All posts by Windell Oskay

About Windell Oskay

Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Alpha Clock Five: Introducing the Blue Edition!

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Introducing our newest open source hardware kit: The Blue Edition of Alpha Clock Five.

Alpha Clock Five Red  Alpha Clock Five White

Alpha Clock Five is our flagship clock kit, which thus far has been available only in a Red Edition and in a White Edition. Whichever color you happen to like, it is a full-featured, beautiful, and extraordinarily easy-to-read desk clock based around oversized 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays. It’s designed to work equally well as a bedside alarm clock and as a computer-controlled alphanumeric data display device.

We’ve already written extensively about the core design of Alpha Clock Five. We’ve also written about the modes and features added in version 2.0 of our Arduino-compatible firmware (such as date display and daisy chained scrolling text), and about the hardware changes necessary to support the White Edition of the kit. Fortunately, the changes that we made in order to support the White Edition also allow us to support the use of blue LEDs, just as easily. And so— by popular request —we now present the Blue Edition.

 

Here, the Blue Edition is shown with a soda can for scale. These LEDs are big and bright, and cast a heavy glow on the soda can and tabletop. (The usual caveats about the difficulty of photographing LEDs apply: A camera cannot capture the apparent intensity of pure blue LEDs in the same way that your eyes can.)

 

As with the other Alpha Clock Five kits, the control buttons are cut as flexures into the top of the laser-cut acrylic case, that can bend down to contact right-angle tactile button switches at the top edge of the circuit board. The top and bottom sides of the case are made of black acrylic, and the rear panel is made from smoke-gray acrylic.

For the Blue Edition, the front face of the case is made of deep blue transparent acrylic, which helps to increase display contrast, especially in brightly lit office environments.

Without the top and back panels, you can see the electronics within: the AVR microcontroller, LED driver chips, transistors, Chronodot RTC module and the other parts that make it all work.

 

The Blue Edition of Alpha Clock Five is available now at the Evil Mad Scientist shop.

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The 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire in Pictures

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The 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire is a wrap— and it was amazing.  And we took pictures. We’ve uploaded 362 photos from maker faire right here for your browsing pleasure.   But first, a little preview.

 

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Kids play with giant cardboard robot arms at the Giant Cardboard Robots booth. As they say, “The revolution will be corrugated.”

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Glo-Puter Zero, by Alan Yates, with its phosphor-based memory. Truly a highlight of the show.

 

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Lenore shares a nerdy moment with Akiba from Freaklabs.

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An unusual LED badge, from the Bay Lights project.

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The Western Pyrotechnics Association is a club for people that make their own fireworks.  It’s incredible to see the complexity and artistry of the fireworks and the tooling that makes them.

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A beautiful hovercraft, designed to look like a flying DeLorean; you can see video of it on the project site.

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Back at our booth, the WaterColorBot was a constant hit.  Above, Sylvia shows visitors how to sketch with it in real time.

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An unexpected application: Our friend Bilal Ghalib stopped by and enlisted the WaterColorBot to help him make a birthday card for another friend.

 

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And one of our favorite moments of Maker Faire: a young visitor, tickled pink as she tries out the WaterColorBot, watching it paint a drawing that she had just sketched.

 

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A bicycle-powered cardboard walking rhino, by Kinetic Creatures, makers of walking cardboard robot kits, with Theo Jansen inspired walking mechanisms.

 

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Some of the creations are simpler, like this sidewalk-chalk wielding vibrobot, spinning on a tabletop chalkboard at the Exploratorium booth.

 

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Some of the creations are more technical, like the OpenPNP project to create open source pick and place machines for electronics assembly.  We’re excited by where this is headed, along with a few related projects.

 

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And of course, there’s no shortage of LED goodness.

Please click right here for the rest of our 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire photo album.

 

This entry was posted in Art, Electronics, Engineering, Field Trips, Robotics, WaterColorBot and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

How to Build a Working Digital Computer… out of paperclips

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paperclip cover

It was the 1960’s, and people were building some very interesting digital computers.   One of them was the Digi-Comp II, which we have written about extensively: a binary mechanical computer based on rolling marbles and flip-flop gates.

For an entirely different approach, look no further than How to Build a Working Digital Computer (1967) by Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips, and Allen M. Wolk.  You can download it as a free e-book (PDF, EPUB, Kindle) at Archive.org, thanks to the BitSavers PDF Document archive.

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How to Build a Working Digital Computer is both an introduction to the “new and exciting field of digital computers” and a set of plans to build one.  What’s especially interesting is that the plans don’t call for any specialized electronic components, but instead show how to build everything from parts that you might find at a hardware store: items like paper clips, little light bulbs, thread spools, wire, screws, and switches (that can optionally be made from paper clips).
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That’s not to say that such a computer is necessarily simplistic. Arrays of paperclip logic gates can get pretty big, pretty fast.
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The instructions include a read-only drum memory for storing the computer program (much like a player piano roll), made from a juice can, with read heads made from bent paper clips.   A separate manually-operated “core” memory (made of paper-clip switches) is used for storing data.

 

So can this “paper clip” computer actually be built, and if so, would it work?  Apparently yes, on both counts. Cleveland youngsters Mark Rosenstein and Kenny Antonelli built one named “Emmerack” in 1972 (albeit substituting Radio Shack slide switches for most of the paper clips), and another was built in 1975 by the Wickenburg High School Math Club in Arizona.  And, at least one modern build has been completed, as you can see on YouTube.

 

CT-650

Photo credit: History of Computers, Computing and Internet

Perhaps more surprisingly, the “paper clip” computer was also the basis of the Arkay (later, Comspace) CT-650 computer trainer, a rare, early computer that seems to have been built directly from the plans in How to Build a Working Digital Computer.   

 

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Photos of an original Comspace CT-650 posted recently at the Vintage Computer Forums show that this computer was a beautiful piece of work— no paper clips or tin cans in sight.

Although it’s a too small to see in the pictures, the fine print below the “core” memory switch array reads “PATENT PENDING.”   The brains of the computer being adapted from an existing design, the patent, D210728, claims only the “Ornamental design for the data entry keyboard console.”

 

So go download this excellent book and make your own wonderful paper clip computer. Link: Archive.org via Friends Of DigiComp

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RoboGames 2013 Medals

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We helped build the gold, silver, and bronze medals for this year’s RoboGames competition, which finished up yesterday in San Mateo, California.

Read on for a bit about how we designed and built the electronics for, and assembled these pretty-darned neat medals.  It’s a story involving LEDs, some remarkable adhesives, and a how to operate a small-scale surface mount production.

Continue reading RoboGames 2013 Medals →

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Super Awesome Sylvia and the 2013 White House Science Fair

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We are super-excited because Super-Awesome Sylvia, who we have been working with on the WaterColorBot, has been invited to this year’s White House Science Fair to show off her project!  Way to go Sylvia!


Tune in Monday, April 22 starting at 11:30 am EDT, at wh.gov/sciencefair, to watch the event live!

 

This entry was posted in EMSL Projects, WaterColorBot and tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Envelopes That Claim to be Important

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A conspicuous contemporary trend in “traditional” dead-tree junk mail (the snail-mail equivalent of online spam) is to follow the basic format of phishing e-mail: it comes in disguise as legitimate “important” mail, to trick you into clicking on opening it.

And so for a while now, we’ve been amassing a collection of what we call “Envelopes That Claim to be Important.”   Here are a few prime examples of what to watch out for.

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Often times, these envelopes are quite well done.   Above is an example that might cause a genuine double take— with its “FINAL NOTICE ENCLOSED” — and bank-PIN style tear tabs on the sides.

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And then, there’s the fine print, so that you really take it seriously.  A $2,000 fine or 5 years imprisonment(!) are threatened under §1702 should you fail to deliver this fine specimen of junk mail letter to its intended victim.  (This penalty is true but somewhat misleading; the law refers to obstruction of mail in general, not this “final notice” in particular.)

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To complete the illusion, envelopes like this often come complete with security printing on the back side.  Is this really for privacy, or just so that you can’t quite as easily make out the advertisement lurking within?  (Also, our bet is that everyone gets the exact same red-printed number on the back side.)

 

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Another sleazy trick is to make the envelope look like the work of some (generally implied but unspecified) government agency.  Official looking seals, IRS style typography, or an implied return address in the state capital aim to create the impression that this is a critical document, to be stored with your important papers.  Sprinkle on a few §1702 threats here and there to complete the picture.

 

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This time, it’s personal. And confidential.  And, what exactly is a “secured document,” anyway?

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“Registered Documents” is probably meant to be evocative of Registered Mail (which tends to actually be important), but comes off more like the previous “secured document” instead.  Again with the security printing, too!

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And nothing shouts “Important Information” more clearly than the words “… or Current Resident.”  

We have not yet noticed any envelopes with both the §1702 threat and the address of  “Current Resident,” but it stands to reason that they’re out there.
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And finally, here is a truly over-the-top example of (yes) presorted first class mail.  In their defense, printing technology has come a long long way, and all those printed permanent marker marks look pretty darned real.

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Download and Print: Evil Mad Scientist Valentines

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If you’re anything like us, you’ve at some point come across supposedly-nerdy valentines and thought to yourself, “A real geek would have used an equation to express that sentiment.”  And if so, have we have got just the thing for you!

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Here’s our collection of six little valentine cards, each of which adds a little authenticity and class to the not entirely uncommon “geek” valentine genre.

Suppose that you want to communicate to your valentine just how hot you think they are. Sure, you could go with a picture of a thermometer— or a Sriracha bottle —but isn’t the thermodynamic definition of temperature itself in a whole category of its own?

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And what better way to say “I love you,” than with the gift of trigonometric identities?

 

Lo Res Valentines

You can download the original file here (260 kB .PDF document).

Print it out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.

Update: New cards have been released! Please check out the 2019 set, which contains all 42 cards from 2013 through 2019.

This entry was posted in Art, EMSL Projects, Mathematics, Science and tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

GPS time on the Alpha Clock Five

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assembled  Alpha GPS 15Alpha GPS 5  Alpha GPS 13

William Phelps recently wrote to us with alternative firmware for Alpha Clock Five, our oversized alphanumeric LED clock/data display kit. His firmware adds two very welcome features: Automatic daylight saving time (DST) correction, and automatic time setting via a GPS module.  It works remarkably well.

Here, we’ll show you how to hook it all up and how to use it.
Continue reading GPS time on the Alpha Clock Five →

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Resistor Color Code Tattoo

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resistor tat

Our good friend Jimmie P Rogers— of LoL Shield fame, amongst many of us who love Arduino and LEDs —has a brand new tattoo of the resistor color code: Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White.  I’m pretty sure that Jimmy himself has known this color code since he was in diapers, but now he has an always-present chart that he can use as a visual aid while teaching electronics.  And at five inches across, it doubles as a ruler (albeit one that will grow less accurate with age).

So, that’s pretty neat.  But two things bring this above and beyond the “usual” coolness of a geek tattoo.  First, Jimmie designed it in Processing, and second, as an open source tattoo, you can download the source code on his web site.

And for those of us who may be a little less committed: Our own favorite mnemonic for the resistor color code is “Black Beetles Running On Your Garden Bring Very Good Weather.”

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The Making of the Digi-Comp II, First Edition

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We recently announced availability of our “first edition” wooden Digi-Comp II kits.  These are big kits, and there are a variety of different manufacturing steps and processes— from CNC routing to vacuum forming —that have somehow found their way into the build.   In this little photo essay, we’ll show you just what goes into the making of the Digi-Comp II, First Edition.

Continue reading The Making of the Digi-Comp II, First Edition →

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