All posts by Lenore Edman

About Lenore Edman

Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Octolively derivative at ARMTechCon

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Mouser display based on Octolively

We dropped by ARMTechCon last week to check out a tip sent in by email (thanks, Barry!) that Mouser Electronics was displaying something that looked like our Octolively modules.

Kids interacting with LEDs
Photo courtesy of Mouser

Mouser staff had been inspired by an installation of our Interactive LED Panels to create something interactive that they could show off at Engineers Week at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. They used the Octolively as the basis for their project, and the kids loved it of course.

Blue "M" in LEDs

For trade shows, they built up a display with a mix of blue and white LEDs to show off the Mouser “M”. Based on the foot traffic it got while I was at the booth, it is quite popular.

ATmega164P

They made some minor changes from our original Octolively design and used different connector types to highlight Mouser’s product lines. The heart of the project is still the 40-pin DIP ATmega164P (perhaps anomalous at an ARM conference) running our Octolively code, which gave the Mouser folks a chance to play with some microcontroller programming.

Interactive display based on Octolively

It’s always exciting to see a derivative of one of our projects in the wild. Thanks to the Mouser folks for sharing their project story and sending the museum picture for us to share.

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Inside the 741

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Ken Shirriff has written an excellent exploration of the 741 op-amp, including decapping a metal can package AD741. There’s a very cool interactive viewer so that you can click on the components in the schematic or on the picture of the die to see what each one is and does.

…The 25pF capacitor in the 741 has a very small value but takes up a large fraction of the chip’s area. You can see the capacitor in the middle of the die photo; it is the largest structure on the chip. …

Our very own XL741 is referenced in the footnotes, too.

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Evil Mad Scientist Open House: November 19

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Evil Mad Scientist Door

You’re invited to our annual open house!

When: Thursday, November 19, 5 pm ? 9 pm
Where: Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
175 San Lazaro Ave, Suite 150
Sunnyvale, CA, 94086

You can check out our latest projects, play with the giant Digi-Comp II, meet Zener the cat, and share in food and conversation.

This entry was posted in Everything Else, Evil Mad Scientist Shop, Field Trips, General News. Bookmark the Permalink.

From the archives: Sweet or Savory Specimen Jars

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thinginajar - 44

 

From the archives comes one of our favorite food projects: Halloween Cuisine: Sweet or Savory Specimen Jars.

 What good is a specimen jar if you can’t serve it at dinner? The contents of the jars should be genuinely edible, made out of real food. Plastic snakes and spiders are right out.

More Halloween edibles can be found  in the food category of our Halloween Project Archive.

This entry was posted in EMSL Projects, Play with your food. Bookmark the Permalink.