When I first saw the Candy Tin fume extractor on Make’s Blog, I decided to build one myself, just never found the time.

Couple years later (again on Make) I saw this massive fume extractor, and I got even more interested.

Lately I’ve been in my lab a lot, and soldering has been quite a daily task for me.
Sometimes I end up soldering for 6 hours or even longer, and I’m sure the fumes can’t do much good to me.
I sometimes wear a mask, almost always I blow the fumes away, still it’s never enough.
After completing a very important job, I found myself with some time on my hands, and decided it was time to build my own fume extractor.
One requirement: it has to look polished and badass.

I bought myself a massive PC power supply, found a black Cooler Master with a huge fan.
I pried it open and got its guts out.
I know it’s a waste, but I wanted that case for my extractor!

Here some pictures, I don’t really need to explain the process, do I?

power supply. no stickers or labels are left on the unit.

a wall wart (200vAC to 16vDC) is powered through the main switch.
the output powers the fan (which has been reversed in order to suck air in rather than out).

with so little space between the switch and the power supply, I decided to reduce the size of the active carbon filter so it wouldn’t accidentally touch any electric wire.
a DVD cover provided the plastic to cap the clear area of the fan.

of course the power plug and switch are left intact to preserve the design.

finished. I just need to add a custom plate on the left side (which I’m not showing yet).

and now a small video to show how it works :)

if you’re on iPad/iPhone watch the video here on Vimeo

there have been several attempts at this, and some are really cool.
this is my way of taking it a step further.

different pencil, different q-tip, slightly different process.
the conductive foam I found is very soft and works very well without need to push.
Muji’s q-tips are very thin and made of rolled paper wich makes it even more delicate on the surface than plastic.
of course I had to put a bunch of them together and the result is incredible.

here we are.
after numerous redesigns, fixes, adjustments, I managed to have a final design for this Arduino Shield for our soon to be delivered project.
what’s on it:

• 8 switch detectors
• 4 Charlieplexed LEDs
• 1 DIP Switch
• 1 SonMicro RFID reader talking over I2C with Arduino
• 1 Relay

I used EVERY I/O on the Arduino (thankfully I knew about Charlieplexing or I’d be screwed).

it sits on top of the board nicely, and looks pretty good.
single face copper, 4 jumper wires, etched in our studio and hand soldered (of course).

it’s a beauty.

I designed an Arduino Shield to support an installation that has RFID reader, sensors, relay and a lot of other stuff.
The project is still not public but I can tease with the design of the PCB.
These boards will be etched in house and are single face plus 4 connection wires for the top.
It was a long process and I think it’s paying back.

I love EagleCAD.

hello geeks/nerds/hackers.

we [twodotone] are looking for an intern on a very short term.
we basically need someone since yesterday.

minimum requirements:
- decent electronics knowledge (don’t cheat on this, you’ll get caught).
- decent Arduino knowledge.
- decent knowledge of interaction design.
- GOOD soldering skills (don’t cheat on this either, you can still learn).
- passion and dedication. we do things we like to be proud of.
- you better be a programmer more than a hipster who draws doodles on a moleskine.

what else would be great:
- some experience in building physical installations.
- stamina. we pull all-nighters all the time.
- drawing skills (I’m not talking doodles here).
- crafting skills.
- smoking kills.

where:
twodotone’s studio, amsterdam, rokin 52.
it’s round the corner from dam square, very central position.

when:
you still reading?
contact us at this address
workwithus@twodotone.com

testing WordPress on ipad.
not really impressed by the app.
the device keeps amazing me.

I worked on this installation with Morcky.
For this installation I built

• Arduino Controlled Relay Array
• Sensor control of installation
• Processing App to manage and play back sound based on Serial commands sent by Arduino

From Morcky’s blog here are the finished installation pictures and description

It is an instrument, one of those you need at home.

To activate the Absolution Machine place your right hand on the dedicated area.
Breath and write your latest sin in the holy book.
Close your eyes.
The wind of absolution will move the people to an ancient ritual.
And the crowd will cheer.
Yes, they will cheer.
For you.
And your sins.

I cannot tell too much about this yet, and I actually don’t have much time to post about it,
but having seen a similar device on HackADay, I wanted to push this out a little.

the device is an iPhone/iPod Touch accessory for Jailbroken devices.
it uses the dock connector serial interface and has a rechargeable battery.
the interface to iTunes is provided via a mini-USB and the charging happens through an external power adapter.
the device can be charged via both USB (100mAh) or PSU (500mAh).

this project has been commissioned by MediaMatic amsterdam, and the electronics have been prototyped by me for twodotone amsterdam (founded by me) and Gianluca Martino of team Arduino italy.

we will post more details when we publish the project and it will end up in the museum it’s been designed for ;)

[links]
twodotone
smartprojects
MediaMatic

After years paying for my monthly subscription, I decided to call it quits.
More than one year ago I even decided to upgrade from a basic 5 slots ($ 9.99/mo) to a 10 slots ($ 19.99) in order to have more books on my virtual shelf.
It looked amazing in the beginning, and to be fair to O’Reilly, it turned out to be quite useful many times.
Why canceling then?

Because in the end, like for many other subscriptions, you don’t get what you pay for.
You get 5 download tokens a month (on renewal) and you can use them within 90 days.
Most of the books don’t allow a full download but a chapter based (usually one token per chapter) download.
Goes without explaining (do the math yourself) that you can never have more than 15 tokens, and how many programming/technology books have less than 15 chapters?
Quite a few, to be honest.
But…
When a book has less than 15 chapters, the download policy changes in order to f**k with you.
You can download on a sub-chapter base.
I mean… are you serious?

I was still determined to close my account so, in order to at least use some of the tokens, I had to search for a book that had both chapter based download and less than 15 chapters.
I found it and I can assure you it’s of very little interest to me (and probably to most of you out there)


Programming the iPhone user Experience

Well, at least I used 9/15 tokens.
Time to cancel.

At least I had a chance to leave a comment on the reason for ending my subscription.
Here it is in all its mean glory:

“for $23+/mo you could just change your download rules.
users like me have been paying for a long time and every now and then they’d love to be treated like paying customers and get something more than 5 tokens/mo that expire in 90 days.
most of your books aren’t downloadable as a whole and when the chapters are less than 15 (max amount of tokens you can possibly allow without shelling extra cash), magic happens: you can’t download chapters but portions of chapters.
this brings the token count required to download a book to more than 20.
and what about the BS of skipping parts of chapter?
I’ll keep buying your printed books because they are of really good quality, but I seriously doubt I’ll get back to safari bookshelf or that I’ll refer someone else.”

thanks for the ride
ubi de feo”

Today I built this cable out of boredom.
I wanted to test my Eclipse-AVR setup to program an ATtiny13 and realized that I always had to make some crazy jumper connections every time I wanted to use a new µ.
Why didn’t I think of this earlier?
Probably because we just worked with a few Atmel and I had my own sockets for each of them.
Now I’m in hacker mood and want to really learn the guts of AVR µs.

hope you’ll like the idea.
I basically used 2 different diameter heat-shrink tubes.

- the first one is to make the wire and the pin tight together and to isolate against unwanted shorts,
- the second one is larger and I wrote on it using a really thin pen before shrinking.

it’s proven to be working really well.

update:
this version has red and black for VCC and GND and is much longer, as I noticed the former one required the AVRISP to be really close to the µ and sometimes it’s just not possible if you have a lot lying around on the same board.

and finally