A version of our RC car floor sweeper project is featured in the April 2007 issue of Popular Science as a “five minute project.” Popular Science is a great magazine and we’re honored!
Daily Cup of Tech’s lost USB drive trick was also featured in the April issue. Over on the Daily Cup of Tech web site, we read that someone managed to use it to find not just a drive, but a lost kid as well– good work guys!
If the phrase “My spoon is too big” either makes you fall over on the floor laughing or reply with “I am a banana,” you must have seen the deadly-funny cartoon “Rejected” by Don Hertzfeldt. We recently got a copy of Bitter Films, Volume One, a collection of six of Don’s animated shorts including “Rejected,” “Lily and Jim,” “Billy’s Balloon,” and “Ah L’Amour.” Even though I’d seen all but one of them before, I laughed so hard that I had trouble breathing during three of these cartoons.
Besides the classic shorts and some other minor gems, the DVD also features a few short Don Hertzfeldt “bookend” animations produced for The Animation Show, a festival-formatted collection of animations produced by Don in collaboration with Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead fame).
The Animation Show is now in its third year and the first two years are available on DVD. Even if you’ve already seen the Hertzfeld animations from it, it’s worth getting Volume 1 of The Animation Show just to see the music video “Bathtime in Clerkenwell” by the band (The Real) Tuesday Weld, featuring sublime and surreal animation by Alex Budovsky. If you like that, you may also enjoy Return I Will to Old Brazil, also by Budovsky and (The Real) Tuesday Weld, which is a music video and new recording of the classic song “Brazil.”
This spring, I’ll be teaching several classes on Saturday afternoons at TechShop. TechShop is a San Francisco Bay Area “open-access public workshop,” located just off of 101 in Menlo Park, where you can go use a wide range of tools to make things. They have full-size milling machines and lathes, welding and rapid-prototyping equipment, Lego, sewing machines, computers, and well… just look at this list of equipment. (Seriously.)
One of the things that TechShop does is hold classes on a variety of topics. These are inexpensive (typically ~$30) drop-in classes that anyone can take without a long-term commitment. Many of them are short “safety and basic usage” classes that teach you what a given machine can do– and how to do it without killing yourself. Other classes teach simple and specialized skills like soldering for kids, blacksmithing, or silk screen printing. I’ll be teaching three (or four, depending how you count) classes, each of which will be held on a Saturday afternoon at Techshop.
Technical Graphics with POV-Ray
The first class is called “Technical Graphics with POV-Ray,” and is a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn how to use POV-Ray, a free cross-platform raytracing program that lets you make killer 3D graphics and animations. You can see some example images that I’ve made in POV-Ray (including the TechShop logo above) here, and master works in the POV-Ray hall of fame here. This is a two-part workshop with part 1 on 3/31/07, 1-3 PM, and part II on 4/7/07, also 1-3 PM.
Make a custom LED Micro-Readerboard
On April 14, I’ll be teaching a little soldering class, suitable for anyone with a little bit of soldering experience (well, anyone whose age takes at least two digits to express in base-10 integers), where you can customize the phrases in and assemble an LED Micro-Readerboard, like the ones that we programmed to be ornaments a few months ago. But, since it’s not the holiday season, perhaps you want to make yours into an LED Micro-Readerboard Nametag instead!
Choosing a microcontroller
Finally, on April 21, I’ll be giving a large-format seminar that’s an introduction to microcontrollers, called Choosing a Microcontroller. This is designed to be an introduction to the capabilities and variety of single-chip computers, as well how to actually pick one for a given application. It’s easy to get overwhelmed looking at the variety of range of micros, from four-bit micros that have a 4-bit wide data path — and actually cost four bits— to AVRs and PICs, basic stamps and Arduinos, to 32-bit gorillas with names like ARM, Blackfin, and Coldfire. So, we’ll try and cut through the fog and help you figure out where to get started.
If you’ve heard people getting excited about or doing cool things with microcontrollers and want to learn more, this might be a great introduction to the field.
Sign up for these and other TechShop classes here. Sign up early, since space may be limited!
Also, if you have suggestions for other classes that you’d like to see taught by the Evil Mad Scientists, you can E-mail us or leave comments here.
We’ve just set up syndication through FeedBlitz so that (if you like) you can get new evilmadscientist.com articles by E-mail when they are posted, typically 3-5 times per week.
(Geek translation: It’s a feed reader for people that don’t read feeds.)
To sign up, enter your E-mail address in the box and click the button:
It’s free of course, but you’ll have to wait for confirmation E-mail to arrive from FeedBlitz, which may take a few hours.
We’ve had some inquiries about project E-mail and/or newsletters, and so we think that this might be another useful tool to keep up with what’s going on here in Evil Mad Science land.
What do you get when you mix a 1970’s style analog chart recorder, an 8-bit microcontroller, and a Fisher-Price Doodle Pro? A truly 21st century toy: An analog PlotBot with e-paper display technology!
Continue reading An AVR-based Analog Plotbot with an E-Paper Display
But you knew that, right? Check out the Wikipedia article about different proofs that 0.999… equals 1. It’s really quite interesting to see the wildly different methods that can be used to arrive at the same conclusion. While I’m partial to the Cauchy sequence version, the first of the proofs is my favorite, beautiful in its simplicity:
0.333…. = 1/3
3* 0.333… = 3 * (1/3)
0.999… = (3*1)/3 = 3/3 = 1
Q.E.D. =)
The Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market is held monthly, March to October, on Saturday mornings at De Anza College in Cupertino, CA. Today (March 10) was the first one of the year, so I made the trip and got there early– by my standards– at 8 AM, by which time the early birds had already left. The market nominally runs from 5 AM – Noon, but it starts to wind down an hour or two earlier than that.
The flea market is very popular but not crowded enough to be annoying, and it’s full of interesting characters. There are people selling things on the ground, under tents, on tables, and out of pickups, big trucks, horse trucks, Hummers, and Prii. The most common things that you’ll find for sale there are classic computers, radio equipment, electronic components (often by the reel), industrial surplus, tools, cables, connectors, books, software, and consumer electronics. Look a little harder to find esoteric components like lasers, as well as stuff that belongs at an entirely different flea market.
Today I picked up three sets of fine tweezers, a giant package of (giant) rubber feet, a small metalworking file, a package of breakaway DIP headers, and two small triple power supplies (+/- 15V @150 mA, +5V @ 300 mA), a total expenditure of $12. I also took my camera with me to document some of the fun, and you can check out the flickr set here, with 61 photos in moderately high resolution. The folks in the photo above are having a great time chatting over some ‘scopes and signal generators.
The next flea market is on April 14, so mark your calendar!
In this head-to-head review we compare two mechanical label makers: the classic Organizer Express by Dymo and the Bubble Roll Message Maker by Au’some Candies Inc. Other reviewers have discussed the bubble machine before, but we thought that we should, just to be fair, compare it directly to the competition.
Both of these devices use embossed-tape technology. A venerable but reliable system to be sure: batteries not included… or needed. (We like our electronic labels too, but that’s a topic for another time. If you’re into those, you may want to see what Lifehacker recently wrote about those.
Continue reading Comparative review of two embossed-tape label makers
This is a pretzel, and if you were asked what shape it was, you would probably say it was pretzel shaped. But (by definition) all pretzels are pretzel-shaped. Here are some other pretzel shapes that are a little less common: Pretzels for musicians, writers, gardeners, mathematicians, capitalists and Mac fanboys.
Continue reading Play with your food: Pretzels for fanboys
As you can see, I’ve upgraded my MAKE Controller.
I’ve long been a fan of googly eyes and of putting them in places where people don’t expect to find them. In this particular case, it’s a clear improvement, and I expect to see them included as standard equipment in future revisions of the MAKE Controller.
Along the same lines, it’s been really great to see googly eyes getting some popular attention lately in such places as the Klutz book and the Amy Sedaris Craft Challenge, which produced some amazing results– check out the flickr pool.
[Related: LabVIEW routines for the MAKE Controller]
