For your viewing pleasure, I’ve just posted a set of photos from setup yesterday at Maker Faire. Everything’s coming together beautifully– we’ll hope to see you there.
Update: We’ve just posted more than 100 more photos, from Saturday and Sunday, to the same photo set; please take a look.
Magnetic fields are everywhere– you just can’t see them*.
Here we introduce some basic and inexpensive visual tools, as varied as iron filings and Arduino, pre-school toys and OpenGL, for getting to know your local fields. It’s not exhaustive, but might provide you with some useful starting points for your own exploration.
(*Unless you count the magnetic field inside those photonsthat you use to see things.)
There. Fixed that for you.
HP Sauce is a popular condiment in the UK and Canada, though now made by Heinz (yes, that Heinz) in the Netherlands.
It says you can use it on pretty much anything– not sure that my printer will taste that much better with sauce on it, though.
Revenge of the Cherry Tomatoes is a new game for the Meggy Jr RGB, our open-source 64-pixel video game kit.
“Revenge” is a written-from-scratch sequel to Attack of the Cherry Tomatoes, the built-in game on Meggy Jr. It was written by Chris Brookfield, who discusses the game and shows off its features in our video:
Revenge is available as one of the example programs in version 1.4 of the Meggy Jr RGB library for the Arduino development environment. You can download it at the Google code site for Meggy Jr.
Neat-o stuff to do in the San Francisco bay area:
Next weekend, go to RoboGames, Fri-Sun, Apr 23-25, 2010 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. It’s the worlds largest robot competition, featuring combat robots, humanoid robots, art bots, soccer bots, sumo bots, and more. We’ll be there as exhibitors, with kits from our web store and other goodies like pager motors for making BristleBots!
In May, we’ll be heading back to the San Mateo Fairgrounds for the Bay Area Maker Faire 2010— our favorite event of the year. It’s the world’s biggest DIY festival, and well, there’s just too much to describe. You have to see it for yourself. We’ll be there showing off one of this year’s Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories blog projects, the Playable game of Tabletop Pong— you can come by and try it out.
Hope to see you there!
Last week we came across these tiny sea urchinshells at a beach shop, thin and light as eggshells. What to do with them? Light them up with LEDs, of course!
This weekend the lab staff will be visiting the Los Angeles area and we’re planning a meetup if you’d like to say hello. This will be informal, but we’ll be bringing along a few of our little projects to show off.
The fine folks at Crash Space, a Los Angeles hacker space, have generously offered to host the event, which is scheduled for Sunday evening, 6-11 PM.
Crash Space is located at
10526 Venice Blvd, Culver City CA 90232
(Google Map | Street View)
In case of overflow, or other last-minute changes on Sunday, please check our twitter feed, http://twitter.com/EMSL for updates.
We’ve already heard from a few of our maker/hacker friends who might drop by, including Eliot Phillips, former head editor of Hack a Day, and Tod E. Kurt, co-founder of ThingM and Crash Space. We hope that you’ll join us too!
Update 4/10/10: Looks like John Park of Make: TV and Mister Jalopy of Dinosaurs and Robots may be able to join us as well!
Update 4/14/10: Thanks to everyone who came out, and special thanks to Crash Space for hosting! It was great to meet new friends, hang out with old ones, and see the projects everyone was working on. @daryll put together a nice video of the event (via).
The basic picture of the atom that many of us grew up with– that of little electrons orbiting the nucleus like so many planets orbiting the sun –turns out to be a little misleading. Reality is somewhat more complicated: a matter of wave functions, spherical harmonics, and ultimately probability clouds.
The chart above shows the appearance of a single hydrogen atom in a few of its lowest excited states.
In each of those states, the electron is found in a different orbital, some of which have unfamiliar shapes. But even the term “shape” is a little funny for something that you can’t hold in your hand. These are actually probability density plots, which show the likelihood of observing the electron in any one position at a given time– and more correctly, 2D projections of 3D probability densities.
So even the humble hydrogen atom can be a bit complex. Fortunately, we have advanced technology that can help us cut though the quantum mechanical haze: Cookies!
These are atomic spritz cookies, made by taking a fairly common cookie press and outfitting it with custom plates.
It’s not quite a trivial process, but the end result is pretty neat: you get to eat the atomic orbitals. Continue reading Atomic Cookies!
Cheap RC car + piece of string = radio control string cat toy
