From the MIT High-Low Tech Lab, it’s a DIY cellphone made from $150 of easily-available parts. The phone module comes from Sparkfun, the LCD comes from Adafruit, the circuit board was designed with Eagle and can be produced by any fab house, and the case is a laser-cut plywood sandwich.

I overheard someone in the lunch line talking about 3D printers running in a conference room upstairs, and asked what that was about. He apparently happened to have a Makerbot on his desk a couple of years ago, and now the kids just expect to see 3D printers when they visit Google. I commented that they must think Google is awfully futuristic for having such high-tech equipment around – but oh no, he said, they think this stuff is totally normal. They know that plastic things must come from somewhere, so why wouldn’t it be a printer at Google? In fact they complain that the plastic is weird and bumpy, and only comes in one color – it’s only their parents who are impressed.

I said hello to Nathan H.’s daughter Mabry as she was eating lunch. She’s about four years old, and told me that she has a friend with a little brother who is also named “Mars”, who is two. I said that was great, I don’t know anyone else named Mars, and that I looked forward to talking with him some day. “Oh, but he’s only two”, she said; “by then you’ll be really really old, or maybe dead!”

Ordinary things blowing up, in gorgeous, beautifully-lit slow motion: it’s a promotional video for some Danish TV show, but it’s totally grinworthy.

Those fluffy stick-on mohawks for motorcycle helmets are now available with LEDs and fiber optics.

Nicely done light fixture using old-style wire filament bulbs, mason jars, cloth-wrapped wire, redwood planks, and plumbing pipe. Step-by-step build gallery included.

Clever, beautiful use of a laser cutter: custom etched nori squares for elegantly surprising maki-sushi rolls.

We’re having an open house at ALTSpace today. If you’ve been curious about the space and what goes on in it, feel free to come by any time from now until 10 pm. It’s just general open-house time until 6 pm, then we’ll have our one-year anniversary party – beer, wine, snacks, and lots of art to look at!

Oh, yeah: I finally finished the dress for Jeanine, yesterday. I hate hand-sewing and avoid it whenever possible, but this is a semi-formal dress and not sportswear so hemming it via my usual “topstitch it with contrasting thread” strategy wouldn’t really have worked. It’s a lined dress, too, so I had to blind-stitch both the dupioni shell and the charmeuse lining. Ugh. I’m glad that’s over. It looks pretty – I made the lining just a little bit too long, on purpose, so you see a little flash of soft champagne gold at the bottom of the dress, for contrast. This project has taken a while; I was only about half done when I burned through my original stock of enthusiasm, so it’s been grinding along at a much slower pace for the last couple of months.

Current active project list:

• Radian, of course
• Electric motorcycle (still mostly just planning)
• Accelerometer-driven lighting system for “la petite piege” aka the spiderweb
• Floodland (next step: BLM permit)

That’s really it. Kind of a short list, but I think that’s OK: Floodland is the sort of thing that can suck up an arbitrary amount of time, and the electric motorcycle is a pretty large fabrication job too.

ALTSpace is supporting itself, and we’re going to have a first anniversary party on Saturday the 14th. It’s really satisfying to walk in there and see all the projects people are working on. There are clothes hanging on the wire shelves, bits of sculptures out on workbenches, an entire back corner taken over by painters… The Seattle Meshnet people come in every couple of weeks to hack on radios, and the last Dorkbot meeting happened here. I’m delighted to see the place functioning as a hub for creative & social activities.

I’ve been in a funk for the past month or so, but today my mood seems to be lifting. It’s a sunny day, I’m getting things done, and while my work situation is not going the way I had hoped, neither is the mess I’ve made quite the disaster I had feared it might be. Life is actually pretty much OK.

I bought a pair of Firstgear leather motorcycle pants last summer when I started commuting to work via bike again, and they really haven’t held up to steady use. One of the snaps broke, the fly zipper pull broke off, the right side leg zipper pull broke off, and then last week the whole right side zipper broke. I thought about trashing them and getting something more durable, but decided to try upgrading them first. I hammered in a new snap, then cut out the old zippers and replaced them with sturdy, chunky visilon zippers. I didn’t get the stitch line *perfectly* straight but it’s good enough that nobody will notice but me, and the new zippers ought to be substantially more durable than the old ones were.

Today I’m going to put a little more work into the dress I’ve been making for Jeanine. It’s all basically done now save the finish on a couple of interior seams and the actual hem. I’ve been moving very slowly on this project; perhaps I can finally get it done today.

Via boingboing, here’s Best Made: an online catalog of goods with simple, classic designs which are made as competently as possible. I doubt I will buy any of their goods but it is nice to see someone collecting Good Stuff.

From the boingboing comments, Sundial Wire offers that classic thread-covered wire in a variety of colors, plus an assortment of old-fashioned plug styles. It makes me want to make a new version of my mad scientist lamp. (This is apparently kind of a thing now – I am clearly not the only one who was inspired by Nik Willmore’s “Tube Lamp”!)

Running linux on an 8-bit AVR: the author thinks his hand-wired board “may be the cheapest, slowest, simplest to hand assemble, lowest part count, and lowest-end Linux PC”. It is certainly a contender. Of course he accomplished it not by running Linux directly on the AVR, but by writing an ARM emulator – ludicrously slow, but it apparently does work, to the point that you can boot bash and execute commands.

I’ve occasionally fantasized about building a parallel computer using an array of STM32F103 chips – they are 32-bit ARMs running at 72 MHz. They have no memory manager but I had a similar idea for using VMs… it’s hard to see what the point would be, though, other than the experience of building something that is technically a parallel computer by hand.

I met up with Dan Ryan over at ALTSpace and did some radio hacking tonight. He showed Ava and me how to disassemble, reset, and configure the Ubiquiti Nanostation Loco. You can get batches of ’em on ebay in unknown condition: out of the ten I bought for $60, two worked, six are broken, and two more still need to be tested. Not bad for an hour’s work.

The plan is to use these as part of the new Seattle Meshnet project. It’s not related to the old Seattle Wireless group, but it’s a similar idea: we’re building an unlicensed citywide wireless data network, which will support data sharing and perhaps even act as a backup Internet connection.

The web site is very awkwardly laid out, but there is some useful information in it: a 72-volt electric motorcycle conversion using six lead-acid batteries and the nearly-standard Mars ME0709 motor. He claims top speed of 45 mph and range of 25-30 miles; that’d be plenty for my commute.

Home-built PCB drill press using a Micromot 50 instead of a dremel, the latter apparently having insufficient precision. This is not a CNC device, but hand-operated.

Legit is another frontend for git; this one focuses on simplification of the branch operations.

Ava and I spent the weekend roaming around in Eastern Washington, taking hikes out in the channeled scablands. We dipped our fingers in Soap Lake, let the wind knock us backward from the edge of Dry Falls, cruised through quiet little towns, and walked for miles through cliff-walled canyons watching the birds soar overhead.

CycleXchange offers a variety of custom CB750 parts.

This is not a surprise, but it’s interesting to see an institution as mainstream as the NYTimes finally recognizing it: the USA has a serious problem with the way it welcomes visitors.

Americans may be surprised by the conclusions of a 2006 survey by the U.S. Travel Association, which found that foreign travelers were more afraid of United States immigration officials than of terrorism or crime. They rated America’s borders by far the least welcoming in the world. Two-thirds feared being detained for “minor mistakes or misstatements.”

Commercial electric motorcycles are popping up all over the place: the Native GPR-S is a product of Electric Motorsport, which has been selling EV components for a decade or so. It’s actually more of a kit than an actual bike: for $2500 you get a rolling chassis, which you can fit out with whatever combination of motors and batteries suits you.

It only works for Arduinos which include their own USB interfaces, but this bit of software synchronizes source code up to github every time you upload the binary to the board. The idea is that you can later plug in any arbitrary Arduino board and recover whatever code was last flashed to it, even if you have completely forgotten what project it was originally for.

The Moto Preserve in Brooklyn is a shared workshop / storage space for motorcycles and scooters. No idea how their financial model works but it’s neat to see a hackerspace-like operation for greasemonkeys.

Using a Raspberry Pi with Arduino

I started a Pinterest page for motorcycle design ideas. I didn’t want to flood this blog with dozens of other people’s photos of other people’s bikes, but I do want to collect all the little bits I find so I can refer to them later.

Following up on the idea that in the future everything will be a coffee shop, here’s a Make Magazine blurb about a Japanese cafe which offers laser-cutting services.

The NYC district attorney’s office has subpoenaed Twitter for records of protestor communications relating to Occupy Wall Street.

Once again, people, you cannot trust a centralized service for your communications, because the Authorities can and will exert pressure on the organization which runs the service. It doesn’t matter how “secure” they are or how much fancy encryption they use; they will cave when the cops show up.

This is the Honda frame I bought last week and it is going to be my new motorcycle. I chose this one because its construction is simple and sturdy and has a large engine compartment I can stuff full of batteries.

This article by Gary Shteyngart, a writer for Travel and Leisure, is one of the more evocative descriptions of Seattle I’ve ever read.

Yesterday evening was the kickoff meeting for the Seattle Meshnet project, which aims to set up a free, decentralized, community-operated data network across Seattle. About a dozen people met up at ALTSpace to kick ideas around and see how to get things moving. There was an immediate technical consensus on the idea of using CJDNS and Ubiquiti Nanostations, so the next step is to lay out a map and start putting up antennas.

I’m not sure how involved I will personally be with the hardware end of this project, but I’d like to participate even if I don’t help develop the architecture. This is something that ought to exist. I’m hoping to get ALTSpace on board with it; I think we could get permission from the building owner to set up an antenna pole in our courtyard.

After the Meshnet meeting I walked over to Offspring for another meeting, this one discussing a different sort of web: Kevin’s building a human-sized spiderweb installation for SEAF, using steel cable and custom-machined aluminum clamp nodes. I’m going to help out by developing a lighting system: an array of accelerometer-driven LEDs will make the web respond to movement, with little sparkles like dewdrops.

I didn’t get the prototypes assembled in time to show at the meeting, but it was easy enough to see how the parts would fit together and to test-fit them with Kevin’s sample nodes. It was useful; I’ve got a whole new batch of prototype parts on order from Digikey now.

I went out on another exploratory trip to Eastern Washington yesterday, checking out three more possible event sites. Ava came along this time, and we had a pleasant day poking around the back country. It was interesting, but as with my last trip it was ultimately inconclusive, and I am already planning a third scouting mission.

The first site was on top of a plateau near an OHV park. The road in is surprisingly good, and there are great little “peekaboo” views out over the wide-open valley as you ascend. When you get to the top the crest drops sharply down the other side, with a spread-out vista of flood-scoured channel lands… It’s a nice spot. The place I was looking for is securely locked away behind miles of barbed wire, though; there’s no way to reach it without crossing private land.

The second place is actually inside an OHV park: there are sand dunes next to a creek in a broad, flat valley, and camping is allowed, so I thought it might be suitable. I didn’t stay long, though; there’s a lot of traffic through the area, there’s no privacy, and the local authorities are trying to discourage party-like activities due to a former excess of drunken yahoo revelry.

Third site was really gorgeous and would be a lovely place for a large festival. It’s a large box canyon hidden away along the Columbia River gorge, basalt cliffs all around, totally private, with a nice easy road in. There are broad spreading grass fields, pocket meadows, low rock outcrops – lots of places to set up tents or stages or sculptures or whatever.

The catch is that there’s a locked gate a mile before the end of the road and a sign forbidding unauthorized vehicles. It’s not a park, but it’s apparently under some kind of natural resource management program, and you can’t just drive in. Bummer! I suspect there might be some set of forms one can fill out to gain individual access for some limited period of time, but it seems unlikely that they’d be willing to unlock the gate for a weekend and let dozens or hundreds of cars come in.

If I can’t find a better spot in time, I’ll use the little box canyon I found two weeks ago. It’s small, and open flames would be a significant problem, but it would otherwise be a good place to start. Still, I have two more sites to check out, and one of them even looks like it has a small dry lakebed….

I bought a motorcycle frame today from a guy up in Lake City who does vintage bike restoration. He’s got frames just laying around outside his shop, heaps of parts inside – it was clear he was basically just trying to clean up his shop a bit, so he sold me a 1973 CB750 frame for $25. He threw in a pair of shocks and a swingarm, too, just to get rid of them. Well, okay, I won’t argue with that!

My plan is to build an electric motorcycle around this frame. I picked a CB750 because it has a larger-than-average engine bay with secure frame rails underneath; it should be possible to pack in a lot of heavy batteries without additional reinforcement. I’ll use the Enertrac motor for the rear wheel and pick up a frontend from Bent Bike.

I’m not planning to pursue this with any particular haste. I have a lot of other stuff going on, after all… but I think this will be a fun tinkering project and eventually a nice way to get to work and back. I doubt it will replace my gas-burner, but it may become a weekend machine instead of a daily rider.