Yep, that's a Lego movie projector all right. The frame-rate's a bit short of 24fps and the film moves a bit while the light's on - but c'mon! Lego movie projector!
Via TechnicBricks, again. That post also mentions the first TechVideo from this year...
...a vending machine made by the same guy, Ricardo Oliveira.
There are several things I should be writing now.
Instead, I made this.
This is Graeme Garden (recently the voice of the demonic Mr Bibby in Bromwell High) being a film director, in "The Making of The Goodies' Disaster Movie", published in 1977. For Christmas, my sister got me my very own copy.
When I was a kid, a significant amount of my interest in (my uncle's copy of) this large but slim volume stemmed from the fact that it has some boobies in it. But it actually still stands up perfectly well today. The more dated a joke in it is, the more historically interesting it's likely to be. (Take, for instance, the running gag about Keith Moon's boundless destructive power; Moon died the year after the book came out. There's also a lot of jokes about surgical supports; improved hernia treatment techniques mean almost nobody has to wear a truss any more.)
Back in the Seventies, The Goodies was overshadowed by Monty Python's Flying Circus almost everywhere (various Pythons and Goodies have collaborated in other projects), but here in Australia the show developed a huge following. This was because although The Goodies is immensely silly, it is also actually a show for grown-ups. But the Australian Broadcasting Corporation put it to air, almost completely uncensored, in an after-school time slot. There were endless re-runs of the show on the ABC in the Eighties, surprising and delighting the young audience, who got to see risqué jokes and lots of violence. (For much the same reason, the Monkey TV series is also tremendously popular among Australians approaching middle age.)
You can now get some Goodies on DVD, too. They're not necessarily going to be exactly your cup of tea if you weren't raised on them (see also: Vegemite), but there are a few episodes that really are just brilliant. Like, for instance, "It Might As Well Be String":
(There's more info about the surprisingly large number of Goodies books here.)
This is a contact-type 3D scanner. Philippe "Philo" Hurbain (co-author of "Extreme NXT", a book about advanced Lego robotics) made it to help him import odd-shaped Lego parts into the LDraw Lego-CAD program.
As you may have noticed, the scanner is itself made out of Lego. I think the only non-Lego parts in it are the actual needle that prods the thing being scanned, and one extra-flexible cable going to a standard NXT light sensor.
All the rest - drive components, sensors, you name it - is 100% Lego. The brain is Mindstorms NXT. Hurbain has made various add-on sensors for Lego robots, but I don't think he's used any of them in this.
Apparently, the new linear-actuator parts are accurate enough for this job, when you drive them with one of the NXT motors, which have built-in position encoders.
More info on Philo's site.
Everybody who found the SX-150 demo from that post to be agonising listening: The first of these videos is safe for you. The second is not.
This track's held together by the DS-10, of course, which is a proper little music production environment. Both the Stylophone and the SX-150 are sweetened up by a lot of reverb, as well.
But just the same - this is actual music, using the actual particular capabilities of these funny little synths. The SX-150 has My First Analogue Synth tweakability, and the Stylophone lets you do effortless "keyboard" glissandos, including only the "white notes" or - with some more dexterity - the whole chromatic scale.
Play these instruments "dry", though, and you get something more like this:
Still an actual tune, but not exactly easy listening.
Last year, one of the award-winners in the Greener Gadgets design competition wasn't all that it might have been.
To summarise: It didn't exist, and was physically impossible.
This year, the winner is an actual object that actually works. It's the "Tweet-a-Watt" prototype, a system that gives wireless computer access to as many power-usage meters as you like, so you can have your Internet washing machine - or, at least, the power-monitoring feature thereof - without having to wait for an appliance company to make one.
Some of the other shortlisted entries seem quite good, too. You can't argue with something that's actually built and working, for a start. And I spent a while trying to think of something wrong with this little cardboard PC case, but couldn't (here's a bigger one).
This roll-up solar flashlight wouldn't be cheap to make with current tech, but it looks workable. And the BugPlug looks fun and useful, while these evil eyes for standby LEDs are hilarious - I don't care if the light-guide design doesn't seem quite right.
The Zeer evaporation cooler looks good, too. As do the WattBlocks, except for the slightly embarrassing detail that they seem to be turning off "vampire" standby devices by adding a bunch of little doodads that must themselves be in standby mode all day. The clockwork Vampire Plug looks like a better bet, but doesn't do the same job.
Many of the other candidates seem to be the usual "cool design project" things that look really neat at first but become less and less appealing the more you think about them.
Take the RITI printer, for instance, which uses "coffee or tea dregs" for ink.
What a great idea! Make the coffee-ring work for you!
Except that dregs are full of particulates, which I strongly suspect would instantly clog any printer nozzle capable of output resolution better than that of a nine-pin dot-matrix. I suppose they could put a filter in the thing, but that'd have to be a frequently-replaced consumable for your "eco-friendly" printer.
(And apparently the whole thing's run by the user moving the print head back and forth by hand. So it doesn't just need sub-millimetre head-tracking accuracy to know when to squirt out a dot - which would seem to rule out the usual rubber-belt system - but apparently when you're sending a document to it, you have to whip the head back and forth so the printer can hear you. And yet it still features an on/off button.)
This neighborhood intercom doodad might perhaps work, but there'd be non-trivial security issues, unless you made setting the system up no easier than just instant-messaging your neighbours. (Not that it wouldn't be great to just drive through the city with a spare "Eco-Neighbuzz" transmitter broadcasting "Big dog-fight this evening at number 29! No homos, negroes, fat chicks or Jews!")
Some of the entries are more art object than realistic product (this one's on the border line), which is fine by me. I've got no complaints about those, unless they win prizes.
But then, along with various solar devices that don't seem to have enough cells to perform as advertised, there's this solar battery charger, which does not appear to have any solar cells at all. Perhaps the green block in the middle is Kryptonite, or something.
The Urban Fan is entertaining, too. It's a ceiling fan that plugs into a light-socket. Commenters predict rather unpleasant failure modes when you try to hang it from a loosely-anchored socket, and I'd like to add that if it uses an Edison screw fitting, it may unscrew itself after a few on/off cycles.
Oh, and then there's the Enviro'clock Bandage, which commenters observe appears to be a sticker with mental telepathy.
And it wouldn't be an eco-gadget competition without yet another dodgy small wind turbine. This time, there's one that has one little turbine that's meant to work in both wind and water. And the "Wind-Helmet" seems to be trying to set a record for personal-wind-turbine smallness and uselessness.
(Some commenters on both of those entries are, again, unimpressed.)
This solar-powered air-cleaning fan is only mildly stupid. This home 12VDC socket idea could work, but seems to me to be almost completely unnecessary (it's remarkable how many of these proposals have glaring spelling errors). And then there's PpMm pre-perforated paper, which aims to end the endless nightmare that is... tearing up a piece of paper.
If you find any other howlers in the top 50 candidates, please point 'em out!
I just got me one of them Twitter things that the kids are so crazy about.
I have a serious, serious problem with turning things I'm writing into very lengthy projects, so Twitter actually looks like a good idea to me. I understand why a lot of people view it as pure granulated pointlessness, but it gives me a chance to toss off the occasional bon mot without any real time investment, and perhaps some of you will enjoy the result.
(In the unlikely event that anybody reading this doesn't get the title joke: La.)
(Pennypacker also found this when I searched for "Twitter". I don't know why, but it's another good one, so what the heck.)
Lego models are usually too fragile to cope with outdoor play. Especially off-road outdoor play.
This one isn't.
(Via, once again, the excellent TechnicBricks.)
And yes, those are pneumatic remote-control tubes going to this particular vehicle. Here are lots more pictures from the "Czech Lego Technic Truck Trial Championship 2008", organised by members of this Czech Lego forum.
(Scale-model rock crawling has, by the way, quietly become quite popular. There's even a Tamiya chassis for it now. Here's Kyosho's spider-ish contestant.)
Making off-road Lego models is, I think, a good introduction to real full-scale engineering. A Lego truck trying to negotiate one-inch pebbles is taking similar risks to a full-sized vehicle trying to get over boulders. The Lego truck's much more likely to fail, for much more realistic reasons, than a "normal" off-road toy truck.
This is because of the square-cube law, which makes it easy to make a model that's far stronger than a full-sized version would be. The connections between pieces of Lego are weaker than the connections between the components of a normal off-road R/C toy, which makes the challenge more realistic.
If you build a small bridge out of Lego, you can just stick together a few layers of beam pieces using nothing but the standard stud connectors, and it'll work. This sort of thing doesn't scale at all, though, as many kids facing the classic "Spaghetti Bridge" challenge have discovered. In scale terms, spaghetti behaves like steel.
As, for that matter, do the engineering components available to you in the old Bridge Builder game and its descendants. In those, the girders are stiff and strong, but they're nowhere near long enough to bridge the gaps all by themselves. And the joints with which you stick girders together are all perfect hinges, and not very strong in tension.
Getting a tracked Lego vehicle to work properly offroad, and not throw a track every time a tiny stick or pebble gets jammed in there, would be a serious challenge. It might also give you some sympathy for the people who have to spend three hours with a sledgehammer, a two-by-four and who knows what else, fixing full-sized tracked vehicles that've done the same thing, in some delightful place or other.
I bought a Gakken SX-150. It's the first electronic musical instrument from their brilliant "Otona no Kagaku" line of "magazine kits", which all come in a funny box with a magazine attached to it that contains instructions for building whatever the thing is.
(Gakken also make the Cross Copter and Mechamo Centipede about which I have previously written.)
The instructions, like Gakken's Web sites, are always in Japanese, but this seldom poses much of a problem. Particularly not in the case of the SX-150, which is quite trivial to put together. As I write this, the Hobbylink Japan page for the SX-150 says "It requires both cement and painting to complete or use. 124 parts" is incorrect. You actually only have to screw the circuit board into the casing, screw down the contacts for the two ends of the ribbon controller and the stylus, and screw down the edges of the little speaker. And put four AAs in it. And cut out and attach the cardboard back panel, if you like.
(I found that Hobbylink Japan had it the cheapest, for Australian shoppers anyway, at about 4380 yen delivered, which is under $US50 as I write this. But it's also out of stock at the moment. The Make: store has it for a higher price, though, as do several other dealers.)
Herewith, a quick SX-150 FAQ.
Does it have to sound like a Stylophone?
No.
The SX-150 doesn't have what you'd call a huge palette of tonal variety - mainly pitch and resonance variations on a, yes, distinctly Stylophone-ish screech - but you can also coax a decent bass tone out of it, as well as various sweeps and bleeps of no use for melodies.
This discussion on monome.org mentions people not seeing the point of the SX-150 until they heard a "mid 90's acid track"; I concur.
Apparently, someone at Gakken said "Let's make a small device with which people will be able to approximately recreate the lead-synth line from Da Hool's "Meet Her At The Love Parade", and somebody else said "Well, it'll need at least a Resonance knob, then", and the SX-150 sort of grew from there.
(Their next product will presumably be the Europa-8, purpose-built to allow you to play the lead synth line from "Axel F".)
The tiny built-in speaker is of course not a bass-monster, but it's easy to plug the SX-150 into other speakers. Its "Output" socket is a fairly hot line-level, so can't drive full-sized headphones very loudly. (It'll probably be OK with little earbud headphones.) It should work fine with any guitar amplifier or effects pedal/unit, though, or with hi-fi gear and headphone amplifiers. I have already connected it to the stereo through an old cheesy digital reverb unit, with entertaining (for me, anyway) results.
Can you actually play a tune on it?
Yes. I was very pleasantly surprised by how musical this tinny little thing actually is.
The standard pitch control on the SX-150 is the prominent black resistance "ribbon" on the front, which you play with the little wired stylus. Left is bass, right is treble, and the total pitch range of the ribbon is a bit more than four octaves.
Some people have achieved tune-playing on an SX-150 by hacking an actual keyboard onto it, with keys connected to the stylus terminal that make contact with the stock ribbon controller at the appropriate points. But you don't need to do that. Even with the standard ribbon, someone with reasonable dexterity can play actual repeatable notes.
The ribbon makes the SX-150 a "fretless" instrument, like a violin or fretless bass. So you'll never actually hit exactly the same note twice. But the pitch-change-per-millimetre is constant - an octave is about 19mm, no matter where on the strip you're playing - and this makes the SX-150 much easier to play than many real fretless instruments. In all regular string instruments, the notes get closer and closer together as they get higher - you can see this effect in the spacing of the frets on fretted instruments.
So in this respect, the SX-150 is like the ondes Martenot or its younger, poorer cousin the Electro-Theremin, which can both make very theremin-y sounds (that's an Electro-Theremin in "Good Vibrations", for instance, not a proper theremin), but are operated by simply moving your hand a set distance for a set pitch change, no matter what pitch you're starting from.
(And then there are trombones, which I have yet to be persuaded do not produce entirely random tones.)
I don't know much about electronics. Can I still do interesting things with an SX-150 (besides just trying to play it)?
Yes. Adding actual new non-trivial features to the SX-150 isn't for beginners, but this thing is genuinely educational, in the very best way. It can teach you things about electronics, and about analogue synthesisers.
Some basic facts: The probe is negative, and the probe-to-strip voltage varies from about 1.6V at the high end of the strip to about 0.8V at the low end. The end-to-end resistance of the strip is about 50 kiloohms.
What this means is that when you connect the probe to the top end of the strip through a multimeter, as I did to get the above numbers, the SX-150 will play a very low note, as a tiny amount of current passes through the multimeter's voltage range.
Many similar tricks are possible. Hold the probe-end in one hand, for instance, lick a finger on the other hand and press it to the top of the strip, and you'll get a low-bass note. Sliding your finger down from there will get you lower and lower bass, far beyond the ability of the tiny speaker to reproduce.
Use a paper-clip as a second stylus, touching the lengthy bit of bare metal on the proper stylus to the paper-clip and then disconnecting it again, with the other end of both stylus and clip touching the ribbon, to create a yodelling effect!
Observe the small but noticeable change in pitch and noise when you hold the stylus close to the tip - so your skin touches the stylus metal - as opposed to holding only the plastic handle!
And the SX-150 is a very limited instrument, of course, of very little use for "real" music. But limitations focus you on what you can do, and this really is a bonsai analogue synthesiser to play with, not just a Stylophone.
Does the "EXT.SOURCE" socket actually do anything?
Yes, imaginary questioner, it does. How convenient that you just asked exactly the right question for me to be able to continue what I just wrote.
The EXT.SOURCE input is a simple example of what all the fuss is about with analogue synthesisers, and the modern software simulations thereof. If you plug a very "hot" signal into that input, it converts amplitude to pitch. Line-level isn't good enough (which is why many people seem to have concluded that it doesn't do anything at all), and most headphone sockets won't go loud enough either; Gakken made this input to interface with their little Theremin. If you've got a loud enough input, though - like a headphone amplifier, or a normal amp turned up only a little bit - there it is; the louder the input, the higher the tone from the SX-150.
This is not very useful, if you don't have the little Theremin. Actually, I think it's probably not terribly useful even if you do. But it helps you make the one great conceptual leap of the analogue synthesiser, especially the modular analogue synth that's a wall of separate "modules" connected together with a spaghetti of patch leads.
That conceptual leap is to realise that audio signals, when conveniently converted to electricity, can readily be transformed in this sort of way. If amplitude becomes pitch a "BOOM tish BOOM tish BOOM tish" drum line becomes "peep boop peep boop peep boop".
That's the whole point of the modular synth. It's all just voltages that different modules create or modify in different ways, and how and where those voltages become actual sounds is entirely up to you.
The SX-150 doesn't take you all the way back to Jean-Jacques and Delia, recording individual oscillator-noises on tape and then endlessly dubbing and splicing. But no mere human has the patience for that. It does, however, give you a real little insight into the dawn of the true synthesiser. So even if you have to pay $US75 for it, I reckon it's a pretty good deal.
UPDATE: Here's someone playing an SX-150.
(The reverb effect later in the clip is, of course, being created by outboard hardware.)
Here's one of many modified versions:
