Make Every Week: Fitness Wristband

The same week we got details about the new Apple Watch, my Nike Fuelband died.

That got me thinking about what I really want — and don't want — on my wrist, and whether I could build something that fit my needs exactly.

So expect a few #MakeEveryWeek weeks devoted to iterations of a fitness watch. This is one of them.

My Fuelband had a clock, which I used for timing my midweek runs of about 20 minutes (don't judge). But I had to keep checking my wrist, and pressing a button in the band, to see if time was up.

I really wanted something to simply tell me when 20 minutes was up. So that's what I made.

Make Every Week: Selfies from Space

This is a snapshot of my town — taken yesterday.

It is crazy-amazing that I can get an image from space on my computer in damn-near real time.

The camera is Landsat 8, a U.S. Geological Survey satellite with a dozen sensors on it. I got an introduction to using satellite imagery at the NICAR 2015 Conference in Atlanta last week, so I thought I’d give it a whirl for this week’s #MakeEveryWeek.

I wondered if I could see from space the lovely thaw we had the past couple of days, with highs hitting near 60.

Make Every Week: Texted Picture Catcher

“Let’s have people send pictures!”

This idea comes up a lot where I work. And we’ve done some great photo-crowdsourcing projects.

But how best to get pictures from an audience? Telling people tag us on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook can work, as in WNYC’s Bodega Cats project. But people have to be using those services.

Most folks can email a picture, especially when the email address is easy to remember. That’s what we did for WNYC’s Abandoned Bikes project.

What about texting pictures?

The phone/texting service I like to play with, Twilio, recently added MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS is what you’re using when you text a picture or video.

So for this week’s #MakeEveryWeek, I wanted to figure out how to text a picture to my server, via Twilio, and then upload it to Flickr:

Phone -> Phone number -> Twilio -> My Server -> Flickr

Make Every Week: Wind-Sensor Candle

How would you build a digital candle someone could actually blow out? My 11-year-old daughter and I tried to answer that one evening, just for the fun of it.

We looked online to see if there were ways to detect breezes without a set of spinning cups. We quickly learned about hot-wire wind detectors, which monitor a warm wire and detect tiny changes of voltage as air passes over it.

Even better, we found a $17 device that does exactly that and has Ardiuno code to go with it. Score!

We bought it that night, and, quite honestly, it has been sitting in my bin of parts for months. (In the meantime we built a whole bunch of candles you extinguish by tipping over.)

So for this week’s #MakeEveryWeek, I gave the blow-out candle a try.

Make Every Week: A “Tiny” Cat Toy

The short story: This week I made a blinky-buzzy toy to occupy our cat with a random sequence of teases. And he loved it!

The longer story starts just over a year ago, when Team Blinky friend Liza Stark gave me an 8-legged computer chip the size of a peanut and said, with wide eyes, “You can do amazing things with these!”

So for #MakeEveryWeek No. 3, I learned how to play with this minuscule computer.

It's ATtiny

The little chip was an ATtiny (pronounced like an author, A. T. Tiny), which is essentially a super-simple Arduino.

Its legs correspond to a some of the familiar Arduino pins: power, ground and five input-output points. More details are on the Sparkfun site.

Illustration (CC) BY-NC-SA 3.0 by Sparkfun

Just like an Ardunio, you can code it to light LEDs, read simple sensors and buzz buzzers. You program it using Arduino desktop software and the Arduino language. You even use an Arduino as a kind of “mother ship” to load programs into the ATtiny — because it's missing all of the connectors Arduino boards have.

Make Every Week: Lunch Bot

We never know where to get lunch.

Oh, we know where we can go. But the moment our team steps outside, no one can answer “Where should we go?”

So for my second #MakeEveryWeek project, I made a bot to pick a place.

At work, we use Slack to message each other. A feature of Slack allows other programs to post messages in our chat windows using “incoming webhooks” — web addresses that accept data and then pass it into a Slack window.

Any computer on the internet can use the incoming webhook, you just need to know your team's secret webhook URL. Which I do. :-)