As much as I love Engineer Guy videos, I am especially partial to Series #4, because it is themed around the chemical elements—each installment features a different element and a remarkable bit of engineering based upon it. And this week my two personal favorite elements are in the spotlight. Though it is utterly common, today, metallic aluminum was once among the most precious metals in existence. Books can and have been written about aluminum’s wonderful history and properties, and as for titanium…well, who doesn’t love titanium?

Here, then, is the third installment of Engineer Guy Series #4, in which Bill Hammack (and his behind-the-scenes teammates Patrick Ryan and Nick Ziech) take us through the constructive use of corrosion to create durable, colorful surface finishes on, for example, Apple’s laptops and iPods. Great, as always. [Thanks, Bill!]

TodBot of ThingM wasn’t content with keeping his Mintronics: Menta (available in the Maker Shed) in the included tin so he 3D printed his own Menta enclosure.

[The Menta] is a great little Arduino clone that fits in a mint tin yet still has Arduino-standard header sockets for shields. I found the mint tin limiting though if you’re adding wires & parts to your circuit, plus I have always felt a little iffy about putting prototypes in metal enclosures. So here’s a printable case for mint tin-sized circuits like the Menta. It has openings for the DC power jack and the FTDI cable.

TodBot has both 25mm and 35mm versions up on Thingiverse but you could easily stretch the case enclose almost any circuit or shield you need.

More:

• Maker Shed Exclusive: Mintronics: Menta
• What’s Different about the Mintronics: Menta?

Daniel of Valencia, Spain, built this clever waiter bot to dispense (warm?) beer:

This time, I show the operation of HeinyBot Waiter in static mode. In this mode, once activated the robot, it enters a loop oscillating movements, gestures and audio messages which only comes when we approach from the side or front to less than 80 cm. If we do one way or another he will turn to us to serve beer. First we have to pay, then keep the coin in his “pocket” and serve beer. To get it, we put your hand under the can and once we detected with the sensor of the clamp, release the can.

[Translated by Google!]

The cord curled in my original project, before reversing. Note right-hand helicity, 19 turns.

Same cord, after reversing the coil. Note left-hand helicity, 21 turns.

One of the first projects I ever wrote for MAKE was about setting a coil in a factory-straight electrical cable or cord using a heat gun and a metal form. A recent comment on that project hipped me to this short video segment from the Science Channel’s awesome show How It’s Made:

In it, a technician in a factory that makes coiled retractable cables demonstrates a second step in the process that I didn’t know about when I wrote my original guide: after the initial “perm,” the coil is reversed by a machine that grabs both ends and twists it in the direction opposite the thermoformed helix. The industrial machine is apparently a bit of a trade secret, but the trick can be performed on a one-off basis using a bench vise and a hand drill.

Besides being a lot of fun to watch, I can now report that this process is a lot of fun to do. And works essentially as advertised on home-curled cords. The “inside out” cord, which started as a regular straight instrument patch cable, is now considerably tighter than before.

Thanks to Bart Patrzalek for the tip, and Brian Adams for linking to the instructive video segment.

Make: Projects — Cord Curling Part 2 – Reversing the Coil

I love this silent Maker Faire video with a very twinkly, ethereal soundtrack. Really captures some of the wonder of the event.

NEWS FROM THE FUTURE – Customer Service Holograms At Airports…

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — She smiles, answers questions and can guide you to the nearest restroom or to your connecting flight. But don’t try to shake her hand. That’s because “she” is an avatar, the latest high-tech venture at the three major airports in the New York City area. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unveiled the device Monday at Newark and La Guardia airports. Those two, along with JFK, will be the first airports in North America to get an avatar this summer. The Port Authority is renting them for about $180,000 for six months. They cost about $250,000 each. According to the Port Authority, more than 100 million travelers pass through the three airports annually.

Here, with great fanfare, is the second installment of Engineer Guy Series #4: the MEMS accelerometer. With typical flair, Bill and his production team take us from the basic concept of an accelerometer (using the familiar ball-on-a-spring model), through the analogous silicon device that lets your smartphone tell up from down, all the way to the anisotropic etching techniques used to manufacture these complex, tiny machines. It’s wonders all the way down, with Bill, as usual. [Thanks, Bill!]

Spoil Board from b_light.

Translucence from .:madworm:..

Space Marine Kid from Tsabo Tsaboc.

Coffee cup fire station – door rolled up from Rumtopf.

4.7mH Inductor from anachrocomputer.

Best Heart from modeltrainsfreak.

DIY Sous Vide Immersion Cooker in action from smudge_cml.

Our pals at Dangerous Prototypes put together these wonderful videos about Maker Faire Bay Area 2012. The first gives you a maker’s POV of being at the Faire, setting up, what to bring, etc. The second video offers a rundown of 13 projects that Ian of DP found at the Faire.

Really great work, guys! It was a pleasure having you all and having Skot in the Make: Live fishbowl talking about his DigitGrid project.

Dangerous Prototypes

More:
See all of our Maker Faire coverage here.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/embed/89099ca915d05

NEWS FROM THE FUTURE – Ketchup That Doesn’t Get Stuck In The Bottle…

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57″ logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.

The result? LiquiGlide, a “super slippery” coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging–though ketchup and mayonnaise bottles might just be the substance’s first targets. Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. “It’s funny: Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles–just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market,” Smith says. “And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”