Kitty’s Morning Tea: Kinetic Theory of Matter for Kids, by Christine Liu, is a remarkably charming book and physics lesson for young children. It’s a short twelve-pages about tea, molecules, and kinetic energy that you can read (in its entirety) above, in a digital edition released by the author. We love seeing science-themed educational materials for youngsters— and this is no exception.
Christine and friends are running an (already funded) campaign on Kickstarter to print the book and get it into the hands of children, and you can get your own printed copy as one of the rewards. It’s also available in a Kindle edition, free for the short remaining duration of their campaign.
Congratulations to reader VAX-Dude for winning the Name that Ware contest for May 2013, by correctly identifying our mystery ware as a VAX 9000 series High Density Signal Carrier (HDSC).
Jack Olsen (of the awesome 12-Gauge Garage) wrote in about using our flickering LEDs to line the deck and pergola he had just built.
He says, “The LED candle effect is great, and really gives the place a relaxed feel at night.” You can read more about the deck project over at the Garage Journal forums, where he describes the build in more detail:
It has 28 real candles on it that I’ve hollowed out to accommodate flickering LED lights. It’s pretty convincing.
I have a pair of 3 v power supplies — each feeds half the light set. They’re plugged into a switched outlet with wire running down along the edge/underside of the deck and up through one of the pillars, then sneaking around the back of the wooden frieze thing and into holes drilled in the backside of the frame.
He even sent us a before shot, so you can see just how from-the-ground-up building the deck was. Thanks for sharing your project with us!
Introducing our newest open source hardware kit: The Blue Edition of Alpha Clock Five.
Alpha Clock Five is our flagship clock kit, which thus far has been available only in a Red Edition and in a White Edition. Whichever color you happen to like, it is a full-featured, beautiful, and extraordinarily easy-to-read desk clock based around oversized 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays. It’s designed to work equally well as a bedside alarm clock and as a computer-controlled alphanumeric data display device.
We’ve already written extensively about the core design of Alpha Clock Five. We’ve also written about the modes and features added in version 2.0 of our Arduino-compatible firmware (such as date display and daisy chained scrolling text), and about the hardware changes necessary to support the White Edition of the kit. Fortunately, the changes that we made in order to support the White Edition also allow us to support the use of blue LEDs, just as easily. And so— by popular request —we now present the Blue Edition.
Here, the Blue Edition is shown with a soda can for scale. These LEDs are big and bright, and cast a heavy glow on the soda can and tabletop. (The usual caveats about the difficulty of photographing LEDs apply: A camera cannot capture the apparent intensity of pure blue LEDs in the same way that your eyes can.)
As with the other Alpha Clock Five kits, the control buttons are cut as flexures into the top of the laser-cut acrylic case, that can bend down to contact right-angle tactile button switches at the top edge of the circuit board. The top and bottom sides of the case are made of black acrylic, and the rear panel is made from smoke-gray acrylic.
For the Blue Edition, the front face of the case is made of deep blue transparent acrylic, which helps to increase display contrast, especially in brightly lit office environments.
Without the top and back panels, you can see the electronics within: the AVR microcontroller, LED driver chips, transistors, Chronodot RTC module and the other parts that make it all work.
They used a Peggy 2 to drive a field full of LED illuminated spheres, along with IR sensors to detect visitors entering the array. Each new person would trigger a new sphere to light up and move through the field.
This is the largest installation we’ve ever seen based on the Peggy 2.
Thanks for sharing your incredible project with us!
Links to many more Peggy 2 projects are on the wiki.
The 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire is a wrap— and it was amazing. And we took pictures. We’ve uploaded 362 photos from maker faire right here for your browsing pleasure. But first, a little preview.
Kids play with giant cardboard robot arms at the Giant Cardboard Robots booth. As they say, “The revolution will be corrugated.”
Glo-Puter Zero, by Alan Yates, with its phosphor-based memory. Truly a highlight of the show.
Lenore shares a nerdy moment with Akiba from Freaklabs.
An unusual LED badge, from the Bay Lights project.
The Western Pyrotechnics Association is a club for people that make their own fireworks. It’s incredible to see the complexity and artistry of the fireworks and the tooling that makes them.
A beautiful hovercraft, designed to look like a flying DeLorean; you can see video of it on the project site.
Back at our booth, the WaterColorBot was a constant hit. Above, Sylvia shows visitors how to sketch with it in real time.
An unexpected application: Our friend Bilal Ghalib stopped by and enlisted the WaterColorBot to help him make a birthday card for another friend.
And one of our favorite moments of Maker Faire: a young visitor, tickled pink as she tries out the WaterColorBot, watching it paint a drawing that she had just sketched.
A bicycle-powered cardboard walking rhino, by Kinetic Creatures, makers of walking cardboard robot kits, with Theo Jansen inspired walking mechanisms.
Some of the creations are simpler, like this sidewalk-chalk wielding vibrobot, spinning on a tabletop chalkboard at the Exploratorium booth.
Some of the creations are more technical, like the OpenPNP project to create open source pick and place machines for electronics assembly. We’re excited by where this is headed, along with a few related projects.
And of course, there’s no shortage of LED goodness.
Please click right here for the rest of our 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire photo album.
This is a fantastically busy week in the bay area for makers and hardware folk.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Hardware Innovation Workshop will be held at San Mateo College. Windell will be speaking on Wednesday afternoon; check out the agenda to see the full lineup of presenters.
On Thursday, we’ll be participating in Maker Faire Education Day with Super Awesome Sylvia and the WaterColorBot. If you’re a bay area teacher, you and your class should be there! If you’re a bay area student, make sure your teacher knows about this!
On Saturday and Sunday, the Bay Area Maker Faire is in full swing at the San Mateo County Event Center. We’ll be there with Super Awesome Sylvia and the WaterColorBot. Windell and I also mentor FIRST Robotics team 3501 from Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, and they will be there with their robot, Oddjob. I will be participating in the Parenting Young Makers panel on the Make: Education Stage at 2:00 pm on Sunday as well. The full Maker Faire schedule has been posted, and advance tickets are still available. If you’re planning on driving, check out the list of free parking lots with shuttles or in walking distance. 110,000 attendees were there last year— not a small party!
To spread the celebration a little further, we’re holding a DIY Fever sale in our shop now through Monday.
It was the 1960’s, and people were building some very interesting digital computers. One of them was the Digi-Comp II, which we have written about extensively: a binary mechanical computer based on rolling marbles and flip-flop gates.
For an entirely different approach, look no further than How to Build a Working Digital Computer (1967) by Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips, and Allen M. Wolk. You can download it as a free e-book (PDF, EPUB, Kindle) at Archive.org, thanks to the BitSavers PDF Document archive.
How to Build a Working Digital Computer is both an introduction to the “new and exciting field of digital computers” and a set of plans to build one. What’s especially interesting is that the plans don’t call for any specialized electronic components, but instead show how to build everything from parts that you might find at a hardware store: items like paper clips, little light bulbs, thread spools, wire, screws, and switches (that can optionally be made from paper clips).
That’s not to say that such a computer is necessarily simplistic. Arrays of paperclip logic gates can get pretty big, pretty fast.
The instructions include a read-only drum memory for storing the computer program (much like a player piano roll), made from a juice can, with read heads made from bent paper clips. A separate manually-operated “core” memory (made of paper-clip switches) is used for storing data.
So can this “paper clip” computer actually be built, and if so, would it work? Apparently yes, on both counts. Cleveland youngsters Mark Rosenstein and Kenny Antonelli built one named “Emmerack” in 1972 (albeit substituting Radio Shack slide switches for most of the paper clips), and another was built in 1975 by the Wickenburg High School Math Club in Arizona. And, at least one modern build has been completed, as you can see on YouTube.
Photo credit: History of Computers, Computing and Internet
Perhaps more surprisingly, the “paper clip” computer was also the basis of the Arkay (later, Comspace) CT-650 computer trainer, a rare, early computer that seems to have been built directly from the plans in How to Build a Working Digital Computer.
Photos of an original Comspace CT-650 posted recently at the Vintage Computer Forums show that this computer was a beautiful piece of work— no paper clips or tin cans in sight.
Although it’s a too small to see in the pictures, the fine print below the “core” memory switch array reads “PATENT PENDING.” The brains of the computer being adapted from an existing design, the patent, D210728, claims only the “Ornamental design for the data entry keyboard console.”
So go download this excellent book and make your own wonderful paper clip computer. Link: Archive.org via Friends Of DigiComp
We helped build the gold, silver, and bronze medals for this year’s RoboGames competition, which finished up yesterday in San Mateo, California.
Read on for a bit about how we designed and built the electronics for, and assembled these pretty-darned neat medals. It’s a story involving LEDs, some remarkable adhesives, and a how to operate a small-scale surface mount production.
Jonathan Foote over at Rotormind is at it again with our Art Controller. This time, he is using it to thermostatically control a ventilation fan.
He has wired up a TC74 temperature sensor on board and reprogrammed the microcontroller to trigger the relay when a temperature set point is reached. The temperature is set using the DIP switch. He has posted his code and shared in detail all of his modifications. Head over and check it out!
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