Well, if Episode #005 was the Failure Episode, #006 was the show without a guest. Our scheduled guest, Jeri Ellsworth, was at Notacon. Wires got crossed and she thought the show was on Saturday. Luckily, the whole thing is very casual, so Dale, Mark, and I took it all in stride and just ran with it We talked about our host picks and about the Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition which Mark had just come back from.
Our Hosts Picks:
Mark:
Mark was thoroughly jazzed by the new X-10-based automatic chicken coop door he’d just built for the coop at his new house. Above is a pic of the kind of system he described (from this site).
Mark was also enthusing all over the latest issue of Wired, guest edited by JJ Abrams. The themes are mysteries and puzzles, and now that I’ve actually seen the issue, I agree with Mark. It’s their best one in ages. Some of my favorite issues of Wired are the guest-edited ones. They took a lot of chances with this issue, pushed the envelope, and I think it really paid off. They should do more of this in the future.
Dale:
Dale talked about Maker Faire plans and the upcoming Volume 18 of MAKE. Both are on the theme of ReMake America. As part of making the Faire “greener,” we’ve teamed up with GreenMBA (Master’s of Business Administration in Sustainable Enterprise) students at Dominican University of California to develop an Alternative Transportation Plan for the Faire. Last year, with 65,000 attendees, traffic became a problem. This year, with the help of the students, we’re developing means of getting the word out electronically about traffic patterns, encouraging use of public transportation, biking to the Faire, etc. We’ll have more details on all this as it develops.
Volume 18 is now at the printers and it promises to be a great lead-in to the themes of the Faire (it hits newsstands the week before), with articles on building a rainwater collection system, an inexpensive heat-exchanger, an Arduino-controller garden monitor, the Tweet-a-Watt, and programmable LED nightlights.
Gareth:
I talked about Kacie Kinzer’s wonderful Tweenbots project that I’d posted about earlier in the week. On the show, I said the bots navigated Central Park in NYC. It was actually Washington Square Park. Apologies to my smiling cardboard overlords.
I also talked about the Google Radish, the ultra-low-power indoor-solar Cholesteric LCD displays engineers at the company have created to replace paper signage for their conference rooms.
Make: Talk Episode #007, Friday April 24, 2009
Our guest this Friday, Friday April 24, at 12-noon PDT, 3pm EDT, will be Nathan Seidle, founder of SparkFun Electronics. He’ll be talking to us about SparkFun, what they’re going to be showing off at Maker Faire, and about the recent Autonomous Vehicle Competition.
Please join us. And call in! Nobody calls in. Last week, we had a phone listener (which you can do too), but no talkers. Don’t be shy. Say something and get free stuff! The call-in number is (646) 915-8698.
And we’ll have Jeri Ellsworth on at some point in the near future.
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