The gods of Random.org have crowned Rebecca Karger, a student at Horace Greeley High School, winner of our Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 set. This is what Rebecca had to say about what she'd do with the set:

If I had this kit, I'd take it with me to college next year, and build a robot that could go down the hall of my dorm to deliver a note to a friend. And probably 500 different other things. I was on an FLL team in middle school that went to the international competition, but it was the year BEFORE the NXT kits came out! I remember seeing a demo and being highly impressed, but my parents say the kits are too expensive.

Rebecca: so yeah, your FB settings are kinda restrictive. You're going to have to get in touch with me if you want the prize. I'm at facebook.com/nerd1.

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If you have to ask why... Well, just don't ask why. [Spotted on the MAKE Flickr pool]

(BTW: This is a cracker box amp, a la the project in MAKE Volume 09)

Schlitz Amp

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Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calendar. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calendar!

Coming up this week:

Craft Night @HackPittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA Friday, Mar 12, 2010, 7pm - 9pm

Maker Faire Newcastle Newcastle, UK Saturday, Mar 13, 2010 - Sunday, Mar 14, 2010

Arduino / Project Night @The Transistor Provo, UT Saturday, Mar 13, 2010, 5pm - 8pm

Breadboard Arduino Classes at All-Con 2010 Addison, TX Saturday, Mar 13, 2010, 2pm - 4pm

Introduction to Electronics @Metrix Create Space Seattle, WA Sunday, Mar 14, 2010, 2pm - 4:30pm

AVR Programming Class @HacDC Washington, DC Sunday, Mar 14, 2010, 6pm - 7:30pm, then repeats

Project Lab with Expert Included Berkeley, CA Tuesday, Mar 16, 2010, 3pm - 6pm

Drop-in Arduino and Electronics classes Berkeley, CA Tuesday, Mar 16, 2010, 7pm - 9pm

Take Apart Tuesdays @Crash Space Culver City CA Tuesday, Mar 16, 2010, 8:30pm - 9:30pm

Start planning for:

Dorkbot SoCal 39 Los Angeles, CA Saturday, Mar 20, 2010, 1pm - 3pm

Arduino NYC Meetup New York, NY Saturday, Mar 20, 2010, 12pm - 6pm

Bob Ross Paint-Along 2 @i3Detroit Royal Oak, MI Saturday, Mar 20, 2010, 2pm - 4pm, 4pm - 6pm, 6pm - 8pm

Using Transistors @Metrix Create Space Seattle, WA Sunday, Mar 21, 2010, 2:30pm - 4:30pm

Handmade Music: Minneapolis Minneapolis, MN Thursday, Mar 25, 2010, 7pm - 12pm

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I've never seen a trailer like this - perhaps it wasn't road safe or something, but it would be wonderful to (re)make - via LoL.

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The Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). Every other Wednesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE Volume 17

Ever since we humans started making shadow puppets in the firelight of our caves, we've been fascinated by the power of the projected image. It seems only fitting that, for DIY Movie Making Month, we'd take a look at magic lanterns, some of our first technological baby steps that have delivered us to the age of Avatar.

What is a magic lantern? It's basically a 17th century pre-cursor to the slide, and then movie, projector. The Magic Lantern Society defines a magic lantern as:

...an appliance by means of which transparencies are projected by artificial light upon a screen with the projected image having a diameter generally from thirty to eighty times greater than that of the transparency or slide, whilst the area of the image may be from one thousand to six thousand times as great.

Magic lanterns grew on the developments of magic shadow shows (i.e. shadow puppets), camera obscura, magic mirrors, and other earlier optics and projection techniques. The period of the magic lantern spanned from the mid-17th century to the late 19th. While there is no clear inventor of the device, Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and physicist, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), with his lenses designed for use in telescopes, is probably the closest thing to a father of the technology.

Parts of a common type of Magic Lantern. [From The Magic Lantern Society's website]

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For portable radio operation, I like End-Fed Half-Wavelength Antennas (EFHWA, pronounced "EF-WAH"). This type of antenna is similar to the common half-wavelength dipole, but with one significant advantage. A dipole has its feedpoint (where it connects to the radio) in the middle of the antenna, but an EFHWA's feedpoint is at one end. This makes it very convenient to throw the antenna up in a tree and connect the bottom of it to your radio. Here are instructions for making a multiband end-fed half-wavelength antenna that works on 17, 20, 30, and 40-meter bands.

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We can only imagine how amazing this coffee burning car smells at it speeds down the highway at a maximum of 60mph. Don’t jump out of your seat so quick to get your own, while the idea sounds fantastic, the mileage will bring you back to earth rather quick. At 3 miles per kilo of coffee, it can turn that £36 210 mile trip into one between £910 and £1,820 with a stop to re-bean-fill every half hour! Still, the Car-puccino is an amazing conversion, and we’re getting closer and closer to Back to the Future’s Mr. Fusion [Thanks Tim]

From user Meph over at the always-entertaining There, I Fixed It.

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Here's a neat idea for a tablecloth, by Kristine Bjaadal. Normally, one would avoid spilling things on their linens, however the Underfull Tablecloth has a hidden pattern built in that only shows up once it becomes stained. Now you can look at that lovely butterfly pattern and remember that one time you had a bit too much wine, without feeling bad about having ruined the tablecloth! [via neatorama]

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[Ross] is the proud owner of a 50 MHz Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope. He’d like to have the 100 MHz version but the $400 difference in price puts it out of his reach. After some extensive poking around on the PCB and pouring over datasheets, he managed to reverse engineer the design and upgrade to a 100 MHz version. This is as easy as desoldering one capacitor to deactivate a high-pass filter present in the lesser model of scope, unlocking the faster potential of its bigger brother.

Makers Market seller Kevin of kaitrees has a bunch of great videos on his market blog. They range from details of the pieces themselves, to "slap tests", and works in progress. It's a neat look at the process that goes into making these pieces.

My sculptures are an effort to distill what real trees inspire in people into something one can have inside their living or working space.

This tree in the video above will require about 500 hours to complete, stand over 7 feet tall, and will use about 1000 strands of aluminum wire. It's his largest piece to date, and looks Amazing! I wonder how much it will weigh?

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In this series, "Letters from the Fab Academy," Shawn Wallace, member of AS220, the Providence, RI community arts space, shares his experiences with the Fab Academy, a distributed learning collaborative, built on the infrastructure of the Fab Lab network. -- Gareth

3D Scanning By Shawn Wallace

Victor Freundt prints a project using the ZCorp printer at the Barcelona Fab Lab.

When working with 3D scanning and printing equipment, it quickly becomes apparent that objects are nowhere near as fungible as MP3s. We'll have to wait a while for the day when every teenager is capable of casually copying real-world objects. However, it is surprisingly easy to hack together a crude 3D scanner from commodity cameras, projectors, and hardware you probably have in a couple of junk drawers in your shop.

A good place to start is with the Modela mini mill, which has a piezo-based needle sensor attachment that can be used for scanning small objects. The machine records the plunge depth at the point it contacts the object and the software that comes with the Modela (Dr. Picza) converts these points into a 3D mesh. Here's an example of using Dr. Picza to scan a small shell from Benito Juarez from the Barcelona Fab Academy site:

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[Jeri Ellsworth] made this silicon inverter at home, by hand. It took her two years to get the process figured out and achieve something we didn’t think was possible. The complexity of manufacture, and the wide range of tools and materials needed seem insurmountable but she did it anyway. Her home chip fab Flickr set is well commented and details her work area and part of the processing. If you’re hurting for more check out her 40 minute Metalab talk which we’ve embedded after the break. If her name sounds familiar but you just can’t place it you may know her from The Fatman and Circuit Girl. We’ve also featured some of her hacks, such as her Pinball challenge against [Ben Heckendorn], and her giant Etch-a-Sketch.

[Thanks Deyjavont]

An anonymous MAKE subscriber writes in to let us know about this very cool wireless robotics platform based on the Arduino and an XBee. The purpose of the project was to teach their 9-year old son about programming in Processing. What a great way to introduce programming to kids!

I built a wireless robotics platform from a cheap R/C car, an Arduino with XBee shield, small microswitch sensors, and a Processing program running on a remote computer to control the vehicle. The vehicle is completely controlled by the code running on the remote computer which allows very rapid prototyping of the code to tell the vehicle what to do and how to react to the sensor events received from the vehicle. I'm hoping this is a good way to teach my 9-year old son about programming.

In the Maker Shed:

The Maker Shed has everything you need to get started with Arduino

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[Matt Kemp] remade this super 8 film camera into a synthesizer. Inside you’ll find a light sensor pointed through the lens. This way, zooming, focusing, and pointing the lens elsewhere will change the sound. He also refit the original controls to monkey with the output. Turn your speakers up when you watch this, your co-workers will love you for it.

Enjoy playing rock, paper, scissors, but having trouble finding worthy opponents to play it with? Need to improve your game for that upcoming world tournament? Well, then, you will certainly appreciate Steve Hoefer's rock paper scissors playing glove. Thanks to the built-in accelerometer and bend sensors, all you have to do to play is play the game, and the computer will tell you what it's move was, and keep track of who won. It's a funny project, and it includes some cool features, such as using edge-lit plastic for the display. Well done!

More:DIY Rock paper scissors electronic gameHOW TO - Beat anyone at Rock Paper ScissorsRock, Paper, Scissors - interview with a professional player

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[Steve Hoefer] pulled together a great hack for the friendless. This glove will play a heated game of rock-paper-scissors against you. [Steve] realized that the middle and fourth fingers are all that need to be monitored to decide which of the three signs you are making. He used flex sensors on the back of these fingers as an input. There is also an accelerometer to judge the three shakes that lead up to the shoot. The small screen you see displays what the glove chose and is a hack in itself. This idea adapts from an Evil Mad Scientist project, using three sheets of acrylic etched with the different icons and edge-lit with LEDs. All of this, along with a speaker and scoreboard, connect to an Arduino. The icing on the cake? [Steve] coded an adaptive learning algorithm that observes your playing style to gain an advantage. See this in action after the break. Once you’ve mastered rock-paper-scissors you should consider building other glove-based peripherals.

[Thanks Zokier]

Follow along with [Victor] through the journey of building a life size replica of R2D2. While you may not be able to scrape too many specific details from the video, it is still great to see the project progress from his first cut to the finished product as well as some fun little outings. His R2 looks absolutely impeccable and he deserves dome credit for taking it to places to show kids. We would have probably just found interesting ways for it to bring us beers. [via Makezine]

LEGO MINDSTORMS hacker Akihiro Uehara built an interface between an AlphaRex and a Wii Balance Board.

User can control the robot's leg motors speed and direction by changing the vector connecting user's center of balance and center of the board. I have designed this application for elementary school kids in a science museum exhibition.

Don't forget to leave a comment on our Facebook fan page to participate in our Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 giveaway. [Thanks, Akihiro!]

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Julia Tsao's Curious Displays thesis project proposes swarms of half-inch pixelbots, which could form into a TV or perform other robotic tasks.

Each block operates independently as a self-contained unit, and has full mobility, allowing movement across any physical surface. The blocks operate independently of one another, but are aware of the position and role relative to the rest of the system. With this awareness, the blocks are able to coordinate with the other blocks to reconfigure their positioning to form larger display surfaces and forms depending on purpose and function. In this way, the blocks become a physical embodiment of digital media, and act as a vehicle for the physical manifestation of what typically exists only in the virtual space of the screen.

Julia even provides a prototype remote control, made improbably gigantic by such buttons as NEEDY, MELANCHOLY and ZEN which would activate pre-pogrammed pixelbot behaviors. Part of the project even includes simulated instructions for dealing with rogue pixels that are hiding under the couch! [via Fast Company]

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