My old friend Kevin sent in these pictures of a massive array of tasty electronic treats that he and his family made for a group picnic at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Nice work!) If your diet is short on precision op-amps and instrumentation amplifiers, these just might hit the spot.
You can read our own article about circuitry snacks (dated July 11, 2007) here.
You’ve got your wire strippers and your soldering iron…now what? You probably know that there is a standard set of essential tools that you need on your electronics workbench. You can find helpful lists of these tools at Lady Ada’s site and Dan’s Data.
However, real tool junkies always want just the right tool for the job. Here are five electronics tools you may not know you were missing. These esoteric tools go a bit beyond the basics that everyone should have.
Continue reading Five Electronics Tools You Might Not Know About
Here we present what is arguably the tastiest way to design and learn about electronic circuits: make circuitry snacks!
Two of our favorite things in the world are playing with electronics and playing with food, and so it is about time that someone finally got around to combining the two. We begin by gathering up appropriate snack-food building blocks and making food-based models of electronic components. From these components, you can assemble “circuitry snacks”– edible models of functioning electronic circuits. You can make these for fun, for dessert, for your geek friends, for kids, and for teaching and learning electronics.
Continue reading Circuitry Snacks
You have probably seen persistence of vision (POV) toys at some point– little LED dot-matrix displays that, when waved around, display a picture or a message that seems to hang in mid air. We’ve been playing with 16-segment LED displays lately, and it some point it occurred to us that we’d never seen an alphanumeric POV display. So, we went ahead and tried it out, and hey– it works! AlphaPOV is the result. It’s a neat effect since the clearly defined segments– designed for text– introduce a certain degree of legibility into the display.
The starting point for building this project is our LED Micro-Readerboard. Normally, the micro-readerboard shows one character at a time, so that you can read it sequentially while holding it still. Here, we use a (very slightly) modified version of the firmware that blinks the characters on and off at high speed. Read on for details, AVR source code and a few more pictures.
Continue reading AlphaPOV: An alphanumeric persistence of vision display
We’ve just finished updating the LED Micro-Readerboard (formerly the micro-readerboard LED ornament) to version 2.0. This version features longer battery life, the use of a standard common-cathode LED display, and a new set of phrases including optional holiday phrases. It’s an open-source project so you can download the code, order some parts, and go to town.We are also making it available as a kit, exclusively through the Make Store. The kit features a remarkable high-intensity LED display that enables vastly improved battery life.
Frequency asked questions for version 2.0 of the LED Micro-Readerboard project; this list will expand as we get asked more questions. ;)
If you don’t find what you’re looking here, you might consider asking a question in the forums.
Continue reading LED Micro-Readerboard, version 2.0: FAQ File
This article contains some reference data– pinouts and the font table– relevant to the LED Micro-readerboard, version 2.0.
Continue reading LED Micro-Readerboard, version 2.0: Technical Data
Maker Faire was a smashing success. The big message of the fair was summarized succinctly and stamped on the back of a card we were given: “Kill Your Television and Make Stuff!”
We had a great time in our little prototyping world off in the corner of the Expo hall by SRL. Near us Bathsheba Grossman had her beautiful sculptures, Fab@Home was printing with cheese and frosting, John Guy had his 3D CNC gantry next to his margarita machine, and Lee Krasnow had an entire workshop for his precision puzzle making. We were also by a couple of exhibitors (as opposed to makers): Epilog and Protopulsion, but I have to say, it seemed like the makers all got a lot more traffic than the corporate folks with their tradeshow-style setups. We were all off behind the Tesla coils, which stole our visitors’ attention hourly. Nobody could compete with the Tesla coils when they were running!
We can’t possibly list all of the cool things we saw, and we didn’t see half of the stuff there, but read on for some of the highlights for us.
Continue reading Maker Faire Bay Area 2007 was fantastic!
Last year at Maker Faire, we showed off our interactive LED dining table. There, we met the fine folks at Because We Can, who make amazing mostly wooden things with a little help from their robot. We eventually all decided on collaborating to design and build a new series of interactive coffee tables. We’ve just wrapped up the project and are introducing them this weekend at Maker Faire.
Besides what is written about them on this page, you can read more about them on the
Because We Can Blog, and you can also see lots of photos in the product pages for the two different coffee table designs: the wave and the ripple.
The new tables are designed to look really great whether or not you can see the LEDs. The wooden bases are elegant and attractive, and also if you go up to one and touch it, it will respond by pleasantly lighting up in that area. The tables are designed to respond in a subtle and gentle fashion to stimulus provided by human interaction. They are normally dim and constant– the most you’ll see in a dark room is a faint glow of twinkling like the night sky. When you set your glass down on the table, however, the table “sees” the motion that induces a slow ripple starting in that location that spreads out to other areas of the table as it dissipates. The overall effect is a bit like touching a pool of water, in that your local disturbance turns into an overall gentle rippling, and eventually settles down. It is decidedly not a disco floor– there is no blinking, no programmed oscillations, or for that matter, any digital electronics at all– the circuitry is completely analog to improve aesthetics and reduce eyestrain.
In February we gave a sneak preview of our project to construct a home-built three dimensional fabricator. Our design goals were (1) a low cost design leveraging recycled components (2) large printable volume emphasized over high resolution, and (3) ability to use low-cost printing media including granulated sugar. We are extremely pleased to be able to report that it has been a success: Our three dimensional fabricator is now fully operational and we have used it to print several large, low-resolution, objects out of pure sugar.
Continue reading Solid freeform fabrication: DIY, on the cheap, and made of pure sugar
