Reminder: Our annual open house is TONIGHT.
When: Thursday, November 13, 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, see our latest projects (including some sneak previews!) and share in food and conversation.
We’ve talked previously about making simple LED pumpkins with candle flicker LEDs. Lately we’ve been playing with making better looking flames by using multiple independent flickering LEDs with different colors and lens styles. It makes a spectacular difference: it goes from something that looks like, well, a flickering LED to something that really looks like there might be a flame in there.
The end result is pretty neat: A compact battery powered “flameless flame” that looks great in a pumpkin, luminaria, or as a stage prop. The interplay of the different LED types and colors gives an ever-changing and shifting flame display.
Other than the candle flickering LEDs, the parts are commonly available. We’ve also bundled them together in the Solderless Flickery Flame Kit.
Components:
Also needed:
Hook up the battery holder to the breadboard several rows apart to give enough room to install the resistors and LEDs. Optional: peel off the backing on breadboard and adhere it to the battery holder. Connect each LED with its own 68 ohm resistor. (Use the “in parallel” method from this article.) The extra jumpers are included to help bridge across the center gap in the breadboard.
Trimming the resistor leads will keep the breadboard tidy, and help prevent short circuits. Trimming the LED leads to varying heights will help distribute the light in different ways.
The white paper bag included with the kit can be used for creating a traditional luminaria or for making a ghostly halloween decoration.
You can find more Halloween decor projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
For Lady Ada Lovelace Day, we would like to celebrate some of the women working in science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics that we got to meet and spend time with at Maker Faire New York this year.
Our friend AnnMarie Thomas had just released her book Making Makers, and was speaking several times during the faire, including hosting the Making Makers panel I participated in, as well as assisting her daughters, Sage and Grace, in presenting a Squishy Circuits workshop.
Also on the Making Makers panel was Sophi Kravitz, who was showing her WobbleWorld virtual reality experience.
Patricia Miranda of Alchemical Tech was there again this year teaching dye-making. I reluctantly declined her offer to get my hands dirty.
Jenine Bressner, who has been sharing her glassworking and laser textile projects at Maker Faire for years, was there as an attendee, finally getting a well-deserved chance to see the faire.
Emily Fischer of Haptic Lab was displaying her beautiful astronomical quilts.
Peggy Monahan of NYSci was helping run a costume design workshop with low cost, easy to use materials like plastic tablecloths, butcher paper and snow-cone cups. Many people bedecked with dinosaur spikes and other fanciful accessories could be seen roaming the faire.
Representing Othermachine and demonstrating the Othermill was their project and support engineer, our friend Simone Davalos.
Fellow electronics shop owner and friend Cheryl Hrynkiw of Solarbotics was demonstrating their projects, like the solar marble machine.
Rachel Meyer, Selena Ahmed, and Ashley Duval of Shoots & Roots Bitters are three scientists who care about culturally important plants, and bring their stories to people through their uniquely blended bitters.
Sharon Shattuck of Eavesmade was selling laser cut and engraved coasters and ornaments of scientists. You can find her sets of women heroes of science coasters and ornaments in her etsy shop.
Toward the end of the faire, we ran into Limor Fried of Adafruit. It was great to catch up with her and hear about the great strides her electronics business has been making.
There were many more women there showing amazing projects. If I left out someone you want to celebrate, please feel free to share about them in the comments.
Halloween, always one of our favorite holidays, is fast approaching again. We’ve updated our Halloween Projects Archive as we do every year to ensure that all of our Halloween projects are gathered together in one convenient location. We’ll continue to add projects as we post them. If one of our projects inspires you to make something, we’d love to hear about it!
We’re excited to be bringing the EggBot back to the East Bay Mini Maker Faire on Sunday, October 19. The schedule of presentations and performances covers everything from “The Importance of Junk” to minestrone making. The list of makers attending covers the gamut as well. Evil Mad Scientist readers get a 15% discount on advance tickets using the code MAKERFRIEND.
RoboGames, the huge cross-disciplinary international robotics competition, is running a kickstarter campaign to bring back the event in 2015, and they need your help to do it.
We love RoboGames. The range of competitions is so broad, there is opportunity for participation from roboticists of all backgrounds. We received a silver medal in the bartending division of the art robots category in 2011 with Drink Making Unit 2.0. In 2013, we helped Super Awesome Sylvia create the WaterColorBot, which won silver in the painting robots category. We helped to produce the medals for the winners in 2009 and 2013. But more important than our personal successes and participation, we have been privileged to see the excitement that comes from the entrants, whether they are competing in soccer, fire-fighting, sumo, or crowd-pleasing combat.
RoboGames is also planning production of a video series around the event, to bring it to those who can’t be there in person, and so that you can enjoy it whenever you need a good dose of robots.
The upcoming lunar eclipse on Wednesday morning will offer a rare possibility for some viewers: a selenelion. Some locations (east of the Mississipi) may be able to see the setting eclipsed moon and the rising sun at the same time. But wait, it’s an eclipse, so that means that the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the earth, right? Right. So you shouldn’t be able to see them at the same time, right? Wrong. The earth’s atmosphere refracts the light from both, letting you see the sunrise a little early, and the moonset for a little longer. A guide to what part of the eclipse will be in progress at sunrise at various locations is available at space.com. You might just want to get up before sunrise for this one!
We ran into Mike Szczys of Hackaday during the final Electronics Flea Market of the year a few weeks ago. Afterwards, he came by the shop and has now posted a nice writeup about the visit.
Maker Faire can be a pretty demanding environment for a project. Outdoor locations expose many projects to the weather, prototypes may have been unpacked and repacked by the TSA, and curious visitors may handle projects in new and unexpected ways. Or maybe ambitions were greater than preparation time, and the project just didn’t quite get finished before the fair opened. No matter what the reason, Maker Faire is a great place to see people in action fixing, troubleshooting, and finishing their projects. Below are some beautiful projects I caught in progress at Maker Faire New York.
The FirePick Delta pick and place machine was a victim of the TSA, and arrived less functional than when it had been packed. The team was working on it valiantly, which also provided opportunities to get a closer look at many of the components.
Components not in use were repurposed for holding down business cards in the breezy aisle of 3D village.
The maker of this robot arm soccer game was opening up one of the control boxes to check on a malfunctioning knob.
He had no shortage of willing testers after the repair.
This half-scale 3D printer assembly was at least as charming in its disassembled state as it would have been all put together. It is great to see the components along with the kinds of tools that are used to assemble and repair projects like this one.
Gertie the robot had seen quite a bit of action, first at the Bay Area Maker Faire and then in New York. Her actuators were apart and in the middle of repair when we came by.
This let Alonso show us the mechanism and demonstrate how the internal frame worked to lean and make Gertie jump in different directions.
Maker Faire exhibitors are generous with sharing tools and materials with each other, and visitors are treated to what are typically hidden activities. No one whisks away a broken prototype to hide it out of sight. Instead, the guts are happily spilled out for everyone to see and learn from.
Last year, I wrote about a case of 3D printed parts being used for a vintage car. This year, another fine example of modern manufacturing and prototyping techniques being used for a vintage vehicle showed up on my doorstep when my parents stopped by during a road trip in my dad’s 1934 Dodge Brothers pickup
Passenger side mirrors on cars and trucks used to be a luxury, add-on, or aftermarket item— if they were even available at all. My dad’s truck never had one. In the intervening years, many states have made side mirrors a requirement, and having them makes safely driving a vintage vehicle much easier. So how did he get the matching one you see in the picture above?
He did what pretty much anyone can do these days: he had the driver side one 3D scanned, had a CAD model made up from the scan and then mirrored it. The model was then 3D printed and sand cast in aluminum. After some finishing work and paint, it looks fantastic.
However, geometry reared its head: it turns out that because the driver sits on one side of the car, a perfectly mirrored mirror mount doesn’t put the mirror in quite the right place. As a temporary fix, he added a standoff to correct the position of the mirror. After returning from the road trip, he’ll adjust the CAD model and have a new one printed and cast. Since the world of vintage cars is a close-knit one, he has already had requests for additional units from friends in the community, and making more will be straightforward from the digital master.
He’s had a few other components made using scanning and digital manufacturing techniques, including a laser cut insulation board for between the engine compartment and the cab. These techniques are a perfect fit for a community with low-volume needs for custom, unavailable, or never before made parts.
