Matt Mets of Blinkinlabs assembled a crack team of volunteers to assemble BlinkyTape for the Crystal Archway at Maker Faire NY. They sat in the dark with their soldering irons and LEDs, making Maker Faire happen in real time.
It was great to see the installation come together over the course of the fair.
After building up one of our Three Fives kits, Ed wrote in to say:
I have been an electronics hobby enthusiast for well over 45 years building many, many kits, hacking my own stuff, others’ stuff, designing projects, etc. I have to say, your Three-Fives kit is truly the nicest commercially available kit I have ever had the privilege of assembling.
I was inspired to create a small, flexible wire harness with an 8-pin header on the end to effectively create an “In-Circuit Emulator” interface. You can prototype a circuit and then quickly pull the chip and insert the “ICE probe” and use a scope to probe any part of the chip you want to see what’s going on “under the hood.”
Thanks to Ed for sharing his project with us— and what a cool idea!
Eric Weddington of Atmel shows off a wafer full of ATmega328P chips (as found in Arduino and many of our own kits) at Maker Faire New York.
That’s about 1500 chips on an eight inch wafer, and not something you see every day!
Our reader Jon wrote in with a question about our open collector tutorial:
I really appreciated the tutorial, and I was able to follow along and understand it very well. One question I had was – what is the purpose of the 1 kilo-ohm resistor that is connected to the base of the PNP transistor? Because when the open collector is ‘high’ then the base of the transistor is at 12 V and it appears the 1 kohm resistor didn’t affect anything, and then when the open collector goes ‘low’ then the base is connected to ground through the output of the SN7407. So basically, what would the difference be if there was no 1 kilo-ohm resistor at all?
And, that’s actually an excellent question, about something that we usually gloss over.
The short answer is that this is a “base resistor” that we use to limit the maximum current that flows through the base of the PNP transistor. But, let’s take a look in a little more detail, and see what would happen if we didn’t have that there.
At the recent Boing Boing Ingenuity Conference in San Francisco, Super Awesome Sylvia and her dad, Tech Ninja teamed up with Joe Grand and Ben Krasnow to use the data stream generated by driving a car to create input for the WaterColorBot. Largest. Brush. Ever.
Over at Boing Boing you can read more about their hack, which took grand prize for the hack day.
Kilobots are small, low-cost, open source vibrobots designed by the Self-organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard to study swarming behaviors. A group of these bristlebot-inspired robots were demonstrated at the Open Hardware Summit.
Photo by Michael Rubenstein.
We’re pleased to announce our newest kit, the “Three Fives” Kit, a kit to build your own 555 timer circuit out of discrete components. Here’s a way to re-create one of the most classic, popular, and all-around useful chips of all time.
The kit is a faithful and functional transistor-scale replica of the classic NE555 timer integrated circuit, one of the most classic, popular, and all-around useful chips of all time. The kit was designed and developed as a collaboration with Eric Schlaepfer, based on a previous version (pictured here), and adapted from the equivalent schematic in the original datasheets for the device. There have been a few other examples of circuits like these (such as the one that we featured in our article about the 555 contest), but we really like how this one has come together.
The kit is designed to resemble an (overgrown) integrated circuit, based around an extra-thick matte-finish printed circuit board. The stand— which gives the circuit board eight legs in the shape of DIP-packaged integrated circuit pins —is made from machined and formed semi-rigid PVC foam.
To actually hook up to the giant 555, there are the usual solder connection points, but there are also thumbscrew terminal posts that you can use with bare wires, solder lugs, or alligator clips.
One of the really cool things about having a unintegrated disintegrated discrete circuit like this is that you can actually hook up probes and monitor what happens at different places inside the circuit.
So that’s our new “Three Fives” Kit (shown above with an original NE555 for scale). It’s not quite as big as our 555 footstool, nor as tasty as our edible version, but it’s a great little circuit, and it’s got legs.
We’ve put together a roundup of our simplest LED projects; easy things to put together mostly with a bare LED and a coin cell.
Pictured above, Basics: Simple LED Pumpkins
How to hack LEDs into Lego minifigures for Halloween, and LED Ghosties for Halloween
LED-lit sea urchin shells, RoboGames Awards
Picking resistors for LEDs and Some thoughts on throwies
Quick, easy, temporary, and beautiful LED garden lights
Paper Circuitry at Home: Electric Origami, and the Soft circuitry merit badge
Edge-lit holiday cards and part II, Refining edge-it holiday cards
Over on buildsmartrobots, Sai posted about a mechanical maze solving project. He uses an EBB (the same controller board we use on the Eggbot and the WaterColorBot) to control a couple of steppers to tilt the bed of the labyrinth using OpenCV to see both the path and the ball.
Alex Ray (@machinaut) has been playing with our Octolively open source interactive LED kits and says, “Physical computing interfaces are fun.”
