Winter-een-mas is a holiday for gamers, spanning from January 25th through the 31st, and celebrated by spending time playing games with friends and family. We hope you’ll join us for this free event – featuring twelve hours of gaming goodness – playing classics from Settlers of Catan to Halo.

I had a project rolling around in my mind. It seemed simple enough, and might actually work, so I decided to give it a shot.  Basically, I wanted to not just play music, I wanted it to shoot from my hands!  And with the magic of old electronics, I can do just that.

Ingredients

• 1 old pair of computer speakers with a wall-wart-style (I got a set of nice-sounding Altec Lansings from Talize)
• 1 disposable lunch container, sized to fit comfortably on your arm
• Enough elastic ribbon to wrap twice around an arm and the lunch container
• 1 MP3 player (I used a Phillips GoGear)
• 1 pair of cheap leather work mittens
• 1 battery holder (based on the voltage of the wall-wart – mine was 12 volts, so I used a case to hold 8 AAs (each is roughly 1.5v, 12V/1.5V = 8).

Make it

1. First, snip the power cord from the computer speakers and save it (but chuck the plug at the end)
2. Cut the power cord into two pieces – one long enough to go from one outstretched hand to the other, the other about 15 cm (though in retrospect it was too short – too short is far better than too long!)
3. Then disassemble the speaker set.  Mine’s was glued together, so I just bashed the case with a hammer.  I saved the speakers and the amplifier (the circuit board that the speakers and power plug into).  Luckily, I was able to trim  the grilles down so it was just large enough for the speakers to drill into, so I held onto those pieces, and the speakers’ screws.
4. Solder each lead from the battery case into each lead where the power plug goes.
5. Cut the cords from the amplifier to one speaker, as the wiring needs to be extended to reach each hand.
6.  Solder each lead of the long electric cable to each cut cord from the amplifier, then solder the other end to the speakers.  Then do the same with the other speaker and the short cord.
7. Downloaded music to the MP3 player and hook it up to the  contraption.
8. Jam the amplifier, MP3 player, and battery pack into the lunch container.
9. Cut the elastic ribbon into two.  Glue them into loops on the lid of the container.  You should be able to “wear” the container on your arm with the elastic holding the lid shut tight.
10. Cut circles in the palms of the mittens about the same diameter as the speakers.
11. Glue or screw the speakers into the mittens, facing out.  Here, since I was able to keep the bits of grill the speaker attaches to, I just screwed the speakers into the grille through the mittens.

Have fun blasting music through your hands!

For me,  the setup lasted a  good two hours – long enough to have a leisurely Unsilent stroll.

The Kwartzlab 60W laser cutter is now set up and has been tested cutting acrylic plastic, wood and cardboard.

The water cooled laser tube.

The control software.

A laser cut gear.

Acrylic cube.

Exhaust venting.

Laser tube water cooling pump.

Our new laser cutter

It’s a 60W laser cutter with a 24″ x 36″ work area!  It will be a while before we get it fully installed and commissioned.  Expect a ribbon cutting party in January.

Kwartzlab is proud to have Oscar Estrada displaying his work on the Art Wall for the month of December! Oscar Estrada is a visual artist who works primarily with pencil and colour pencil Sketching and painting. His focus is on realistic art and portraits. Oscar also uses his woodworking skills to make all the frames for his art. He was born in San salvador, El salvador and moved to Canada at the age of 16. Drop by any Tuesday evening between 7 and 10pm to meet the artist and check out his work. More info about Oscars work is available on his website: http://www.sketchsandframes.com

On Tuesday Nov. 29, Kareem Shehata from Aeryon Labs gave a talk about the Scout quadcopter. The Aeryon Scout is a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) micro unmanned aerial vehicle used for tactical, over-the-hill aerial intelligence.  Unlike other systems, the Scout puts the control of aerial intelligence directly into the hands of the people on the ground that require the intelligence while delivering the most sophisticated and highest quality aerial intelligence available today.

The entire system fits into a single flight case.

To demonstrate how easy the device is to use, he enlisted a couple of volunteers to assemble the scout without any instructions. James Bastow and Jack VanHam had it ready to fly after a few minutes!

Infrared camera payload.

Kareem explains the control system and feedback loops. Many sensors, microcontrollers and embedded systems are integrated to make a very stable system.

The controller tablet makes planning a mission easy. The user simply clicks areas to designate no-fly zones and then charts a course using waypoints and camera direction. The altitude for each waypoint is determined with a slider.

The camera is mounted on a gimble to keep the image steady.

Thanks Kareem for a great demo!

For some really good pictures of the demo, check out Darin Whites blog posting:

http://makebright.com/2011/11/quadcopter-talk-by-kareem-shehata-of-aeryon-labs/ 

The clock has a mechanism that was invented by Brendan and is the only one of its kind in the world. It is inspired by a clock made by Philip Woodward that he called W4, but it looks very different and has many novel features. It has a wheel and a lot of other moving parts right on the pendulum rod, for example. Also, the pendulum receives an impulse only once every 40 seconds. The dial and pendulum bob are fused glass, and the frame is black walnut.

Brendan currently has another clock on display at Kwartzlab that is entirely hand made. It uses an interesting double compound pendulum that moves very slowly because it has weights both above and below the pivot point.You can see a video of it here:

Last year, Tom  dropped by the lab and gave a presentation about the beautiful Stirling engine that he built using his Taig milling machine and lathe. I found some video of the machine and finally uploaded it to youtube. The Stirling engine, which runs on a heat source, operated for hours sitting on top of a mug of hot water.

On Tuesday night Rob fired up the Wurlitzer 200A electric piano that he is in the process of restoring.
The power/volume potentiometer seemed to be a little dirty but after a few turns it powered on and the amplifier was functioning. You can read robs blog about the restoration here: http://www.auralplane.com/

Karl Williams

ROM Dumping

I removed the ROM from a figure, soldered wires to the pads and used the Arduino SPI library to dump the memory. This was a very slow process (the data transfer rate was a few hundred bytes per second running the library at max speed), and voltage dividers were needed to step down the voltage in order not to overload the memory. The first few attempts to dump memory resulted in heavily corrupted dumps, I suspect this was due to the Arduino having trouble reading data close to the input voltage threshold, as running the memory at a voltage closer to its maximum solved the problem.

The ROM dump contained many strings of 0×55, 0xAA and 0xFF. I suspected that these represented strings of identical pixels, as the Tama-Go uses a four-shade greyscale display, so pixels would be represented as two bits, and four identical pixels would be represented as 10101010 (0xAA), 01010101 (0×55), 11111111 (0xff) or 00000000 (0×00). Looking through the binary, I found an instance where a string of 5′s was preceeded by two values which seemed reasonable for width and height, and the string was exactly long enough to provide data for an image with that width and height.

I wrote a script to decode this image, and after a few decoding accidents, extracted an image.

They can't _always_ decode properly ...

Success!

I wrote a longer script to dump all the images on the ROM.  There were about 7000 images, taking up about 60% of the 32MBit ROM.

These images give some interesting insight into how the Tama-Go works internally. For example, outside of user-generated data, text doesn’t appear to be stored as strings. All of the text displayed while using the figure was part of the images dumped.

Text Strings

Also, for every item in the game, there were images of every single Tamagotchi using it, for example, pictures of every Tamagotchi in the dress.

Tamagotchis in dresses

This makes me suspect that Tamagotchi programs aren’t very ‘smart’, and simply display bitmap images on the screen in sequence.