iCar

There was talk this week about Steve Jobs's dream of an iCar, whispered to Apple board member Mickey Drexler and repeated to Fast Company.

iCar 3/4 View

Although drawings of this Steve Jobs fantasy haven't surfaced (yet?), designer Franco Grassi showed off his interpretation of what such a car might look like, depicting a radical design that seems perfect for warm climates, and perhaps functioning as a dune buggy.

iCar Interior

Of course, there's an iPad front-and-center, along with the steering wheel from an alien spacecraft. We're assuming there are clear glass panels that slide into place for inclement weather.

iCar at Leisure

Now, here we go. It's a golf cart, right? We kid, but people probably made fun of the Wright brothers' aircraft, too.

Sony Wireless Power

It's hard to believe wireless power is even possible, but it most certainly is, and Sony has just filed a patent showing how it's getting closer to perfecting it. Sony's figured out how to precisely locate a device so its wireless power loss will still be in the practical range.

Sony's even figured out a way to daisychain devices, having one gadget sending power to another, as long as all are within the most efficient range. I think the most useful application of this technology will be used for charging electric cars, letting you jump out of the car and run into your house without having to deal with plugs and wires.

iPhone 5 Tall Boy

iPhone 5 rumors heated up to an even higher fever pitch this week, with additional credible sources crowing about a bigger iPhone screen with a diagonal dimension of at least 4 inches. Okay, okay -- we believe that, but we wanted to see pictures.

And here they are in the form of a design concept from one of our favorite illustrators, Federico Ciccarese. This handset looks like a thinner, stretched-out version of the iPhone 4S, with a 16x9 screen that gives you just enough room for an additional row of icons.

Horizontal Shower controls

You can control temperature and intensity of the spray with this panel, called eTools. According to its manufacturer Dornbracht, you can choose from your favorite shower "choreography," including balancing, energizing or de-stressing effects.

Horizontal Shower

If you thought the ordinary shower couldn't be improved, take a look at this. Now you can take a shower lying down with this Horizontal Shower, placing yourself a shower field of six "water bars" that are recessed into its special ceiling.

Sneak Peek: Beacon Phoenix Bluetooth Speaker

As speakers get smaller, their sound seems to get bigger. That's the case with this Beacon Phoenix Bluetooth speaker, a handsome unit available in red, blue and black. We listened to this cute $99 cube, available for preorder next month, and it cranked out some crispy tunes at a prodigious volume despite its diminutive size. In other words, it's loud.

My biggest thrill was unplugging it and running it on battery power -- it felt like there was a whole band standing in the palm of my hand, rocking it with impressive intensity. It hooks up easily to your Bluetooth-compatible device, and the company says the Phoenix's rechargeable battery will play on for eight hours.

However, because of its tiny size, its bass sounded diminished, although still present. Even so, it might be a worthy companion for a dancing beach trip this summer

Battery saving TV-B-Gone with region/range selection switches

What is the TV-B-Gone?
TV-B-Gone is a small gadget that can turn on and off virtually any TV in the world developed and sold as a kit by Adafruit. They also provide the source code and compiled firmware under Creative Common Share Alike license.
I would like to thank original developers at Adafruit for this great work and sharing ideas before starting showing my modification.

First trial
At first, I downloaded the firmware v1.1 and flashed an ATtiny85-20 and made it with only one transistor and two wide angle IR LEDs with two supercaps as shown below. The switch is connected to the supercap + so it will beam only when you press the button.  It worked fine, but the problem was it drained the supercaps too quickly. The first reason is, of course, low capacity (compared to batteries) of the supercaps, but there are other reasons, too. I didn’t have a resonator at 8MHz, so I burned the oscillator selection fuse bit of the ATtiny85-20 as internal 8MHz. The internal oscillator has benefits of omitting an external component and programmable, but there are serious down side; its frequency can be unstable and varies depending on the temperature and power supply, AND it consumes more power at high frequency settings.

After this first trial, I added a 8MHz ceramic resonator and uploaded v1.2 firmware on an ATtiny85V-10 and found it can last double the time than ATtiny85V-20 using internal oscillator. One full cycle of pulsing all the codes takes a little less than a minute and with this latest testing configuration, more than 30 times of full cycle worked with 2 supercaps before the voltage dropped below 1.7V (two in series).

Need to save battery
I have thought about to turn off the device before the full cycle finished once it either turn on or off a TV. Adafruit's firmware database is designed as the codes for popular TV models emits first.  So in most cases, long before it emits all the codes, my target TV is turned on or off.  I thought about to add a power switch but that wasn’t very attractive to me.

Idea and solution!!
A couple days later, I suddenly got a good idea to utilize the Region Detection pin (pin6 of the ATtiny85v). Once the program detects the region from the level of pin 6 (float (internal pull-up): US, pull-down: EU), it is not used any more until all the codes pulsing is finished. So, in US mode for example, after it started pulsing and when you want to stop it, forcing the pin6 to ground will exit the do loop in software and the device will go sleep. I tested both US and EU mode with modified code and worked fine. This way, you can save battery.

Here in this introduction, I included a picture of the assembled TV-B-Gone JeonLab, but the circuit, which will be shown and explained step by step, is quite simple, so you may be able to assemble one on any prototype board or even on a bread board. 

Building Machines From Paperclips

Several months ago I awoke one morning with an idea for a project. I had gone to bed thinking about a presentation I am going to make to a group of middle and high school technology teachers in a couple of months. I wanted to come up with a simple and inexpensive projects they could use to teach their students some aspect of technology and hopefully inspire their creativity. During the night I dreamed of making machines out of paperclips and this project was born. As for the cost of this project - the wood and paperclips cost me 37 cents. 

I already had several projects I was working on at the time so I thought about the idea for a couple of months before I actually sat down with a box of paperclips and started trying to make a machine. During those months I figured out the design and process for making the machine parts and a way to assemble them. I found that I only needed a few items and tools to get started. I found the process to be easy. Paperclip machines are interesting to design and build, and fun to operate when finished. I think the sculptural form of these machines take on an artistic element as well.

For educators this project is a great way to teach students the physics of mechanical machines including cranks, levers, fulcrum points, rotary and linear motion all while stirring their curiosity and developing their mechanical aptitude. In PLTW: this could go under Modeling and Design as a miniature working model or as a machine prototype in manufacturing or structural systems.  It could also go under the Power/Energy section.  In STEM: it could go under nearly all of the categories.  

PS - If I win the Grand Prize in the Shop Bot Contest - and I sure hope I do - I will use it to make proto boards for this project and others for middle and high school students in the STEM program.

Here is a video of the paperclip machine I built.

Slothfurnace.com presents: The ROTJ Luke Skywalker Lightsaber

A Return Of The Jedi Luke Saber, with crystal chamber, thin neck, and detachable blade.  Normally this kind of thing takes me about 4 to 6 months, this one took four, as I was under a deadline for Christmas.  This instructable was written based on my step by step photodocumentary at http://www.slothfurnace.com .  You can see more prop builds and more description there.

Facet V1 Velomobile

Let me start by saying that I have wanted to build a velomobile for at least five or six years.  I've been collecting little bits of research since then, but things finally reached "critical mass" just a few months ago.  The combination of assistance from a Coroplast velomobile group on Facebook, the rediscovery of some old CAD designs, and the results of extensive glue testing (yes) culminated in what I call the "Facet V1."

("The Vector" seemed too generic, and "The Polygon" was too geeky.)

The Facet V1 is made almost entirely out of Coroplast, the same corrugated plastic that many election signs are made from.  The plastic shell is wrapped around a Catrike Expedition recumbent trike.  This is a well-known build method, with dozens of examples all over the net.  I'd suspect that people have been building coroplast shells over their trikes ever since both objects existed in the same Venn diagram.  So this is definitely not a new thing, but my Instructable is hopefully one of the most comprehensive you'll find anywhere.

Remote control animatronic....fairy :)

....yes fairy.  This project came about when the ladies where I work decided that a fairy birthday party would be a nice thing to do.... Now I am a rufty tufty woodsman and so I refused point blank to run said parties, I was let off on the understanding that I made a fairy that would appear with the pull of a string or something similar, fair enough thought me. One of the ladies gave me a seven inch doll to play with.......

Step 1The design

Well pulling a string is not my thing so my thoughts turned to battery powered remote controlled animatronic fairy.

I found the perfect tree to hide her in and worked out she needed to move up and down diagonally.

 The first picture shows the basic mechanics:-

1. A single, geared motor drives it all
2. Crosshead between two slide rails moved up and down by...
3. toothed belt drive number one
4. The platform, where the fairy stands, is driven sideways by....
5. Lead screw and nut with a toothed pulley driven by...
6. Toothed belt number two which is tensioned by a strong spring.
7. Shows direction of travel for the fairy.
8. Title says it all, I called her Nuff, she is a fairy that makes her  Fairy Nuff!

Various microswitches, relays and a wireless remote get everything moving and stopping in the right places at the right time.
The fairy wings are UV reactive and there are flashing UV lights (controlled by a pair of 555 timer circuits) to light her at night.

Next two pictures show circuit diagram for motor switches and relays and a circuit diagram of the light flasher circuit.

Step 2The bits

Power is supplied by plug in battery packs used in cordless drills as there are always a few charged sets knocking around in the office.
there is an extended aerial attached to the tree to ensure good communication with the wireless remote, the socket to connect it up can be seen in the pictures.

Building a solid state tesla coil

 Well, now that that's over, lets get on to what a tesla coil actually is. 
A tesla coil usually has these key components:
*power source
*Switching circuit
*Resonant Capacitor (only for drsstcs, some vttc,s and regular spark gap type coils)
*Primary coil
*Secondary coil
   The tesla coil was invented around 1891 by Nikola Tesla. His original intention for the device was to create a wireless energy distribution system. Unfortunately, his design could not send power at even close to reasonable efficiency, as the power was almost all being wasted on corona and arcing. Today, we coilers take this to an advantage. 
   But what males the tesla coil truly magnificent is the voltage it produces. A typical spark gap type coil takes (usually) the voltage from your wall socket, and steps it up to a couple thousand volts, where it then goes through the switching circuit, through the primary, and is seen on the secondary side as more that 200,000 volts! But how did tesla do this?
   The answer is resonance. A resonant circuit, usually consisting of a capacitor and inductor, is much like a slinky. (stretched out) When you give it a push, it bounces back and forth losing momentum with each pass. However, if you keep hitting it every time it comes back, it will start to move really far back and forth at the same speed. (Or frequency) The frequency at which you hit it is it's resonance.
   The secondary coil is like our spring. But how do we get voltage from it? Certainly not by hitting it. No, you have to use an oscillating magnetic field from the primary coil to excite it. A normal spark gap type TC would use a resonant capacitor and a spark gap to produce the oscillation, where as our coil (sstc) will use feedback from the coil itself to drive the primary. (using an antenna.)