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.
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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.