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!
Juan from FabLab 851 at the University of Chile writes:
We have built a ShopBot workstation using one of your design… And the result was awesome!
They’ve posted some build pictures on their Facebook page as well. Thanks for sharing your project!
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.
a musical duet played by #craftrobo and #watercolorbot @TinkeringStudio @ericrosenbizzle pic.twitter.com/lQi8udHTf5
— Ryan Jenkins (@ryanejenkins) August 20, 2015
There’s nothing quite like the sound of a robot duet— a stepper motor quartet.
Every month or two since 2009, someone has sent me a copy of a particular comic from the webcomic Cowbirds in Love. Here is today’s example, from @benk_at_work on twitter:
Sigh.
There is, of course, only one appropriate way to respond in a situation like this: with another comic.
Back in 2011, I wrote an era-appropriate semi-autobiographical rage comic, that I could use as a standard response when people sent me that comic.
Joking aside, we really do spend a lot of our time engineering— and many of our friends and colleagues are bona fide engineers. On the other hand, I love to cook, but that doesn’t make me a chef either.
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:
