Pumping Station: One

A quick note: my open source Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope project has been mentioned in the MAKE blog.

You! Over there bangin’ yer pots and pans, glitching toy circuits, playing that weird looking pipe thing! No, don’t stop! We want you to join us this Saturday, July 23rd for an open jam session. It’ll be at Nothin’ Less Cafe, located at 2642 N. Milwaukee Avenue (right next to the Logan Theatre), from 11 am to 7 pm. We’ll have some instruments set up, but feel free to bring your own mutant trombones or circuit-bent toys (or that thing from the picture above). If you want to bring a traditional instrument, that’s okay too. You don’t have to be a “musician,” just be ready to make noise. It’s free and open to the public, so come out and invite your friends. It’s part of the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival going on all weekend, so there’ll be plenty of things to see and do in the area.

(Picture licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, by SWARM Sounds on Flickr.)

With great pride and humility I present my Cylon! This is my very first dabble into electronics so I am pretty sure that the whole thing will burst into flames at any moment. The eye(s) are soldered onto a generic board I bought and are hooked up to a freeduino that I made during a transistor thursdays class awhile back. In a future model I hope to hook up a range sensor that will only turn on the Cylon when someone steps in front of it. For now, however, enjoy the simple pleasure of sentient robots!

On December 3, Jeff rebooted Transistor Thursdays with a “Solder Your Own Freeduino” class.  I had never played with an Arduino before, so I excitedly took the class.  I soldered it together, jumped for joy when the tests worked, and did the classic Arduino “hello world” of making an LED blink.  I played around with that for a little while, and then I got other ideas.

As anyone who has seen me play with my Commodores knows, I enjoy getting things to make noise.  Blinky is fun, but for me, loud is even more fun.  I went to my locker, cut a speaker off of a circuit board that I had already harvested for a few other parts for other projects, and hooked that up to the Arduino.  I then started familiarizing myself with the music coding commands…and didn’t stop until I had my Arduino playing something that was guaranteed to inspire people to throw ping pong balls at me.

The fact that the Arduino code loops over and over again until you cut the power meant there was only one song I could possibly choose for this:  The Song That Never Ends.

My flex resistor jacket is finally finished. After a month and a half of failures and a whole bunch of setbacks, the PS:One logo is finally embedded with twenty big LEDs which are attach to a circuit board and a flex resistor. The LEDs only light up when the right elbow is bent to a certain extent. It runs off of two AA batteries held along with the circuit board in a pocket on the left shoulder.

The jacket was premiered (sort of) at Digital Breakdown on Dec. 18th to help promote PS:One. Bunches of recently printed stickers didn’t hurt either. Luckily, the jacket is perfect for dancing.

Thanks to Jeff Kantarek and Jordan Bunker for their huge amounts of help on this project. Without their expertise this jacket would not be glowy.

Go ahead! The link below this post will take you to V1.1 of the PDF How-To to build one yourself, with step-by-step instructions and a pretty exhaustive materials list. Also some pictures, but perhaps not as many as there should be. Regardless! Is the PDF confusing or vague? Any questions? Go ahead and e-mail me at eli.skipp@gmail.com so that I can update the PDF and so that your questions can get answered. Happy hacking!

Fabric Light Bright PDF

[EDIT!]: This project is under a Creative Commons license!

Fabric Light-Bright by Eli Skipp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.