Bilal Ghalib and Alex Hornstein have embarked on a fun, educational road trip. They’ve packed a Prius with 3D printers, dubbed it the Pocket Factory, and are traveling around the country exposing people to 3D printing and the potential of desktop manufacturing.

[Source: http://blog.makezine.com/2012/01/20/the-pocket-factory-takes-to-the-road/]

Definitely worth following these guys if you are in the USA!

Twitter: @pocketfactory22

Website: http://pocketfactory.org

Look slike a good idea for small form-factor drones :-)

The OrcaM Orbital Camera System will take any object placed into its maw and create a submillimeter accurate 3D model, complete with color, texture, and reflectivity maps. Seven individual cameras orbit around the sphere with the object inside it, taking simultaneous high resolution pictures while different combinations of projected light and shadow are used to help define object geometry. It’s completely automatic, and when OrcaM is done taking pictures, you can pull the original out unharmed along with a perfectly rendered digital copy.

Source: [http://blog.makezine.com/2012/01/20/news-from-the-future-reconstruction-sphere-makes-digital-copy-of-anything/]

As you may already know, David Lang, our Zero to Maker columnist, is involved in the OpenROV project, an open source camera-equipped R/C submersible, designed to look for water-burired treasure. They’re taking the ROV prototypes up to Hall City Cave in Northern, CA tomorrow for some preliminary dives. How exciting!

Source: [http://blog.makezine.com/2012/01/22/openrov-to-perform-preliminary-dives/]

The cloud is now your hard drive. And not just a few dozen Gigabytes, Terabytes or even Petabytes, but all of it – infinite storage – for only $10 per month. This is the incredible promise of the new TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Bitcasa.

Read More

Bitcasa Reveal Video from Bitcasa on Vimeo.

Near Space Balloon Flight, shot with HD HERO cameras from GoPro from Kevin Macko on Vimeo.

#!/bin/bash
clear
while [ 1 ]
do
 uptime
 df -h | grep Filesystem
 df -h | grep rootfs
 df -h | grep usb
 echo ""
 Temp1=$(cat /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/lm90/0-004c/temp1_input)
 Temp2=$(cat /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/lm90/0-004c/temp2_input)
 echo "MB T  = "$Temp1
 echo "CPU T = "$Temp2
 sleep 1
 clear
done

Insert it in a file. I called it stats.sh

chmod a+x stats.sh

and run with ./stats.sh

It updates every second and returns:

• uptime with load
• Disk space and usb disk space
• MB temp
• CPU temp

You can add all you want in there or remove what you don’t need :-)

Specs follow:

First Mod: Heatsink with fan!

I noticed that my processor was going up to the 50′s plus degrees when working, so I decided to keep it cool by adding a Heatsing with a FAN. I found one on Amazon.co.uk, specifically designed for Graphics chips, so I thought it would be ok for my Alix. It came with a self-adhesive strip on the bottom which made installation simple. Then after seeing that an 18V supply for the Alix was too high, and hmm… I ran out of adequate resistors to step down the voltage… I hooked on the 5V supply right behind the Serial port! And that ensures i get minimal fan spin, and hence virtually no noise from the fan. The airflow is enough to cool down the heatsink, as there is a noticeable difference when the fan is operational and not.

Update: While compiling the kernel the cpu temperature stays below 42 degrees (Celsius)

Application:

I am now trying to develop a home-made GPS tracker with a GPRS modem to “report back” the location… More on this coming soon!

And today I finally had the time to achieve good results (and map it in Photoshop!)

List of items:

1. Netgear Router
2. Smoothwall Firewall
3. 10/100 Netgear Switch
4. Gigabit Netgear Switch
5. xen server
   1. Backup Server
   2. Samba Server
6. External hard drives
   1. 2 x 1 TB
   2. 1 x 500 GB
7. Thecus N4100Pro NAS
8. iMac
9. MaxValue 85 mbps Ethernet Over Power Adapters
10. Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router