EXTERMINATE!!! EXTERMINATE!!! EXTERMINATE!!!
We Evil Mad Scientists like Halloween. A lot.
You might have already seen our old-school Cylon Jack-o-lantern. Here is another halloween electronics project, hopefully in time for you to make your own: It’s a radio-controlled robotic Dalek that can move around and turn its head. Oh, and did I mention that it’s a pumpkin?
Continue reading Building a Robotic Dalek Pumpkin
It’s a pumpkin! It’s a Jack-o-lantern! It’s an electronics project! It’s… a Cylon!
Cylons are great. They’re evil, menacing, and shiny. They have glowing red lights, computer-monotone voices, and they aim as precisely as imperial stormtroopers.
For halloween this year, we made Cylon Jack-o-lanterns in both large and small versions.
The design consists of two parts, a pumpkin-carving part and an electronics part. The big idea, of course, is to make the Cylon’s red eye scan back and forth.
How well does it work? Take a look! (Youtube)
This week’s Weekend Projects Podcast at Make Magazine is about making a programmable LED pumkin.
Our Cylon is made with a very different approach. It runs on a 9V battery and uses two cheap integrated circuits (a 555 and 4017) that together control six LEDs (or six groups of LEDs).
Circuits like this are quick, easy, and cheap to build. It’s also fun merely from the standpoint of making something that people might expect to require a microcontroller. For this particular circuit, it turns out to be cheaper and faster to do it without one.
If you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can build this circuit for less than ten dollars, in less than two hours, without any programming at all.
Continue reading Make A Cylon Jack-O-Lantern
So, you’ve disassembled hard drives, taken the magnets out, made wind chimes out of the platters, and so on. One thing that you might have left over is a set of printed circuit boards. Funny shaped printed circuit boards, with holes in them. Here’s how to turn those leftover PCBs into fabulous geek-chic picture frames.
Continue reading How to make hard drive PCB picture frames
What is a good science project and turns really fast? An electric motor! I built an electric motor for my school science project in third grade. It was fun to build and got a lot of attention at the school’s science fair.
I was looking in a book for a science project idea when I saw instructions for building an electric motor. My parents approved the idea, so Windell and I went looking for parts.
Continue reading Building an Electric Motor
We had a lot of fantastic entries in our supercapacitor contest! We now have a Grand Prize winner, two Second Prize winners, and a number of honorable mentions. A big thank you to everyone that submitted entries!
The Grand Prize (ten supercapacitors) goes to Stephen Kupiec, for his winning entry, “Supercap Project Luxeon V Throwie”:
A Luxeon V LED driven off of a LuxDrives 3021 buckpuck has been sporadically putting out a very short bright flash every 15-30 min on my desk startling coworkers. But it hasn’t been connected to power in over a month. The buckpuck has been harvesting power from 220 microfarad electrolytic capacitor which is in the circuit as a power line conditioner. Given a 1 farad supercap coupled with a very low (10000:1) duty cycle flasher circuit, a very distracting flasher could be made.
We selected this entry both for its originality, as well as for taking advantage of the low internal resistance of the supercaps.
Two second prize winners will get five caps each:
Chad Norman‘s entry is funny enough that it’s hard to read with a straight face:
Dress them up, adding little tiny bits of plasticine/playdough and dress them all up real purdy like. Then, using stop motion techniques, animate an epic saga of romance, death, intrigue and action with the supercapacitors as the actors.
From Mike Saz comes another very practical idea for using supercaps:
Mod your wireless mouse. They’ll soak up a day’s worth of juice in seconds, and you can stop buying AA’s, or worse, nicads.
Read on for the (long) list of honorable mentions!
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest: We Have Winners!
The Supercapacitor Contest ends at midnight on Monday night, July 31. The end is near! This is not eBay; there is no advantage in waiting until the last minute. It’s your last chance to submit an entry and possibly win fame and/or fortune, in the form of ten sweet supercapacitors. To recap: submit your best idea for what to do with a bunch of 2.5 V, 1.5 F carbon aerogel capacitors with ultra low equivalent series resistance. To enter, leave your entry as a comment here or E-mail it to us. Keep reading to see some of the cool ideas that we’ve already received. Can you do better?
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest: The End Is Near.
Besides the eight project ideas that have been listed as comments to the original contest announcement, I’ve received 39 pieces of contest-entry E-mail, some of which contain more than one project idea.
I’m counting each entry that I’ve received as a separate entry. One piece of email contains a list of thirteen (but number 13 reads “i couldn’t think of anything else, i just like the number thirteen”).
Some of these ideas are just great! Keep ’em coming!
What can you do with a lot of supercapacitors? This is no idle question. I picked up a bag of 100 on eBay. These are sweet: Cooper PowerStor Series A carbon aerogel capactitors with ultra-low resistance. Specifications: 2.5 V, 1.5 F, with nominal equivalent series resistance of 60 milliohms at 1 kHz. I recently saw these at Digi-Key for $9.60 each. These aren’t the wimpy memory backup caps that aren’t rated for enough current to drive an LED. These are power caps, meant for high current charge and discharge.
Obviously, these are meant for great things. It only leaves one question: What great things should I do with them? To help answer that, I’m holding a contest: Come up with the best use for a pile of supercaps, and you’ll get ten of them to play with.
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest!
On this breadboard there are four Kingbright PSA08-11HWA sixteen segment displays that I got from BG Micro some years ago. The PSA08-11HWA comes in an eighteen pin (16 + decimal point + common anode) dual-inline package. Normally that’s great– ideal for use in a breadboard. Note that the rows of pins are oriented 90 degrees from how you’d like them to be– this is really only good if you want your displays to be read top-to-bottom in the breadboard, rather than left-to-right. Turn your head sideways to read this display saying “M7H7.” Controlling these displays is not difficult. However, in this case, where you don’t need to change what’s displayed, it’s absurdly easy.
Continue reading Making the “Evil” LED logo
We’re number 2! We’re number 2!
On a recent list of the top ten strangest kitchen gadgets, our Interactive LED Dining Table narrowly edged out the tetris cooking timer.
Continue reading TechEBlog list of strange kitchen gadgets
