At first glance, these might appear to be normal 5 mm (“T-1 3/4”) clear lens ultrabright yellow LEDs. However, they’re actually “candle flicker” LEDs— self-flickering LEDs with a built-in flicker circuit that emulates the seemingly-random behavior of a candle flame.
In the close-up photo above, you can actually make out the glowing LED die on the left side, and a corresponding-but-not-glowing block on the right: the flicker circuit itself. In what follows, we’ll take a much closer look, and even use that little flicker chip to drive larger circuitry. Continue reading Does this LED sound funny to you?→
This turns a humble pen-plotting Eggbot into a full-on CNC-driven vibrated-tip diamond-point engraving tool, capable of light-duty marking and engraving on hard materials like glass, stone, and ceramic. Wooo!
Earlier this spring, we released our open-source ISP Shield for Arduino. After using them for a while, we’ve found a few ways to improve the design, so today we’re releasing version 2.0.
The ISP Shield is an Arduino “shield” (daughtercard) that makes it easier to use your Arduino as an AVR ISP programmer. It can be used to burn bootloaders onto new AVR chips, from directly within the Arduino programming environment, either in the on-board ZIF socket or on an external target board. More generally, it can also be used as a general-purpose AVR ISP programmer, using avrdude with the programmer type specified as “avrisp.”
One of the tricky things about using the ISP shield is that there is a known incompatibility between Arduino-as-ISP and Arduino boards that have auto-reset capability. Version 2.0 of our ISP shield design fixes this, by adding the ability to temporarily disable auto-reset on the Arduino. Auto-reset override is an optional, jumper-selected feature that can be turned on and off.
(The other jumper shown above allows you to select whether or not the ISP shield provides 5V power over the ISP interface, a handy feature for programming chips on simple target boards.)
The ISP Shield 2.0 is also our first printed circuit board to feature the OSHW logo— the first of many, we hope. :)
Several years ago, we came across this interesting artifactat one of our local electronics surplus shops, and couldn’t really make heads or tails of it. But after the passage of the aforementioned several years– along with several dozen interesting suggestions from our readers –we haven’t been able to get much closer to an answer.
But then, at this month’s Electronics Flea Market, we came across what appears to bea related chunk of hardware:
Now that the scores have been received from final-round celebrity judges Hans Camenzind and Forrest Mims, Jeri and Chris will be announcing the results of the contest live on uStream, today (Wednesday April 20) at 9 pm EST.
To help get you in the mood for the results, here are just a few of our favorites that you may not have seen, in no particular order– hopefully some of these will be amongst the winners!
A beautiful working model of a 555 constructed of discrete components installed in the Encyclopedia of Integrated Circuits.
Pavel Hanak built the most pure 555 circuits that we’ve ever seen: Astable Multivibrators Built Solely From 555s. No external resistors or capacitors, just the internal resistance and capacitance of up to 20 additional 555s. (Clearly an insane genius!)
So that’s just a taste of all the awesomeness from this contest– we hope you’ll tune in live on uStream, today (Wednesday April 20) at 9 pm EST to see the winners.
BarBot 2011 gave us just a taste of what is to come this weekend at the huge international robotics competition in San Mateo. We rounded up some video links of Drink Making Unit 2.0:
We’ll be at RoboGames all weekend, participating in the symposium and selling a few choice kits and components. So get your tickets now! If you’re not in the bay area check the National Robotics Week event listingsto find an event near you.
We’ve teamed up with Ponoko for a spring design challenge! We’re helping to judge and we’ve donated a Deluxe Egg-Bot Kit for the grand prize winner. Ponoko is also giving away vouchers for getting stuff made through their services.
Ponoko has made it so that anyone can have take advantage of prototyping tools like laser cutters and 3D printers that used to be either prohibitively expensive or inaccessible to individuals. You upload your digital designs, choose from a wide range of materials they stock, and then they fabricate them and ship the physical object to you. We’ve recommended them for folks who don’t have access to a laser cutter, but want to make custom handles for their Meggy Jr RGB or custom cases for their Bulbdial Clock.
The contest deadline is April 13, and we’re looking forward to seeing your entries!
Make Live is starting NOW, (6 pm PDT/9 pm EDT)– so join us over at Make for the live show.
(Bonus: We’ll be showing a sneak preview of next week’s project!)
You can also view the show preview, up now, and we’ll be posting the non-live video link later, once it’s posted.
Update: The show video is up.
It lets you use your Arduino (or shield-compatible clone, such as the Diavolino) as an AVR ISP programmer, for example to burn bootloaders onto “raw” AVR chips, directly within the Arduino programming environment, either in the provided ZIF socket or on an external target board.
You can read more about this process here.
The circuit is designed to be compatible with the “Arduino as ISP” option in recent versions of the Arduino IDE. It is based on a number of prior hardware implementations, most closely the version by Andre Knoerig at Fritzing.
Complete documentation, including assembly instructions, design files, and basic usage information is available on the Evil Mad Science Wiki.
We’re excited to be joining Make: Live tomorrow for Episode 5: Kinetic Contraptions. We’ll be showing our mechanical Tabletop Pong, which we took to Maker Faire last year. You can check out the show preview over at Make, and join us at 6 pm PDT/9 pm EDT Wednesday for the live show.
