All posts by Lenore Edman

About Lenore Edman

Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Coming soon: Visual diffs for 3D models

Cube Hero Screenshot

After reading our post on Improving open source hardware: Visual diffs, Wil wrote in to to tell us about Cube Hero:

I have a demo up of visual diffs for 3D printable models. Here you can see a specific model, and … you can see diffs as I changed the model.

We’re excited to see new tools for collaboration like this being developed. Besides visual diffs, the project aims to provide visual versioning, 3D object sharing, and bill of materials integration. Cube Hero is looking for interested possible users, so go check it out–they’re accepting signups for updates and launch invitations.

Nerdy Derby at New York Maker Faire

Our friends over at ITP are putting on a brand new event at Maker Faire NY called Nerdy Derby. It’s like Pinewood Derby racing, but without any pesky rules*. They’ve listed track specs on their site, so check ’em out and bring your own car to race, or build one on-site at their workshop. They’ll be giving out prizes in several categories, including “The Underdog,” “The Tricked Out,” “The Delicious” (for edible entries), “The Not-So-Pretty” and “The King of the Hill.” Watch their introductory video embedded above or click over to see it on Vimeo. We’re looking forward to checking out these races! We might even have to enter a car of our own…

*The Nerdy Derby site states: “While there are technically no rules for the competition, we ask that participants exercise common sense when it comes to safety.” Gotta love a common sense approach!

Basics: Picking Resistors for LEDs

5 mm warm white diffused LED

So… you just want to light up an LED. What resistor should you use?

Maybe you know the answer, or maybe everyone already assumes that you should know how to get to the answer.  And in any case, it’s a question that tends to generate more questions before you actually can get an answer: What kind of LED are you using? What power supply? Battery? Plug-in? Part of a larger circuit? Series? Parallel?

Playing with LEDs is supposed to be fun, and figuring out the answers to these questions is actually part of the fun.  There’s a simple formula that you use for figuring it out, Ohm’s Law. That formula is V = I × R, where V is the voltage, I is the current, and R is the resistance. But how do you know what numbers to plug into that formula to get out the right resistor value?

Continue reading Basics: Picking Resistors for LEDs

Curiosity on Mars!

NASA Ames

Congratulations to Curiosity! As the New York Times says this morning,

In a flawless, triumphant technological tour de force, a plutonium-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered at the end of 25-foot-long cables from a hovering rocket stage onto Mars early on Monday morning.

A crowd of some 5000 people gathered on the plaza at NASA Ames Research Center late last night (it was only Monday Morning on the east coast) to watch presentations by mission scientists and finally the live broadcast, on the big screen.

This was a thrill.  Not only was the landing process itself incredible— watch this video, “Seven minutes of terror” if you haven’t —but it was amazing to be in a crowd of so many people excited to watch the landing as well.  Many of the people in the audience screaming and cheering had worked on various parts of the mission, including the ground-breaking (pun intended) scientific instruments aboard the rover and the new lifting-body heat shield to get it there.

Curiosity closes in on Mars

On Sunday night, the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity (the one on the right; the biggest, baddest, most awesomest Mars rover ever) will attempt to land on Mars. Curiosity is a nuclear powered Mini Cooper sized robotic geologist, much bigger and more capable than previous rovers. It’s going to be a moment of great excitement when Curiosity touches down, and there are a number of ways that you can watch.

If you have the opportunity (Mars rover pun intended) check with your local science museum, planetarium or hackerspace to find out if they’re hosting a viewing party.

Curiosity model at Exploratorium

Here in California, the Exploratorium currently hasa special exhibition up, including the simplified full-scale model of the rover in the picture above. They will be airing a live webcast of the landing on Sunday night.  And, NASA Ames Exploration Center in Mountain View, is hosting a live broadcast on-site with over 5000 people. The free tickets for the event went very quickly.

And, if you can only watch on the internet, NASA TV is NASA’s official video channel.  Star Talk Radio has a list of places to watch online. Space Industry News has a similar lineup, which includes a link to a google map of events.

Mystery components!

MysteryComponent1
While picking out interesting vintage diodes at the electronics flea market, we came across a couple of components— possibly also diodes because of where we found them —of types that we have never seen before.  And we can’t resist a good mystery.

 

MysteryComponent4

First, there’s this little two legged can, marked with 650, a black dot, and CO on one side. The other side (as you can see in the photo above this one), is marked T 1 and has black and red dots.

 

Secondly, a couple of things that look kind of like resistors:
MysteryComponent6

They are very small, only about the size of 1/4 W resistors.  They are marked with a red capitol letter “P” and a set of four colored stripes. The “P” marking interrupts the three narrower bands in both cases.

MysteryComponent8
Here’s a good look at the color bands: brown, violet, green, and then a broad yellow.  (We could be reading this wrong; is the broad stripe supposed to be read first?)

MysteryComponent7
This one has brown, violet, green, and then broad violet.

So, what are they?  We don’t actually know, but if you do, or if you have a good guess, we’d love to hear it!

Evil Mad Scientist at Maker Camp

Maker Camp Banner

Maker Camp is a virtual DIY camp for teens created by the folks at Make Magazine and Google. It’s free and open to all on Google+. I am excited to be participating in Maker Camp this week as the guest camp counselor on Thursday, July 26.

Electric Origami

The activity I’ll be leading will be Electric Origami. Schedule, materials lists and how to join the camp are all on the Maker Camp site and Make’s Google+ page.

Maker Camp Banner

I’m looking forward to hanging out with the campers! I’ll be posting the direct link to the broadcast and hangout as soon as it is posted on Thursday.

Update: Introductory information has now been posted for the Make G+ hangout, which begins at 12 noon, PST.

Update 2: The stream is up, link is here!  And, there’s a youtube stream, too!

The 2012 Open Source Awards

open source awards

Congratulations to the recipients of the Open Source Awards announced today at OSCON: Bradley Kuhn, Elizabeth Krumbach, Massimo Banzi, Christie Koehler, and Jim Jagielski!

lightbulb in eggbot

We were honored to participate in the creation of the awards which were given out this year. Using an Eggbot, we plotted the Open Source Award design onto lightbulbs which were integrated into the awards which were given out on stage. Additionally, the award recipients are each receiving an Eggbot. It is exciting and fitting that this year’s award is itself open source hardware which works on open source software and was created using open source tools.

lightbulbs and eggbot

Top photo by Sarah Novotny.