Besides the eight project ideas that have been listed as comments to the original contest announcement, I’ve received 39 pieces of contest-entry E-mail, some of which contain more than one project idea.
I’m counting each entry that I’ve received as a separate entry. One piece of email contains a list of thirteen (but number 13 reads “i couldn’t think of anything else, i just like the number thirteen”).
Some of these ideas are just great! Keep ’em coming!
What can you do with a lot of supercapacitors? This is no idle question. I picked up a bag of 100 on eBay. These are sweet: Cooper PowerStor Series A carbon aerogel capactitors with ultra-low resistance. Specifications: 2.5 V, 1.5 F, with nominal equivalent series resistance of 60 milliohms at 1 kHz. I recently saw these at Digi-Key for $9.60 each. These aren’t the wimpy memory backup caps that aren’t rated for enough current to drive an LED. These are power caps, meant for high current charge and discharge.
Obviously, these are meant for great things. It only leaves one question: What great things should I do with them? To help answer that, I’m holding a contest: Come up with the best use for a pile of supercaps, and you’ll get ten of them to play with.
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest!
I am one of the evil mad scientists from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. I am approximately 11.75 years old. I am also one of the co-creators of the LED dining table. I would like to tell of my experience at the Maker Faire.
Continue reading Maker Faire 2006
On this breadboard there are four Kingbright PSA08-11HWA sixteen segment displays that I got from BG Micro some years ago. The PSA08-11HWA comes in an eighteen pin (16 + decimal point + common anode) dual-inline package. Normally that’s great– ideal for use in a breadboard. Note that the rows of pins are oriented 90 degrees from how you’d like them to be– this is really only good if you want your displays to be read top-to-bottom in the breadboard, rather than left-to-right. Turn your head sideways to read this display saying “M7H7.” Controlling these displays is not difficult. However, in this case, where you don’t need to change what’s displayed, it’s absurdly easy.
Continue reading Making the “Evil” LED logo
We’re number 2! We’re number 2!
On a recent list of the top ten strangest kitchen gadgets, our Interactive LED Dining Table narrowly edged out the tetris cooking timer.
Continue reading TechEBlog list of strange kitchen gadgets
This is our dining table. We built it because we needed a new dining table, and I guess we’re just that kind of people. It has a frosted glass top lit by 448 multicolored LEDs that respond, in a complex and gentle fashion, to input generated by motion above the table while we eat.We showed it off at the Maker Faire. Click on the photo to get to see some other photos of the table construction. Lenore was interviewed about the table at the faire, see Lenore’s CNET inteview.
I gave a computer graphics tutorial at the MakerFaire about making 3D graphics using POV-Ray, a free, cross-platform ray-tracing program. I called it POV-Ray for Mere Mortals.
I gave a short presentation at the 2006 Makerfaire entitled What Makes Atomic Clocks Tick?, giving some details about how atomic clocks work and how they are used.
