December 15th, 2011

Making a carnival wheel digital

A recent project of ours had us devise a very clever method of digitally tracking the position of a carnival wheel. Most of you out there probably aren’t making carnival wheels on a regular basis nor are you often looking to digitally track the position of one, but we were so proud of the method we came up with that we thought it may be worth sharing with the tinkerer community. This does work with a carnival wheel but can also be applied to other spinning objects that need to be tracked.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 8th, 2011

Moey’s first vehicle

Moeylette

Moey has added its first vehicle to the fleet! A G.A.C. foldable Mobylette bicycle now being donned the “Moeylette”. It’s amazing what a little nail polish can do. If you’re in the Gowanus / Park Slope area of Brooklyn, look out for us on our supply runs!

by Rory | Posted in News | No Comments » | Tags: , , ,
November 18th, 2011

Jenny Holzer’s “Selections from Truisms”

Moey Inc. was tasked with resuscitating an old Jenny Holzer LED art piece from 1984 entitled “Selections from Truisms”. This video tells the story of the year long journey to reverse engineer the internal electronics and acquire some of the vintage electronic components that were manufactured as far back as 1978.

With Glen Duncan (engineer), Joey Stein (CTO), and Rory Nugent (designer, engineer)

September 23rd, 2011

Introduction to industrial sensors

Industrial sensors

At Moey, it isn’t uncommon that our projects required us to be unique in our design, nimble in our execution, robust in what we deliver, yet economical all at the same time. Considering we’re all tinkerers at heart, this can be a hard pill to swallow. We like to play with new sensors and appreciate the challenge of learning how to use them, but this is often not the best approach when we have a tight timeline and many pieces of a project to worry about. In the past, we’ve used industrial sensors on occasion when we needed to get something done simply with no hiccups down the road but the cost of the sensors have often bothered us. Industrial sensors, while amazingly robust and reliable, are often overkill for what we do and leave us feeling like we’ll never reap the full benefits of the product. However, lately we’ve had a renewed interest as we’ve stumbled upon some really economical sensors that may just have eased our tummies.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Rory | Posted in Article | 2 Comments » | Tags: , ,
February 23rd, 2011

Using a Wii Balance Board with a wall wart

This tutorial describes how to add a 5 volt power supply to your Wii Balance Board. To some this might seem like blasphemy. Adding a wired connection to a wireless device, who would do such a ridiculous thing? Well, we did, and we thought some others may want to do just the same. The real benefit of this modification is to no longer have to replace or recharge your batteries. A beautiful, virtually endless flow of electricity for all your fitness needs. You may also use the modified unit with the original battery configuration if you choose not to use the wall wart at any point. No changes needed. Just unplug it from the wall and re-sync (or pull the power jack quickly and it should switch over to the batteries seamlessly).

Perfect for an installation or kiosk that uses a Wii balance board.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Rory | Posted in How-To | No Comments » | Tags: , , , , ,
November 30th, 2010

ShiftBrite Strips available on BatchPCB

ShiftBrite Strip

We recently placed a listing for our ShiftBrite Strips into the BatchPCB marketplace. If you’re not familiar, take the time to read up on our description of these really handy circuit boards.

Head on over and place an order!
You can purchase ShiftBrite LEDs from Macetech.

https://batchpcb.com/pcbs/98234

by Rory | Posted in Tools | No Comments » | Tags: , , , ,
November 9th, 2010

ShiftBrite Strips

We love LEDs, and apparently so do most of our clients. While there are quite a few professional lighting solutions available, they’re cost and lack of transparency have often turned us off. We don’t always wish to have a computer act as the main controller of the lights, and more times than none we want to build in some form of interaction. So, on our quest for a lighting solution that addresses all our needs, we stumbled upon these great LED units called ShiftBrites from Macetech. Each unit contains a RGB LED and an Allegro A6281 LED controller. You communicate with it using four-wire SPI and you can daisy chain the LEDs to create long strings for scalability. In short, these things rule.

Shiftbrite LED

Read the rest of this entry »

by Rory | Posted in Tools | No Comments » | Tags: , , ,
October 18th, 2010

Using a Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go on Mac OS X

Virgin Mobile MC760 (Front)Virgin Mobile MC760 (Back)

Moey creates exhibits and installations that find their way all across the United States and sometimes even the world, so providing our work with internet connectivity is crucial to installations with a tight deadline and those requiring long-term servicing. Unfortunately, some locations in which we install do not have an internet connection that is easily accessible.

We recently have been tossing around the idea of equipping our work with “pay-as-you-go” USB 3G modems so we can get access to an installation regardless of where it is installed. It is as easy as visiting a Best Buy store, buying a modem, and purchasing a $20 voucher card for bandwidth.

The activation process must be done on a Windows based computer, which wasn’t too terrible seeing as how we have a test machine in our studio, but attempting to use one of these modems on a Mac, our system of choice, left us hanging dry. There are no instructions on the Virgin Mobile MC760 website, just lots of unanswered FAQs. There are many questions like “How do I get the MC760 to work on a Mac?” hardly answered by statements like “It works great for me!”. So, we decided to figure it out and share our own successful instructions.

Read the rest of this entry »