What is it? It’s a most useful little thing: a low-cost diamond engraving attachment for the Eggbot.
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 2.0 is also our first printed circuit board to feature the OSHW logo— the first of many, we hope. :)
The ISP shield kit is available at Evil Mad Science, and complete documentation is available at the Evil Mad Science Wiki.
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:
This spring, we’ve had the honor to help judge the 555 Contest organized by Jeri Ellsworth and Chris Gammell.
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.
555 Timer based Music Box Player
Flashus Bulbus, an array of blinking bulbs
555 Adding Machine by Alan Yates
555 AM Radio by Eric Schlaepfer:
This Atari Punk Sequencer just rocks; check out the video.
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.
It’s National Robotics Week, and for us that means RoboGames!
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:
Lots of the BarBot partygoers posted photos to flickr too, including a huge set from Spaceman Sam and lots more from ekai, nicolecwong, ninaviss, hackmancoltaire, k0re, shifzr and amyr_81.
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.
Photo from BarBot 2011 by Samuel Coniglio.
The Evil Mad Science ISP Shield is a new open source hardware kit that we’re releasing today.
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.
The other three books are Lego Technic Idea Books: Fantastic Contraptions, Simple Machines, and Wheeled Wonders. And these are a phenomenal collection of assemblies and subassemblies providing the kind of masterful insight into Lego construction that comes from many years of careful study.
Interestingly, none of the electronics projects requires programming. Shred refers to music, as many of the electronics projects are audio based. Many of the non-electronics projects are also musically inclined, but there is plenty for everyone in this book, from boomerangs to rockets.
Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred is a good introduction to making stuff, and is clearly oriented toward doing things with kids. It would be nice if it had full-color photography. Some of the projects have supplemental material which is worth checking out on the Snip Burn Solder Blog.
The body of the books unfold with beautiful full-color photography. The contraptions are cleverly constructed of different colors to make the mechanisms and assembly clear.
Many of the assemblies seem obvious in retrospect, but the thought that went into them is deep and clear.
Not all of the assemblies are obvious at first glance, and many are quite complicated, like this gear reduction assembly that allows two speeds in addition to direct gearing. For anyone who loves Lego, prototypes in Lego, or loves mechanical assemblies, these books are definitely required viewing, and we’re not sure how we lived without them for so long.
(Full disclosure: we received these review copies from No Starch Press, and Evil Mad Science is mentioned favorably as a resource in Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred as a resource. That could have influenced our opinion. Also, we like Legos.)
