Back in April, we posted a little project in which we demonstrated a simple Bulbdial clock, based on the original concept from IronicSans.com. We had a lot of feedback on the original project. We listened to it, learned from it, and finally designed a kit around the concept.
Hey folks, we’re having an informal meetup this evening (Friday Nov. 27) at the Kennedy School McMenamins, in Portland, Oregon. We be in the Cypress Room starting at 8 PM.
Check the @EMSL twitter feed for any last-minute updates, and we’ll hope to see you there!
It’s new… and we shall call it Mini Peggy.
Peggy 2LE (“little edition”) is a diminutive version of our popular Peggy 2 LED “pegboard” an open-source LED matrix display. Peggy 2 is big, designed to fit a 25×25 grid of 10 mm LEDs. Peggy 2LE is mostly the same, just smaller: it’s designed to fit 5 mm LEDs.
Here’s the family photo: Big ol’ Peggy next to the new Mini Peggy, Peggy 2LE.
Continue reading Peggy 2LE
Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But, the deadline for our Arduino Contest at Instructables is approaching right fast: Entries are accepted until this Sunday, Nov 15, 2009, at 11:59 PM PST.
Why enter? To show off your cool stuff! Also, you could win a Meggy Jr RGB handheld gaming kit, or an Arduino Mega or other nice goodies, so don’t you want to come out and play?
Official contest rules are here. The basic entry requirement is that you make a project that involves the Arduino IDE in some way, and you can already check out many of the great projects entered. Woo!
One of our first kit projects, and one of the consistently most popular, has been the LED Mini Menorah project. For a couple years now we have meant to revisit that project, and we’ve finally got around to doing so. Here is the result: our new Deluxe LED Menorah Kit.
Our automatic ice maker is on the fritz, so we’ve temporarily reverted to making ice in conventional trays. But, imagine our delight at opening up the freezer and finding this!
Several of our ice cubes apparently formed with long spikes on top. This is really *not* what you expect when you start out with liquid water in an ice cube tray. Snowcrystals.com has a fairly detailed explanation of how these things form, and it’s documented elsewhere as well. (Roughly speaking, supercooled water is pushed up through a hole, somewhat like magma forming a volcano.) It’s relatively easy to form these in your freezer if you start with distilled water, but occasionally– as in our case –they do occur with regular tap water.
Lately we have been working on a new version of the PeggyDraw program, which is a program that lets you draw things that you want to display on the Peggy 2 for static images. The new version isn’t quite ready to show off this week, which is too bad because we like to put out our Peggies for halloween.
On the bright side, Mark Delp just sent in a program called bmp2peg that’s been added to the Peggy project at Google Code. It converts a (tiny) windows BMP file and generates an Arduino sketch that can run on the Peggy. (bmp2peg runs on windows, and also on linux if you recompile it, macs unknown thus far.) Both bmp2peg and the original cross-platform PeggyDraw can be used to put static images on the Peggy, or to generate static frames that you swap out in the code to build simple animations. The window-friendly pumpkin above was drawn as an image file, converted with bmp2peg, and installed on a Peggy 2 filled with orange LEDs.
Last year at halloween we took a different approach to the Peggy in the window. We took one filled with red LEDs, and every twenty seconds (or so) it would flash the letters “BOO” — huge and bright — and then go dark again. We took a little movie of this last year, showing how that works.
(The flickr video is embedded below — if you can’t see it, click through to see it.)
The video is very dark, but it’s accurate: our street really is that dark on Halloween. You have to walk slowly because you can’t see where the sidewalk is.
You can find more Halloween decor projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
We picked up some of these blueberry/yogurt candies at Trader Joe’s, which didn’t really merit a mention until we looked at the ingredients list:
Well, now, that is interesting. The last ingredient in the list is red cabbage extract, “for color.” But… red cabbage is one of those pH-indicating substances (Link 1, Link 2), that happens to make a pretty good DIY version of litmus paper.
So… if these candies have red cabbage extract for color, do we really have litmus candy?
Continue reading Everyday science: Litmus candy
