Ever since our wine charm project, we’ve been amassing an ever-growing collection of interesting-looking electronic components. It turns out that they happen to make pretty good Christmas tree ornaments.
The Bulbdial Clock Kit
Back in April, we posted a little project in which we demonstrated a simple Bulbdial clock, based on the original concept from IronicSans.com. We had a lot of feedback on the original project. We listened to it, learned from it, and finally designed a kit around the concept.
EvilMadScientist Meetup tonight in Portland!
Hey folks, we’re having an informal meetup this evening (Friday Nov. 27) at the Kennedy School McMenamins, in Portland, Oregon. We be in the Cypress Room starting at 8 PM.
Check the @EMSL twitter feed for any last-minute updates, and we’ll hope to see you there!
Peggy 2LE
It’s new… and we shall call it Mini Peggy.
Peggy 2LE (“little edition”) is a diminutive version of our popular Peggy 2 LED “pegboard” an open-source LED matrix display. Peggy 2 is big, designed to fit a 25×25 grid of 10 mm LEDs. Peggy 2LE is mostly the same, just smaller: it’s designed to fit 5 mm LEDs.
Here’s the family photo: Big ol’ Peggy next to the new Mini Peggy, Peggy 2LE.
Continue reading Peggy 2LE
Typographic Character Coasters
A simple design project for font lovers: Single-character typographic coasters.
Linkdump: November 2009
- Invisible gecko
- Nice vehicle concepts by Luigi Colani.
- Contraptor, another interesting open source hardware construction system
- How trees shed leaves
- Geometric fractals in Processing
- Oloid, a geometric toy
- Lucky cat candy
- I wish I had an RC submarine to use one of these.
- Frosty Bubbles
- A Commodore 64 emulator written in LabVIEW (via @Paeaetech)
- Did you know about the Secret Single-app Mode in Mac OS X?
- Interesting construction accident. [Snopes link; beware of popups]
- Nice sunset
- Soda bottle rockets at Popular Mechanics
- Roundup of geek cufflinks
- I could watch slow motion bullet impacts all day long.
- DIY motors for electric airplanes
- Average Cats
YOU HAVE EIGHT EARTH MINUTES LEFT
Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But, the deadline for our Arduino Contest at Instructables is approaching right fast: Entries are accepted until this Sunday, Nov 15, 2009, at 11:59 PM PST.
Why enter? To show off your cool stuff! Also, you could win a Meggy Jr RGB handheld gaming kit, or an Arduino Mega or other nice goodies, so don’t you want to come out and play?
Official contest rules are here. The basic entry requirement is that you make a project that involves the Arduino IDE in some way, and you can already check out many of the great projects entered. Woo!
Refining Edge-Lit Holiday Cards
We’ve picked up a bunch of improvements on our Edge-Lit Holiday Cards since last year and we’ve collected them here for you to see. (Also, welcome Popular Science readers! This project is mentioned in the December 2009 issue.)
New LED Hanukkah Menorah Kit
One of our first kit projects, and one of the consistently most popular, has been the LED Mini Menorah project. For a couple years now we have meant to revisit that project, and we’ve finally got around to doing so. Here is the result: our new Deluxe LED Menorah Kit.
A pleasant surprise in the freezer
Our automatic ice maker is on the fritz, so we’ve temporarily reverted to making ice in conventional trays. But, imagine our delight at opening up the freezer and finding this!
Several of our ice cubes apparently formed with long spikes on top. This is really *not* what you expect when you start out with liquid water in an ice cube tray. Snowcrystals.com has a fairly detailed explanation of how these things form, and it’s documented elsewhere as well. (Roughly speaking, supercooled water is pushed up through a hole, somewhat like magma forming a volcano.) It’s relatively easy to form these in your freezer if you start with distilled water, but occasionally– as in our case –they do occur with regular tap water.
