Make Every Week: Remote-Controlled Egg

In a nod to the egg-dying we’ll be doing this weekend, I made an egg I can color from my phone.

In truth, it was the perfect excuse to play with a Metawear board I picked up a while ago. Hatched from a Kickstarter campaign, it’s a bunch of sensors and an LED packed onto a board the size of a postage stamp. You talk to it over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).

The idea is that Metaware can help quickly build smart wearables and fitness trackers. To dip my toes into the process, I made an egg.

Hi, Weatherbot

(This post originally appeared on the Opennews Source blog.)

The students’ eyes opened wide in a mix elation and evil-mad-scientist.

Lines of code projected at the front of the class had just done something in the real world: They sent a tweet. And you could see it, right there on the internet.

The power of this little exercise was crystal clear to the undergraduates. And they couldn’t hide their giddiness.

“Use this only for good,” I admonished.

They had followed along as I built basic Twitter bot. You can do it, too.

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: 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: 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. :-)

Make Every Week: A Bendy Mangnifier

Making makes me happy.

Whether it's a map, a blinking hoodie or a Twitter bot, I get a thrill from making things. Yet I don't partake this euphoric drug often enough. Which is ridiculous.

So every week this year, I'm going to make something. 

Could be small, could be simple, could be silly. Some should be tricky and/or blinky. And best if I learn something new in the process. 

But at least one thing. And I'll blog about each one here.

So without further ado ...

Week 1: The bendy magnifying glass

For a while I've owned a little tool called a “third hand” to carefully hold tiny things while I solder other tiny things onto them. Looks like this: