Just prowling through my latest edition of Popular Science, and I stumbled upon this article.  This article had to do with a advancement in the technology of law enforcement – the mechanics of the Taser evolving to more and more weapons to replace the actual handguns and pistols that many police officers use.  The evolution of the Taser/electric stun technology solves many of the problems that are present with the commonly used Taser – the regular Taser being used in the police force all over America lacks the range needed to hit assailants.  If the assailant is more than thirty or so feet away, the Taser has absolutely no chance of hitting its target.  The new shotgun slug extends the range to 35-100 feet, solving most of the problems that come with the regular Taser.   The reason why this article is pretty significant is because more of the design and engineering in order to make a much more efficient stun weapon.  The transformation from large thick probes connected with wires flowing with electric current to a small, simple lithium battery powered plastic shock canister is a significant advancement for technology.

This is the link to the complete article with pictures if you’re interested in seeing what the slugs and shotgun itself look up close, and a much more in depth analysis of this new law enforcement weapon: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/shock-bullet

Here’s an interesting project called The Lumen, a 3D display that adds depth to 2D images. The neatest part is how they get each little pixel up and down; they use a wires made of “shape memory allow” that expand when heated and shrink when cooled.

[or watch this video here]

Good look to everyone taking final exams!

Bre Petis later had his own show on the history channel called History Hackers, and he is now one of the founders of a company called MakerBot. What does MakerBot do? They make my dream machine.

[or watch this video here]

One day I’d like to get one of these awesome little tabletop factories. I could print out parts for robots, housings for kits, little action figures of me (wait, what?), and just about anything else I can imagine, which is a lot. Unfortunately (or fortunately compared to other rapid prototyping machines) the MakerBot’s price range is between $750 and $950 which if I run my numbers in 3 seconds correctly means that it may not pay for its self for a long while. While the BW Science Labs Store is finally pulling its weight (and quite a bit more if I do say so myself) I simply can’t invest $1000 in a RPM, least for now.

1) Get an investor!

Easier said than done, the investor’s security blanket is a fat packet of Excel spreadsheets, so you will be expected to have every cost calculated and scrutinized.

What do you mean you’re not funding my Star Trek PEZ collection?! They’re crucial to marketing. Duh.

Or if you’re a student, you could always make a family member an “investor”.

Hey dad, I have a really cool EDUCATIONAL idea that is crucial to my future success…

2) Ebay.

It may sound dumb, but ebay is my favorite way to pay for projects. I get to trade that really ugly messenger bag I have for a prototype. I’m serious, I’m actually selling a really ugly messenger bag on ebay, and someone is bidding on it!

I’m not a fan of long get-rich-quick ideas that litter the web like old socks, so I’ll stop here. Get an investor, sell some stuff on ebay, and that’s all you should need to build your laser sunglasses.

A Cambridge student named Qui Pan has built a fantastic program that lets the user scan any desktop object with only a webcam. The computer generates a 3D model in real time, all you have to do is move the object in 360 degrees on your desk. This gets me really excited as this would be the perfect way to get 3D models into Unity games. Rather than paying $20 for a 3D model of a water bottle to use as a prop in a game, I could go out and buy a real bottle for $1, scan it, and import it into my game- no $1,000 laser scanner required.

[or watch this video here]

Micro

I’ve been able to spend a little more time this week coding my 3D game, but only for about 30 minutes, which is about 3 minutes in “coding time”. I was able to spend about 3 hours this weekend working with an Arduino microcontroller, and hopefully I’ll get on to more advanced Arduino projects later, but for now I only did enough to get the basics down.

It’s been a pretty good week for the BW Science Labs Store, the Vivus the Robot kit has sold really well, and sales are going up with Christmas coming ’round the corner.

With only 2 days left in school until Thanksgiving break, teachers feel the need to give us loads of exams so we can earn our freedom through hours of grueling tests.

I’ve been wondering for several months now if I should buy an Arduino, the relatively low cost microcontroller that has hobby engineers going wild (seriously, wild. You would not believe how much someone can love a computer chip until you’ve seen the die hard Arduino fans). Fortunately, my school’s ASR (Applied Science Research) teacher let me borrow an Arduino for the weekend. I’ve only had a couple hours to tinker with it, but so far I’ve been very impressed by both the Atmega 328 (the chip) and the design of the board. I’ve had the chance to sift through some of the documentation on the Arduino site, and my favorite tutorial so far has been the Melody tutorial.

Setup was quick and easy, once you get the hang on which pins do what, and yielded a pretty annoying little song (but still pretty cool).

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that there should be more videos on BW Science Labs, so here’s one I shot of my borrowed Arduino playing “Marry Had a Little Lamb”.

I only recorded this once, even though it plays in a loop. After about two or three times of playing “Marry Had a Little Lamb” you start to lose your mind.

And for those of you too lazy to click on the link above, here’s the code I used to make this happen:

int speakerPin = 9;

int length = 15; // the number of notes
char notes[] = “ccggaagffeeddc “; // a space represents a rest
int beats[] = { 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 4 };
int tempo = 300;

void playTone(int tone, int duration) {
for (long i = 0; i < duration * 1000L; i += tone * 2) {
digitalWrite(speakerPin, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(tone);
digitalWrite(speakerPin, LOW);
delayMicroseconds(tone);
}
}

void playNote(char note, int duration) {
char names[] = { ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’, ‘g’, ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘C’ };
int tones[] = { 1915, 1700, 1519, 1432, 1275, 1136, 1014, 956 };

// play the tone corresponding to the note name
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
if (names[i] == note) {
playTone(tones[i], duration);
}
}
}

void setup() {
pinMode(speakerPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) {
if (notes[i] == ‘ ‘) {
delay(beats[i] * tempo); // rest
} else {
playNote(notes[i], beats[i] * tempo);
}

// pause between notes
delay(tempo / 2);
}
}

Micro

Speaking of Unity, I’ve been working on my own little project, and here are a few photos of the in game artwork.

The 3D city I have is pretty darn big and it’s exciting to finally be working on a fully 3D project. This game is just a way for me to learn 3D programming by doing. I admit it really is just another first person shooter, but once I get the coding down I’ll be able to work on some more creative projects.

I’m slowing store product development for now as I’m setting aside money to get a new BW Science Labs site. Once that’s finished I expect to develop an explosion of awesome new products.

I’ve been getting some feedback from people who have bought the Vivus the Robot Kit from the BW Science Labs Store and aside from a little constructive criticism, the feedback has been really good. It’s nice to know that people all over the world (and I really do mean all over) are putting together the kit and its not exploding it their faces. When people are putting together a robot you never know what will happen, they skip one step and it becomes aware, building armies of itself and setting its advanced mind on world domination. Well, actually that would be kinda cool, but you get the idea.

I recently bought a second protoboard to retry what I had previously failed. I soldered up the components for the new board, and 1/2 way through I realized what I had done wring the first time. I had soldered everything in correctly, but I had placed the chip in backwards! I find it annoyingly funny how I spent so much time redoing my solder joints (at least 2 or 3 times per lead) when the whole time I had just inserted the chip wrong.

Well, I learned from my mistake, and now I have not one, but two working prototyping boards. These chips are coded in BASIC, an infamously (in a bad way) old language, something like forty or fifty years I think, which translates to about 550 programming years. Be that as it may, coding in BASIC is really easy, as its just a bunch of barebones commands. I got a LED blinking demo working in about 2 minutes to test the chip.

The code looks like this:

do
high 2
low 1
pause 500
low 2
high 1
pause 500
loop

Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?

All I’m doing in this is directing current to the LED, making it turn on, pausing 1/2 of a second, turning off the LED, pauseing it for 1/2 of a second, and continue doing this until I unplug it, it runs out of batteries, or the universe implodes.

There’s something oddly rewarding about programming hardware. Sure, writing security utilities in Python is fun, making games in ActionScript 3.0 is profitable (or at least for other programmers), and coding lord-knows-what in JAVA is interesting, but actually having a physical object that can do something cool in the real world is pretty unique. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an LED to watch blink…