Hasta La Gadget!

Maker Faire, the largest festival for DIYers, crafters and hackers, happens Saturday and Sunday, May 30 and 31, in San Mateo, California. More than  80,000 people are expected to attend this year to check out what the 600 odd makers have to show, including robotics, music, crafts and food.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Steve Chamberlin’s 8-bit homebrewed CPU.  Nearly 1,253 pieces of wire were individually hand wrapped to create the connection and Chamberlin has built a functional computer based on it. The computer and the CPU will be on display in booth 296 at the main Expo Hall.
• A group of Disney Pixar’s Wall-E movie aficianados will also be showing their handmade Wall-E robots and other characters from the movie. The hobbyists have  created life-size, fully functional replicas from the scratch that are indistinguishable from their namesakes in the movie. The robots will be on display at booth 147 in the Expo Hall.
• There will also be interesting musical instruments on display such as the Yotam Mann’s multitouch musical pad. The musical pad has optical lasers, a webcam and some custom software rigged together to provide an inexpensive way to make some cool music. The contraption will be on display at booth 211 in the Expo Hallo.
• The Bay Area Lego Users Group (BayLUG), which has more than 100 members, will show an entire city constructed of Lego bricks. The exhibit, with individual members responsible for building a single city block, will measure about 2,000 square feet.
• Other cool exhibits include Daniel Fukuba’s DIY Segway. Fukuba, with some help from other Segway enthusiasts, has created a balancing scooter, first with a wooden frame and then an aluminum frame.  “I started with raw, plain PCB boards and soldered on all the components for the speed controller and the logic controller,” says Fukuba. The project took about two months and $4000. And at the Faire, he will be sharing his expertise on how to do it yourself. Fukuba’s DIY balancing scooter will be on display at A1 in the Bike Town pavilion.
• We are also eager to see the two-person self-propelled Ferris Wheel where riders use their arm muscles to shift their weight and turn the wheel. This Ferris Wheel is about 20 feet tall, made of plywood and will be in the Midway M2 area.
• Don’t forget to also check out the CandyFab Project that uses low-cost, open-source fabrication to create 3D sugary confections. A completely new CandyFab machine will be on display at booth number 293 in the Expo Hall cranking out some sweet goodies.

Know of some other cool exhibits or events at the Faire? Post them in the comments below.

And follow @gadgetlab on Twitter, where we’ll be tweeting throughout the weekend with tips on the most interesting, fun and wacky things to see. Stay.

For more on the event, check out O’Reilly’s Maker Faire website.

Photo: Wire wrapped 8-bit CPU/Steve Chamberlin

Intel’s fabrication plants can churn out hundreds of thousands of processor chips a day. But what does it take to handcraft a single 8-bit CPU and a computer? Give or take 18 months, about $1,000 and 1,253 pieces of wire.

Steve Chamberlin, a Belmont, California, videogame developer by day, set out on a quest to custom design and build his own 8-bit computer. The homebrew CPU would be called Big Mess of Wires or BMOW. Despite its name, it is a painstakingly created work of art.

“Computers can seem like complete black boxes. We understand what they do, but not how they do it, really,” says Chamberlin. “When I was finally able to mentally connect the dots all the way from the physics of a transistor up to a functioning computer, it was an incredible thrill.”

The 8-bit CPU and computer will be on display doing an interactive chess demo at the fourth annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, this weekend, May 30-31. It will be one of 600 exhibits of do-it-yourself technology, hacks, mods and just plain strange hobby projects at the faire, which is expected to draw 80,000 attendees.

The BMOW is closest in design to the MOS Technology 6502 processor used in the Apple II, Commodore 64 and early Atari videogame consoles. Chamberlin designed his CPU to have three 8-bit data registers, a 24-bit address size and 12 addressing modes. It took him about a year and a half from design to finish. Almost all the components come from the 1970s- and 1980s-era technology.

“Old ’80s vintage parts may not be very powerful, but they’re easy to work with and simple to understand,” he says. “They’re like the Volkswagen Beetles of computer hardware. Nobody argues they’re the best but we love them for their simplicity.”

To connect the parts, Chamberlin used wire wrapping instead of soldering. The technique involves taking a hollow, screwdriver-shaped tool and looping the wire through it to create a tight, secure connection. Wire wraps are seen as less prone to failures than soldered junctions but can take much longer to accomplish. Still, they offer one big advantage, says Chamberlin.

“Wire wrapping is changeable,” he says. “I can unwrap and start over if I make a mistake. It is is much harder to recover from a mistake if you solder.”

Chamberlin started with a a 12×7-inch Augat wire-wrap board with 2,832 gold wire-wrap posts that he purchased from eBay for $50. Eventually he used 1,253 pieces of wire to create 2,506 individually-wrapped connections, wrapping at the rate of almost 25 wires in an hour. “It’s like a form of meditation,” he wrote on his blog. “Despite how long it takes to wrap, the wire-wrapping hasn’t really impacted my overall rate of progress. Design, debugging, and general procrastination consume the most time.”

The BMOW isn’t just a CPU. Chamberlin added a keyboard input, an LCD output that shows a strip of text, a USB connection, three-voice audio, and VGA video output to turn it into a functioning computer. The video circuitry, a UMC 70C171 color palette chip, was hard to come by, he says. When Chamberlin couldn’t find a source for it online, he went to a local electronics surplus warehouse and dug through a box of 20-year-old video cards. Two cards in there had the chip he needed, so he took one and repurposed it for his project.

The use of retro technology and parts is essential for a home hobbyist, says Chamberlin. Working with newer electronics technology can be difficult because a lot of modern parts are surface-mount chips instead of having through-hole pins. That requires a wave soldering oven, putting them out of reach of non-professionals.

After months of the CPU sitting naked on his desk, Chamberlin fashioned a case using a gutted X Terminal, a workstation popular in the early 1990s.

“Why did I do all this?” he says. “I don’t know. But it has been a lot of fun.”

Check out Steve Chamberlin’s log of how BMOW was built.

Photo:  Wire wrapped 8-bit CPU/Steve Chamberlin

Mac cloner Psystar has filed for bankruptcy, effectively stalling Apple’s legal case against the Florida-based startup.

Filed with the federal courts in Florida, the voluntary petition for bankruptcy protection temporarily puts Apple’s lawsuit on hold while the bankruptcy court begins proceedings.

Apple in July 2008 filed suit against Psystar alleging copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap license infringement. Psystar opened its Mac clone business in April, selling a PC hacked to run OS X Leopard.

Apple strictly forbids its operating system to be installed on anything but Apple products. The corporation alleges Psystar is violating the Mac OS X end-user agreement, which states, “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.” The corporation also alleges Psystar is committing copyright infringement by installing OS X on non-Apple hardware.

Psystar did not immediately respond to requests for comment. However, the bankruptcy petition suggests Psystar’s investors may have withdrawn from financially backing the company. The bankruptcy filing also implies that Psystar likely cannot afford a legal team to win its battle against Apple.

Winning the lawsuit would be a large victory for Apple, as it would set a legal precedent enabling the corporation to easily squash other existing Mac cloners.

The Florida court on June 5 will hold a hearing revealing Psystar’s equity creditors, meaning if there any large entities backing the Mac cloner (e.g., Microsoft), we’ll know who they are very soon.

Suggestion of Bankruptcy [PDF via MacObserver]

See Also:

• Apple, Psystar File to Protect Secrets Before Battling in Court …
• Psystar Marches Forward With Beefy Mac Clone
• Mac Copycat Psystar Gets Ammo to Countersue Apple
• Psystar: Apple Is Paranoid for Alleging Conspiracy
• Psystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way …
• Psystar Tags Back Apple With Antitrust Suit
• Apple Cries Corporate Conspiracy Behind Psystar
• Apple Finally Sues Mac Copycat Psystar

Image courtesy of Psystar

Surveyor makes open source robot controllers that have quite a fan following among do-it-yourself drone enthusiasts. The company’s core product is the SRV-1, a  programmable mobile robot controller that is open source,wireless and video enabled.

Peter Dove, UK-based developer, has created a nifty way to control the Surveyor SRV-1 module’s camera and the base using a Nintendo DS game console. Dove used the SRV-1 console’s built-in WiFi link to remotely control the motorized robot base and view pictures and video transmitted by the robot. And as the video shows the buttons on the DS’s console work perfectly for the purpose.

The attempt is similar to how some enthusiasts had used the Google Android G1 phone to control a robotic blimp.

For detailed binaries and source code on how Dove brings together the DS and the Surveyor moduel, check out his blog.

A few weeks ago, Gadget Lab’s own Brian X Chen moaned about his dreadful experience using a hackintosh netbook for six months. The poor poppet whined on about the case falling apart, the Wi-Fi simply dying on him on a trip abroad and a whole range of other petty niggles.

As Chen mentioned, I agree on one point: The trackpad on the gen.1 Wind is truly atrocious, a tiny square of plastic with almost unusable buttons that you, inexplicably, need two hands to press. But on almost everything else, I disagree. Sure, the Wind isn’t perfect, as either a Windows or a Mac machine (although the Ubuntu Netbook Remix would be almost perfect if the Wi-Fi would work). But it has some great advantages, and a few tweaks down the road I have a tiny, portable machine that has proven very useful.

First, the obvious. The thing is tiny, and it’s a Mac. I don’t want to get into the whole Mac vs. PC thing. I just prefer to use a Mac, I’m used to it and everything is second nature. Now that the problems with certain drivers have been ironed out, it behaves exactly like my bigger Macs, even to the extent of switching automatically to line-output when plugging in headphones. The Mac OS has been rock solid on this machine since the very beginning. Maybe that’s because I didn’t steal my version off the internet.

Then there’s the battery. I replaced the truly awful three-cell that shipped with the machine with a huge, wrong colored nine-cell. It’s not pretty, but I get a true seven hours of use from the computer, and I still have the old one for an extra hour or so if I need it. This alone is reason to own a netbook, Mac or Windows, as it means you are no longer tied to a power source.

I took the Wind (actually, a Wind clone from Medion) on a weekend trip to Rome. I threw it in hand-luggage along with an external hard drive and turned the whole thing into a portable photo backup device. That there was neighbor-fi in the apartment helped, too, for checking out tourist spots, but for the main task — to clear my CF cards every day and do some basic editing (yes, it runs Lightroom, even with just a gig of RAM) — the netbook was perfect.

There’s more. At the kind of parties I host, there is always a need for the internet and, of course, music. The Wind acts as a great wireless front-end to iTunes sharing and Airtunes streaming, and you can pass it around the drunken guests without worrying. Sure, $400 is too much to lose to a spilled gin and tonic, but it’s better than $1600 for a replacement MacBook.

If you are aware from the beginning that a netbook is a cheap, low-spec, low-rent kind of computer, with the cheapest, most plasticky parts, then you won’t be disappointed. And if you hack it to run OS X, and you have similarly low expectations, you’ll actually be pleasantly surprised. I love my hackintosh netbook. It’s not perfect, but is sure is damn useful.

Six Months With a Hackintosh Netbook: It Ain’t Pretty [Gadget Lab]
It Lives! Gadget Lab’s Netbook Running OS X Leopard [Gadget Lab]

Photo: Charlie Sorrel