Vlog: Mark Frauenfelder - student inventors in Illinois
Mark visits student inventors in Illinois, and learns about electronic firefly jars, recycled cassette tape holders, and a solar powered lamp for the developing world.
Mark visits student inventors in Illinois, and learns about electronic firefly jars, recycled cassette tape holders, and a solar powered lamp for the developing world.
the latest
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Hey this is my school! Engineering Open House is this Friday and Saturday from 9am-3pm if Boing Boing can make it back ^__^
The Engineering Open House at the UofI is the highlight of my year. Hope to see some folks from BoingBoing this Friday!
1. WTF is "Pulse Width Modification"? Some kind of auto luminescent entomology jargon? The AT Tiny sends out "Pulse Width Modulation".
2. While the kid doesn't come right out and say that he invented the jar of fireflies, the BBtv overlay does. The hardware and software for the jar of fireflies was designed by friend and ex-coworker Xander in Seattle. He wrote an instructible and published it under creative commons last year at http://www.instructables.com/id/Jar-of-Fireflies/ .
Xander even went so far as to source entomology phd candidate dissertations to research the frequency with which fireflies signal to each other at various stages and programmed an algorithm into the microcontroller to mimic their natural behavior.
For someone to take credit or make any claims to it's design is a terrible disservice for Xander's hard work and creativity.
Making something awesome like the jar of fireflies is a lot of fun. Designing something awesome like a jar of fireflies is straight up ELITE. Claiming that you designed it, presenting it as your invention is not only reprehensible, it's outright plagiarism.
But then again, it's just a video clip. Maybe he actually did say that he just followed an instructible and we didn't see it. In any case, their should have been credit given to it's creator.
**CORRECTION - Steve did not design the Jar of Fireflies**
I'm "Steve" from the vlog. I am sorry the video was cut it make it seem like I designed the jar of fireflies. I never claimed to have designed the jar of fireflies. I told Mark Frauenfelder that I saw the design featured on the Make blog.
@ Polymorf - Thank you for pointing this out.
1. I did miss speak. I meant to say "Pulse Width Modulation". I didn't know I was going to be on camera when I was speaking to Mark Frauenfelder and I got a little flustered.
2.You are right Xander deserves all the credit for the Jar of Fireflies. http://www.instructables.com/id/Jar-of-Fireflies/
As far as I know it is licensed under creative commons and the IEEE student branch at UIUC did not make any money when we held the workshop to make these.
If there are any UIUC students out there interested in making projects like these you can contact me at smoser2 AT uiuc DOT edu or you can visit our google group at http://groups.google.com/group/uiuc-ieee-workshops-committee
-Stephen Moser
The firefly jar is so awesome. I definitely need to make one for my son. Thanks for the linkage!