Andrew Means (impetus for the band Velella Velella and coincidentally my brother-in-law) is looking into a new venture of creating an amazing portable rotating speaker.

He’s going about things with analog purity: tube amp, a DC motor with complete sweep of rotation speed, and a wooden chassis that is a beautiful thing.

Right now he’s set up a web site to get feedback on his prototype while working out details of the project. If there’s something you’ve always wanted in a speaker, now’s your chance to ask.

Check it out at: http://embassyspeakers.com/

This URL has been sitting in a sticky note on my desktop for a number of months now:
http://www.response-box.com/lights/B1167474708/C85072942/E20051208151155/index.html

Here is what is says:

A Raw Pixel Circuit Board

I built up one pixel by hand before sending the batch off for fabrication. Note that J1 is mounted from the rear of the unit. The design could definitely be smaller if SMT parts were used. The RS-485 transceiver, the PIC microcontroller and the drive transistors are available in SOIC packages.

A previous version of this design used a ULN2003 driver chip in place of the 2N3904 transistors. Board area is about the same, but the transistors only cost $.03.

Since the only thing on the board running off +5v are the chips, the 78L05 works well and takes up not much space at all.

The LEDs are made by SunLED and are high-flux ‘spider’ devices. Each pixel contains two each red, blue and green LEDs.

Each pixel attaches to the main wiring harness with 4 crimp connectors. The main harness contains +12, gnd, data + and data – signals. A future revision of this system will likely include separate in and out connectors on each pixel. However, these connectors add resistance and cost to the system.

The boards measure 1.25″ × 2.00″.

I had just found out about this, and was drooling over the photos on the Flickr site, when I then saw Peter Kirn’s report on CDM come in on my RSS reader. You should definitely check out his write up, as it’s the best I’ve seen (link below).

The device looks beautifully crafted. It appears that they have some brushed aluminum sheets that they are punching and then mounting to some sort of resin base for which they have a mold. The final presentation is definitely pleasing…

• CDM’s report
• Official Site
• Flickr Site with some really nice pictures – including some from the assembly process and the enclosure making.

After searching for quite a while to find the perfect spring for an installation, I was sent to McMaster-Carr to find what I needed. Low and behold, I also found a whole lot of things I never knew I needed! I figured I’d pass along the link in case someone had a hard to find hardware item.

www.mcmaster.com

Here are some sensor/electronics sites that I’ve looked at lately:

• http://www.sensorwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page
• http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php
• http://vvvv.meso.net/tiki-index.php?page=HowTo+Sensors
• http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/594O/
• http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~dano/CUI/
• http://multio.mamalala.de/

Earlier tonight, in the class that I’m co-teaching, we were working with one of the students on a project where the goal is to make a dinosaur, constructed from wire, walk. We also needed to be ableto control this with an OOPic. The easiest way to approach this was to use a servo that is modified so that it can continuosly rotate, rather than stopping when it gets to the end of the internal potentiometer.

Here are a couple of sites that we found:

• http://www.kronosrobotics.com/an116/GAN116_hs300.shtml
• http://www.robotstore.com/download/Servo_Mod_Notes_1.0.pdf
• http://www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/gadgets/servos/servomod.html

Also, if you are looking to buy servos, be sure to check out http://servocity.com/ . This is where we’ve been buying our servos in the class. They have some decent prices too.

My father (an electrical engineer) sent me this link recently: http://www.embedded.com/mag.htm

It is a free online magazine with lots of good stuff that is applicable to the kinds of development that relate to the Teabox and such.