You know they love you when during spring cleaning they save the vintage Popular Mechanics magazines and ship them to you. They must really love me because I got twenty-one pounds from the 1960’s in the mail! I can’t wait to read them all, but so far I’ve only made it half-way through July 1962, which contains “Your Complete Concrete Guide” and “The Desperate Flight of Airtransit 13” among other treasures.
Even the font size has gotten smaller.
What can you do with a busted (or merely obsolete) chip? Well, you can always make a trivet or even chip bugs. But here’s a new one: Alejandro Gonzalez found that you could make a BristleBot by bending the pins of the
chip. Clever!
[Flickr photo set]
[YouTube video — blurry but you get the idea.]
Adapted from the original by John Shadle, and used by kind permission. (Thanks!)
Big, bad, beautiful and bright 10 mm diffused PINK LEDs, just the thing to help you make that ultra-geeky Valentine’s day gift! Seriously hard to find. Cheaper than diamonds.
[Product page]
(Remember: What better way to say “I love you,” than with the gift of doped semiconductors exhibiting radiative recombination properties?)
DON’T FEAR ART.
High-quality black and white vinyl stickers, 8.5″ x 1.5″, $1.00 each. [Product page]
Lots of people are apparently afraid of LEDs and wires. Show them that you aren’t.
And some less flashy goodies:
Resistor lead forming tools, as seen in this article.
[Product page]
20-pin DIP ZIF sockets. Cheap.
Perfect for programing ATtiny2313’s or other small DIP microcontrollers.
Also recently added, for those of you that find this sort of thing exciting: surplus 22-pin sockets and 10-pin headers. (Yow!)
I just found out [via CO] that trinlayk used our computational method to make cat beds! She used this pattern, modified, of course, to accommodate the specific volumes of her cats, Megumi (pictured above) and Seimei. Megumi looks mighty pleased with the situation. Thanks for putting the pics in the Auxiliary, Trinlay!
Check out these neat chips that I picked up at a Silicon Valley junk shop.
They’ve got pins on the bottom and a socket on top. Wait– what?!?
Continue reading A funny looking chip
