We’re getting into the spirit with a couple of seasonally appropriate decorations. The Rebel Alliance Ornament and the Imperial Crest Ornament for EggBot are both available on thingiverse. Our guide to printing ornaments with the EggBot may be helpful, too.
Both designs are derived from a set of silhouettes from vecteezy.com.
Our friends at Mouser sent us this picture of their Octolively derived display, updated for the holidays:
We continue to have fun with your Octolively module design. In the attached photo you can see why we decided to use sockets for the LEDs on our boards. We plan on changing out the display for each of the holidays.
I was a little concerned at first about using the red LEDs with resistors that were chosen for white or blue, but they’re socketed, so replacing any that get damaged by overdriving should be easy! Looks like a fun way to celebrate at the office, and the snowflake tree-topper is a nice touch.
Over on twitter, @shaiss says:
This is why #OSHA is awesome! In a pinch+some parts we made our electronic menorah. @EMSL design & @adafruit trinket.
If you want to roll your own, the open source hardware documentation is on our wiki. If you’re not keen on the breadboard aesthetic for your hanukkiyah, you can still get the Mega Menorah 9000 kit.
After some troubleshooting and finishing her Deluxe LED Menorah kit, Judith wrote to say:
That’s me showing off success! I want to thank you again for leading me through the process- and just in time for Hanukkah. I’ll really enjoy using it.
Thanks for sending the picture and sharing your success with us!
Introducing the Boldport Buggy kit.
This simple and playful soldering kit is based on the on the beautiful Buggy circuit board designed by Saar Drimer of Boldport.
The first version of this circuit board was created as a badge for the hardwear.io hardware security conference in The Hague. This new version of the Buggy is a complete kit, featuring an updated circuit board, with a power switch and six candle-flicker LEDs.
A cool detail is that its six legs are actually the current-limiting resistors for those six LEDs. They are posable (giving it quite a bit of personality) and we have given it little red tubing socks to cover up the otherwise-conductive feet.
The Boldport Buggy kit is available now at our store, and you can read more about its design at Boldport.
We dropped by ARMTechCon last week to check out a tip sent in by email (thanks, Barry!) that Mouser Electronics was displaying something that looked like our Octolively modules.
Mouser staff had been inspired by an installation of our Interactive LED Panels to create something interactive that they could show off at Engineers Week at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. They used the Octolively as the basis for their project, and the kids loved it of course.
For trade shows, they built up a display with a mix of blue and white LEDs to show off the Mouser “M”. Based on the foot traffic it got while I was at the booth, it is quite popular.
They made some minor changes from our original Octolively design and used different connector types to highlight Mouser’s product lines. The heart of the project is still the 40-pin DIP ATmega164P (perhaps anomalous at an ARM conference) running our Octolively code, which gave the Mouser folks a chance to play with some microcontroller programming.
It’s always exciting to see a derivative of one of our projects in the wild. Thanks to the Mouser folks for sharing their project story and sending the museum picture for us to share.
RJS sent in these pictures from Halloween this year after making our Larson Scanner kit in its Kraftwerk Tie incarnation.
Thanks for sharing the pictures, you both look awesome!
Ken Shirriff has written an excellent exploration of the 741 op-amp, including decapping a metal can package AD741. There’s a very cool interactive viewer so that you can click on the components in the schematic or on the picture of the die to see what each one is and does.
…The 25pF capacitor in the 741 has a very small value but takes up a large fraction of the chip’s area. You can see the capacitor in the middle of the die photo; it is the largest structure on the chip. …
Our very own XL741 is referenced in the footnotes, too.
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.
