Build It – A Flameless Hack-o'-Lantern by PopSci
Popular Science has added a build video for their Hack-O-Lantern project.
Related:
Last year, we released our Flickery Flame Soldering Kits with six candle-flicker LEDs in red and yellow or white and warm white, to give a fun and semi-realistic flame effect. Now we’re releasing a new Psychedelic Flame Soldering Kit with six blinky-fading-flashy RGB LEDs.
Together the auto-changing LEDs make this a bright, colorful, and kinetic light show. Perfect for holiday decorations (psychedelic Jack O’Lanterns, anyone?), luminarias, scale models, stage props, and parties.
These kits are fun, low-cost, self-contained, and easy soldering kits, which will be right at home both as stocking stuffers and as bite-size first projects for soldering workshops.
The first day of Maker Faire New York was great fun. We’ve found a several great clock projects so far, including this one, featuring image processing running on a Raspberry Pi.
Our friends at NYC Resistor brought a wonderful papercraft seven segment display clock.
At the end of the day, while talking with Tom and Massimo from Arduino, we ran into another maker with a clock project. Welcome to the maker community, Ahmed!
Our friend Sean Ragan has a how-to piece in the October edition of Popular Science inspired by us! His Hack-O-Lantern brings together our Solderless Flickery Flame and Dark Detecting Jack-o’-lantern projects.
We’re bringing a stack of our Don’t Fear Art bumper stickers with us to Maker Faire New York this weekend to give to all the awesome DIY clock projects we find there. If you see us (@oskay and @1lenore), hit us up for a sticker!
The Hill Country Science Mill just posted a photo that Sean Ragan took of the Interactive Game of Life display we made for them. It’s awesome to see it in action!
The Bald Engineer posted a build video of our XL741 Discrete Op-Amp Kit as part of his AddOhms electronics video series. He suggests some excellent safety tips in the video and talks about good soldering technique.
He also posted a nice review the kit.
The Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium has a great post on making copper crowns with LEDs as a soldering practice project.
The circuit diagrams are wonderful, evoking possible shapes of the crown.
Our two “dis-integrated circuit” kits are the Three Fives Discrete 555 Timer, and the XL741 Discrete Op-Amp. These two kits are functional, transistor-level replicas of the original NE555 and ?A741 (respectively), which are two of the most popular integrated circuits of all time.
Last year, we wrote up a detailed educational supplement for the Three Fives kit, that works through its circuit diagram and discusses its principles of operation down to the transistor level. Today, we are doing the same for the XL741 kit, and releasing an educational supplement that explains how a ‘741 op-amp IC works internally, down to its bare transistors and resistors:
This ability to peek inside the circuit makes the XL741 a unique educational tool. In what follows, we’ll work through the circuit diagram, discuss the theory of operation of the ‘741 op-amp, and present some opportunities for experiments and further exploration.
You can download the supplement here: XL741 Principles of Operation (1.1 MB PDF)
Additional Resources:
Steve W. wrote in to share his improvement on the method for making wire bundles we wrote about:
I’ve used the bend-it-over-and-stuff-it-in-the-chuck approach, but was not fully happy with it.
So I drilled a 1/8″ hole in the back of a binder clip. The drilling is easy if you clip a ~3/8 scrap of wood.
A 4-40 SHCS screw long enough to allow me to actuate the clip was not threaded all the way to the head, so I used a 1/4″ spacer between the binder clip and the 4-40 nut. (Pan head screws are usually 100% threaded, but I would have had to look in the dreaded ‘other’ box to find one of those). Having the nut up against the chuck acted as a lock-nut. I had been surprised when I first tried this that I did not have to work harder to keep it from loosening. I had expected I might need a lock washer, and/or a second nut to lock the first.
Just grabbing the wires with the binder clip (my original plan) was not secure. So I wrap the wires 180 degrees around a screwdriver bit and put that in the clip.
Works great, and it is quick to pop in and out when twisting many groups of wires.
Thanks for sharing your hack and sending the photos!
