22
Jun 10

BADASS fume extractor

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?

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

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Popularity: unranked [?]

22
Jun 10

my take on the iPad Stylus

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.


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Popularity: unranked [?]

08
May 10

INNL Arduino Shield

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.


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Popularity: unranked [?]

02
May 10

Latest PCB

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.

Popularity: unranked [?]

27
Apr 10

Intern position in amsterdam

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

Popularity: unranked [?]

24
Apr 10

post from iPad

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

Popularity: 1% [?]

13
Apr 10

Installation with Morcky: For Those Who Pray

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


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Popularity: 1% [?]

14
Mar 10

iPhone RFID reader with rechargeable battery

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 ;)


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Popularity: 3% [?]

21
Feb 10

Goodbye Safari Bookshelf

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?
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Popularity: 3% [?]

27
Jul 09

Arduino ISP custom proto-board cable

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.
arduino_isp_cable2
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Popularity: 4% [?]

12
Jan 09

Palm Pre

Upon carefully watching Palm’s keynote introducing the Pre at CES, I’ve been thinking about nothing but that little toy.

I’m quite bummed by the lack of information about the SDK.
The emphasis has been placed on the fact that millions of coders (if we can really address HTML/CSS/JS programmers that way) will be able to program for the webOS and Mojo.

Of course I’m wondering how much will be possible using those techniques and languages.
Will that mean you won’t have graphic acceleration for your games?
What if a developer wants to port a graphic app that uses double-buffering?
How is a programmer going to deal with sound?

That’s still all to be seen.
We can’t but patiently wait.
I’ll stick to my wonderful E71 for now, and keep using iPhone as a backup device and to play with.

For a more thorough examination I’d like to link to Rui Carmo’s take on the device.
I always treasure his opinions.

Popularity: 1% [?]

31
May 08

.mac galleries look nice on iPhone [outdated]

I was sent a link by a friend (Greg) to show his latest work in interior and furniture design.
I find his products amazingly beautiful, and seeing how friendly the .Mac interface for gallery looked on safari, decided to take a look at how they were rendered on iPhone.

this is the result,
perfectly integrated like the camera roll or the sync-ed photos.

is this another sign of .mac targeting mobile (iPhone/iPod touch) more and more?

Popularity: 3% [?]

28
Mar 08

iPhone-dev toolchain on Leopard: the real deal

After about 2 days trying to follow the wiki on Google Code iphone-dev with no success at all, I decided to finally look around and see if someone had succeeded in writing a proper how-to to install the unofficial SDK for jailbroken iPhone.
That’s right, Apple, I’m not content with the official one, especially for the proof of concept applications we’re trying to demo.

a search reported this amazing step-by-step tutorial on Cocoa Machine on installing the toolchain (I skipped some steps, as parts were already successfully installed via the wiki on iphone-dev), and finished compiling/installing the whole.

what’s really great about this guide, is that the author patched the XCode templates as well, and is giving instructions on how to modify the Makefile for code downloaded from code.google.com or others.

everything explained.
it’s now time for me to get to it.

Popularity: 1% [?]

28
Mar 08

Po Bronson’s genius.

Having had the chance to appreciate this man’s writing in his book “the nudist on the late shift” (which I recommend to every geek around),
I was reading through his website in search of trivia and other funnies.

I stubled upon the Apology Engine.

wonderful.

Popularity: 1% [?]

14
Mar 08

new server

we finally moved out of Plesk :)
thanks rick

285599483_c5c69960fe.jpg

Popularity: 1% [?]

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