sex promote scientific progress or constitute useful art? A court may soon have to decide.

astroengine writes "It's a strange irony that to afford the expense of space exploration, international collaboration is often sought after — spreading the cost across several international partners means the biggest space missions may be accomplished. And yet in times of austerity, national budgets balk at the prospect of investing in international projects like ExoMars. Sadly, that's exactly what could be facing the ambitious ESA-led Mars rover/satellite mission if NASA's Science Mission Directorate budget is slashed in the next financial year. NASA may pull out of the project, leaving ExoMars with no rockets or a means to actually land on Mars. Could Russia help out? Possibly, but it will still lead to ESA taking on more cost than it has budgeted for."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A guitar will often die a slow death by peeling its own wood bottom from the glue that binds it to the rest of the body. This might very well relegate the instrument to firewood, but Asaf Tz’rtkof saw potential in the exposed brace work.

The result is a spice rack carved out from the body of the guitar. This is an excellent example of reuse, and adds an element of pizzazz to any kitchen decor.

[via Recyclart]

More:

• Roasting Pan Guitar Resonator
• Guitar Amp Bulletin Board
• How-To: Vinyl Record Guitar Holder

jfruh writes "In an email exchange with privacy blogger Dan Tynan, Columbia law professor Eben Moglen referred to Facebook as a 'man in the middle attack' — that is, a service that intercepts communication between two parties and uses it for its own nefarious purposes. He said, 'The point is that by sharing with our actual friends through a web intermediary who can store and mine everything, we harm people by destroying their privacy for them. It's not the sharing that's bad, it's the technological design of giving it all to someone in the middle. That is at once outstandingly stupid and overwhelmingly dangerous.' Tynan is a critic of Facebook, but he thinks Moglen is overstating the case."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Those of us who played Mass Effect 2 did not like how linear and restricted it was.

Three Pacific Grove, California residents were in jail on drug charges Thursday after the Santa Cruz Anti-Crime Team raided an Airport Boulevard warehouse, which was adjacent to a state Department of Justice crime lab in Watsonville, according to sheriff's deputies.

New submitter Kiyyik writes "After weeks of wrangling over shared space on utility poles, Google and the KC Board of Public Utilities have gotten their act together and Google is starting to wire Kansas City, Kansas today. They will be paying attachment fees and hanging the fiber optic lines in the space on the poles reserved for telecommunications. The Kansas City, Missouri side is still on track to begin a few months behind the Kansas side."

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