All posts by Windell Oskay

About Windell Oskay

Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Linkdump: July 2010

We’re looking for a few good eggs

American Eggs

Our Egg-Bot kit— a compact open-source robotics platform –is on schedule to come out later this summer, and we could use a little help getting it ready. We’re looking for 2-3 more volunteers with programming experience to help us test and polish our cross-platform Inkscape driver.

As a volunteer, you’ll get (1) to be one of the first to play with these awesome little machines, (2) an acknowledgement in the kit release, and of course (3) a prerelease Egg-bot kit (screwdriver-type assembly but no soldering required) that you can keep.


Here are the baseline requirements:

  1. At least two platforms (of Mac, Linux, and Windows) that you can test things on
  2. Programming experience in Python
  3. US resident (A matter of mailing time, in this case!)
  4. Enough free time and enthusiasm to help out with the project this month


If you meet these requirements (especially the enthusiasm part), drop us a line on our contact form and let us know a bit about you. We’ll be accepting applications through July 9.

We’ll be giving bonus points for the following as well, so be sure and let us know:

  • Enthusiasm for and/or experience in robotics education
  • Mad art skillz
  • Mad programming skillz
  • You happen to be located in Silicon Valley
  • Cross-platform experience in python
  • Experience with Inkscape
  • Experience with Processing


Thanks!

Update: Holy crap that was fast— we’re already overwhelmed by volunteers– you guys rock!

Peggy Clock Contest: We’ve got winners!

Here are the winners from the Peggy 2: Clock Concept Contest! We had a lot of fantastic entries, and had a verydifficult time deciding on not just first prize but on the runner ups. Thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to our fourteen winners!

First, our Ten Runner-ups:

Peggy2 clock concept demo
1. Neat radial concept clock by rsx2112, complete with a demo appwritten in Processing. This is based on using the LEDs off-board, controlled by the Peggy 2.

Binary Sudoku Clock

2. Binary sudoku by jsarik

3. “Binary” morse code clock by Will Grainger. Above is the youtube demo of this concept.

We had no idea that numbers looked so cool in Morse code.

Peggy 033000   Peggy 022230

4. Flickering candle clock and hourglass clock concepts by Tom of Nekomi Tech. The twelve candles burn down their way through twelve hours, and the matched hourglasses give hours and minutes, perhaps by number of rows and/or number of dots.

5. The awesome Lab Clock from Emo Mosley.

Peggy clock Polar   Peggy clock Sand

6. Radial sand clock by Lego Robotics Instructor hastypete, with different-colored LEDs in rings. Can be used as a polar clock (left) or as an unusual sand clock (right).

 

Wedding clock

7. Wedding clock by Squall Line Productions and Jared Style Design. Much more about this clock in this photoset.

The Sands of Fuzzy Time

8. “The Sands of Fuzzy Time” by C_Dave, featuring dripping sand and “fuzzy” text like you’d find on a word clock

08:25

9. We adore this simple “Crazy Eyes” Clock by pepehdez. “Small Eye = Hours, Big Eye = Minutes”

PeggyMaze

10. Among the different entries by Rouverius, we liked this one the best: a retro-game maze, where your health and gold give the time.

Our three Second Prize winners are as follows:

Mascara de luz 1

1. “Mascara de luz” (Mask of light) by Antonio Capo– a 3D sculpture made by cutting acrylic rods to different lengths, and lighting them selectively with the LEDs to simulate the passage of the sun during the day– a sort of advanced sculptural sundial. From what we can tell, this isn’t just a concept: he’s actually built it too (although perhaps not initially as a clock). Much more information about this fantastic project is available and linked from here.

Earth Peggy Clock

2. World clock concept by AlliedEnvy. A classic design and clever use of the fixed LED colors. A neat thing that you can do on a clock like this is to change how far the sunlight extends by season.

AlliedEnvy also sumbitted a neat sky clock concept that reminds us of Ken Murphy’s History of the sky.

City Lights

3. City lights clock concept by Vexelius.

This clock displays a city landscape that changes according to the time of the day. Time of day is shown by the lengths of the four buildings, and it also shows moon phase and weather.

And finally our First Prize winner:

peggyvictoria

This “station clock” by Jellmeister take advantage of the limited video capabilities of the Peggy in a surprising and elegant way.

It uses Peggy’s 25×25 matrix to follow the minute hand seamlessly around an old-fashioned station clock (Victoria in the example shown). Gradually moving by slowly changing the “anti-aliasing” allows this to move without any noticeable instantaneous change, to make the clock elegantly eye-catching rather than constantly attention-grabbing. Showing enough of the centre of the clock face allows the hour hand to be read as well, allowing instant easy telling of the time.

Again, our congratulations to all of the prize winners, and to everyone else for making us wish that we had set aside more prizes for the contest.

And prize winners: we’ll be in touch shortly. :)

Peggy Clock Contest: The end is near!

Some of the contest entries

The deadline for our Peggy 2 Clock Concept Contest is midnight, tomorrow (Tuesday) evening. Some of the existing entries are shown above, and they haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible.

We’ve got fourteen prizes, including awesome soldering kits and exclusive Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories sew-on patches. All you need to do to get one? Show us a clever way to display the time on a Peggy 2 LED matrix display. Let’s see those clocks!

Diavolino

Diavolino-angle2

Say hell-o to Diavolino. Yes, it’s yet-another Arduino compatible board, but it’s cheap and kind of neat. Simplified design, rounded corners, and shiny. Open source kit. You can get one at our store here.

We designed this primarily in response to local need in our San Francisco hacker community for low-cost boards for teaching.

In many ways, this project is reminiscent of and complimentary to our ATmegaXX8 target boards, which are low-cost, simple design circuit boards for programming AVR microcontrollers through an ISP connection. And while you can add one, those boards don’t have a place to put a USB-TTL cable. And so here we are. Continue reading Diavolino

Peggy 2: Clock Concept Contest!

White LEDs

There are probably thousands of cool ways to build clocks based around an LED matrix, and we’ve seen some neat analog and digital clocks based on our Peggy 2 kit. But we’ve also come up with a few dozen other cool ways to show the time, and realized that we’ve only scratched the surface.

So today, we’re announcing a Clock Concept Contest: Show us your coolest idea about how to build a Peggy clock, and you could win one!
Continue reading Peggy 2: Clock Concept Contest!

Peggy 2: Adding a ChronoDot

Peggy-chronodot - 7

Peggy 2 is our intelligent, Arduino-compatible (“freeduino” based), multiplexed 25 x 25 LED matrix, supporting up to 10 mm LEDs (or up to 5 mm LEDs in the Peggy 2LE version). It supports single-color LEDs at each point in the matrix, but you can mix and match different color LEDs throughout the matrix, and you don’t have to populate every LED location.

Since the whole matrix is available to control, it can be used to make an interesting clock in a lot of different ways.

One of the things that is sometimes helpful on a clock is to get slightly better precision than is available from a regular quartz crystal, and we’ve been using Macetech’s ChronoDot module on our Bulbdial clock kit. However it’s almost as easy to add the ChronoDot to the Peggy, and here’s how to do so.

Continue reading Peggy 2: Adding a ChronoDot

linkdump: June 2010

Tricks of the trade: Twisting wire bundles

Wire Twisting - 23

A common problem that you may come across when building “a box” to do something– whether a one-off gizmo or bona fide scientific instrument –is the rats nest of wires. A similar problem occurs when you need to run a bunch of basic wires out from your box to other devices. Unless there’s a standard cable lying around that does exactly what you need, you can end up with messy tangles of wires outside of your box as well.

There are many well-known solutions of course, as varied as elegantly laced wiring harnesses, cable tiesand teflon spaghetti sleeving, heat shrink tubing and cold shrink tape, and (possibly for the brave and/or insane) duct tape and paperclips.

Wire Twisting - 25

One of the other basic methods– well known to many people who build electronics –is to twist wire bundles with a hand drill and a friend. This is a quick and awesome trick that makes durable cables, short or long, exactly to your specifications, and shockingly fast.
Continue reading Tricks of the trade: Twisting wire bundles

Improving Tabletop Pong

Tabletop Pong-- Updated - 04

This weekend we brought our updated Tabletop Pong game to Maker Faire, where it survived two hard days of play by hundreds and hundreds of attendees. We were amazed by the reactions to it– particularly that such young and old people alike enjoyed playing it so much.

Of course, our first version back in January was a bit more iffy, and might not have survived a couple of hours at the fair. Here, we discuss the upgrades in some detail, complete with video and– now that it is working well –design files.
Continue reading Improving Tabletop Pong