All posts by Windell Oskay

About Windell Oskay

Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

One Minute Project: Chip Bugs

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Still life with yellow paper (group shot 2)

If you work with electronics, you have probably at some point come across chips that have gone bad. The usual strategies to deal with these include (1) writing “DEAD?” on them in large letters (2) throwing them out, and (3) hiding the evidence. I once heard about a lab student who, whenever he came across a dead chip in his circuit, would dutifully file it back in the drawer with the new chips of that variety– just in case it turned out to be good after all.

Here’s an alternative solution: Turn your chips into Chip Bugs: cute, tiny sculptures that leave no doubt as to which components are which.
Continue reading One Minute Project: Chip Bugs →

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September Linkdump

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  • Could you decode a message from an alien civilization? Here is your chance to find out.. It’s one of the most rewarding puzzles that I’ve ever seen.
    (Hint: print the pages out large to work on it.)
  • Individual Icons makes fantastic geek jewelry incorporating screws, rulers, thermometers, levels, and compasses.
  • See also: GeekGirl Jewelry made from electronic components
  • Density game
  • If you like evilmadscientist.com, then you will probably
    also like….(similicio.us)
  • New Honorary mad scientist:
    Tim Hunkin(thanks Matt Tovey)
  • Another variation on our circuitry snacks
  • Video showing what you can do with a mac laptop and Processing.
  • Every math geek chef and their brother has seen the beautifully fractal Romanesco broccoli, but I had never seen the more mundane fractal hiding inside red cabbage.
  • ACME Portable Hole $3.25/3
  • Have you ever found yourself wondering where you could buy 3D glasses by the thousand? (Not… that… i… would… have… any reason for that.) Source 1, Source 2.
  • What every baby needs
  • Bagless shopping concept
  • CandyFab has its own
    wikipedia pagenow.
  • Custom PCB is yet another low-cost prototyping service that nobody seems to know about. They have been around a while, but I haven’t tried them. (Have you?)
  • There are not many things that would I would trade-in my Prius for. Not many.
  • How to prepare a kiwi
  • Admit it. You want this squirrel-infested coffee table.
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Make your own 1952 Fraction-of-an-inch Adding Machine

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Adding Machine in case

Last weekend we took a trip to Urban Ore in Berkeley, where I found an incredible gem: this “Fraction of an Inch Adding Machine.” It’s a simple to use device that lets you add any number of fractions– from 1/64 to 63/64– quickly, automatically, correctly, and without thinking about it.

As proudly proclaimed on the bezel itself, this calculator design is covered under patent Des. 169941, submitted in 1952, and granted a 14-year term in 1953. Forty years after the patent has expired, it’s painfully obsolescent, and yet remarkably charming. The design is so simple and so obvious in how it works, and yet… there’s something almost magical about it.

But enough talk. Want to play with one? Using our pdf pattern and some office supplies, you can make a working replica in 5-10 minutes and try it out yourself!

Usage 3: First operand

Continue reading Make your own 1952 Fraction-of-an-inch Adding Machine →

This entry was posted in EMSL Projects, Mathematics, Vintage Technology and tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Inside the PayPass: Credit card case mods

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paypass top

The PayPass is an RFID version of the MasterCard credit card. It is often available as a keychain “fob,” like the one shown above.

This particular one is from Citibank and is– as far as I can tell– a free optional addition to any Citibank Mastercard account. These have been in the wild for about a year now, and seem pretty handy. The obvious downside is that the RFID readers are far from ubiquitous. Still, things are improving and there are now quite literally dozens of places where you can use them.

From a hardware perspective it’s easy to see that this fob consists of the RFID element itself encased in a big block of plastic. And of course, plastic can be removed.

Continue reading Inside the PayPass: Credit card case mods →

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What it is

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Holdspiral

It’s time to reveal the mystery tool!

Wow– we’ve had some great answers– and some great restraint from those of you who already recognize it.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Here are some of the guesses that were entered as comments– it’s a great list, and worth a read. My real surprise on this list: four guesses were that it was a piece of a time machine.

  • Scoop for lifting boiled eggs out of water. (X5)
  • Time Machine or part thereof (X4– WTF?)
  • Golf ball retriever (X3)
  • Eggcup (X2)
  • Egg dipper for coloring Easter eggs (X2)
  • Yolk separator (X3 — might work; kinda sharp.)
  • Candle Snuffer (X2 — probably won’t work.)
  • Antenna for communicating with intelligent aliens. (X2)
  • A spiral (Yup.)
  • Cocktail stirrer or Cocktail whisk
  • Mayo whip
  • Egg Beater
  • Frothing whip for an espresso set.
  • Heat sink for pouring hot water into glass (Does such exist?)
  • Potato Masher
  • Futon tataki, for beating the dust out of futons
  • Magic wand for putting the magic smoke back into blown components! (Nice!)
  • Magic wand – other (X2)
  • Eggpoacher
  • Hair ornament
  • Implement to politely push away public huggers
  • Ectoplasm handler
  • Sproingy Springtime hamsterlift
  • Barbeque tool
  • Rejected design for a supppository.
  • Manufacturing tool to keep two materials separate.
  • An “Infinite Speculum.”
  • “I’m not at liberty to say.”
  • Golden Ratio Bubble Wand! (Neat idea!)
  • Instrument used to keep eyes open whilst driving. (Ow!)
  • Fancy urethral sound
  • A bismuth crystal scoop.
  • IUD
  • Cone stand from an ice cream shop.
  • Thalidomide baby contact-lens application tool. (High points for originality.)
  • High quality nose picker.

To this list let me add my own “guesses”:

  • Professional level egg-in-spoon-race spoon.
  • Lollipop for robots.
  • Support armature for world’s largest lollipop.
  • Advanced nose-hanging spoon.
  • Dieter’s ice cream scoop.
  • Traditional umbrella for use during Festivus.

The tool is so simply and beautifully constructed that it is very difficult to judge the overall scale of the object. Is it three inches or three feet long? Of course, it turns out to be pretty small.

Nine answers assumed that the tool was the right size to hold an egg. And it sure is– a robin egg. ;)

You could indeed balance a chicken egg in the spiral, but it would be unsteady. The most popular answer was a tool for lifting boiled eggs out of water. Even for robin eggs, that would be difficult because (1) there’s very little angle between the spiral and the handle, and (2) the handle is very short. It might work as a golf ball retriever if the water trap is no deeper than your Beta bowl and you don’t mind turning the bowl upside down to get the ball out.

Honorable Mentions: The tool would be very good as a…

  • Tea bag remover thingy
  • Olive spoon for getting olives out of jars.

But of course, as one person answered, it’s a tool…

Continue reading What it is →

This entry was posted in EMSL Tests & Quizzes, Everything Else and tagged , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Matt’s awesome chip desk

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What does one do 434 discarded Itanium CPUs? Matt Tovey was inspired by our Chip Trivet, and used them to make this awesome computer desk.

   

The CPU modules were scrapped as the result of a supercomputer upgrade, and were presumably functional before having their heat sinks taken off– a herculean effort for that many CPUs! Matt says that the list price for the lot of chips was over US$800,000 in 2006 and that the desk contains about 2.8 TFLOPs of computing power, about the same
as 900 3.2GHz P4s.

Matt started with a plain desk, tiled in the CPUs, and added wooden edging and a beveled glass top. Nice work!

I just love the way that this desk looks. But it gives me an idea too– take it one step further, and what if it worked? You could use a single, giant PCB for the motherboard which sat underneath the glass surface of the desk. With that much area, you could fit in a lot of processing power. On the cheap (or moderately cheap), one could imagine instead filling the inside of a desk top with low-cost (even last-generation) PC motherboards to make a great looking beowulf cluster or render farm that doesn’t take up any desktop or rack-mount space.

Sadly, Matt’s page has moved on to the great /dev/null in the sky, but the mirror still shows some of the build photos.

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Using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller

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ADXL3XX   Makeshift socketX up: Red   X down: blue

The last decade has seen more than an order of magnitude drop in the price of
accelerometers, devices capable of measuring physical acceleration (often in more than one direction). History suggests that whenever a useful technology makes a precipitous drop in price, unexpected applications follow, and that’s exactly what has happened in this case.

Starting from zero and summing up acceleration, you can use an accelerometer to find velocity, and from that derive relative position information. By measuring the acceleration due to gravity, one can also determine orientation (technically, inclination)– you can tell which way it’s pointing. Those are pretty useful skills for a chip! And so as bulk prices for tiny chip-scale three-axis accelerometers have begun to approach $5, they have started to appear in all kinds of mass-market applications that you might not have predicted: laptop computers (for hard drive protection), smart phones and cameras (for orientation– e.g., portrait vs. landscape on the iPhone), cameras for image stabilization, and quite visibly in the controllers for Nintendo’s Wii system.

With all that promise, you might think that an accelerometer is a difficult beast to harness. That turns out not to be the case. In this little project we demystify the mighty accelerometer and show you how to get started playing with one. In the spirit of hobbyist electronics we do this the easy way– without designing a PCB or even soldering any surface-mount components.

Note: An updated version of this article is now available here.
Continue reading Using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller →

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Book Review (and build!): Forbidden Lego

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Forbidden Lego

It was on the 12th of March this year that I first heard about, and placed my order for, Forbidden Lego, a new book by Ulrik Pilegaard and Mike Dooley, $24.95 from No Starch Press. It’s finally here, and yes, you want a copy.

Forbidden Lego was written by a pair of Lego master builders, who used to work in designing advanced Lego sets (e.g., Mindstorms). While they obviously got to work on lots of cool things while they were there, there were certain projects that just turned out not to be suitable to be made into kits released by the Lego company. They wrote the book to give some kind of a tantalizing hint at the kinds of things that go on behind the scenes at Lego, and the kinds of neat things that might get released in a world without product liability suits.
Continue reading Book Review (and build!): Forbidden Lego →

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