My old friend Blaise Mibeck sent in photos of the Green Machine, a brilliant minimalist dystopian creation by his son Gaelen, age 12. The photos are slightly blurry, but the content makes up for it. [Link]
MiniPOV Cylon firmware
The MiniPOVs were created by AdaFruit Industries. They Rebelled. They Evolved.
And now, they may be invading your front porch.
It’s an open secret that here at evilmadscientist we go both ways: analog and digital.
So, here is yet another way to get a Cylon pumpkin circuit– a useful component for halloween. (Yes, you can do KITT too, we won’t stop you.) We’ll spare you the carved pumpkins and dive right into the details.
There seem to be a lot of MiniPOV kits out there. If you’ve got one, this is a fast way to make a passable slowly-scanning eye.
Note that we are not using the “POV” part of the MiniPOV– you don’t need to wave your pumpkin back and forth; it really is just a slowly-moving image.
(You can get a MiniPOV direct from Adafruit or from the Make store, probably in time for the big day.)
This is a one minute project for some of you (you know who you are), but if you are really starting from scratch there isn’t any giant time advantage to going doing it this way instead of analog.
Once you have a working minipov, the first step is to download the firmware (4 kB .ZIP file) and unzip it. If you are programming the MiniPOV3 directly through its serial port,
pop open a terminal and move to the directory. Type (with a return after each line):
make all
make program
And… that’s it.
(If you have a GUI for programming AVRs and know how to use it, you can of course use that instead of programming through the terminal.)
If you are using some other AVR programmer or are programming a bare ATtiny2313 without a MiniPOV at all, you will need to edit the header of the included makefile to reflect the type of AVR programmer and the port where it is located. (And then, proceed with the instructions above.)
While this makes a pretty good looking pumpkin, there is still room for improvement in the firmware– the motion is reasonably smooth but doesn’t yet capture the incandescent fade that the analog versions do. I’ll leave it to the community to improve this firmware; if you have some better code, let me know and I’ll help roll it in.
Update:
Tim Charron sent in a greatly improved version of this program– please give it a try.
You can find more pumpkin related projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
Halloween projects and Texas
This week the lab staff is heading off to Austin, Texas, our former stomping grounds and site of the other Maker Faire this year!
As we noted earlier, we’ll be doing a demonstration of how to build an excellent Bat Costume out of an umbrella and a hoodie. However, our primary project there will be our booth: High-Tech Pumpkins, where we will show up to a dozen (fingers crossed) halloween-themed projects, TSA willing. (Thank FSM it’s Austin, not Boston.)
While we get everything together this week, our publishing schedule will be a little wonky. However, halloween is just around the corner, so it’s time to dust off a few projects from our halloween archives!
How to hack LEDs into Lego minifigures for Halloween (Link)
Make a Flying Spaghetti Monster Costume (Link)
Crocodile Costume (Link)
Easy Itty-Bitty Blinky LED Jack-O’-Lantern (Link)
A Robotic Dalek Pumpkin (Link)
See also:
Evilmadscientist in PC Magazine’s Favorite Blog List
Neat-o: our site was picked as one of PC Magazine’s 100 Favorite Blogs!
October Linkdump
- After my video has had 10^6 views on YouTube, I have learned, firsthand, the sad truth about such things.
- Costume for people who like Big meatballs.
- The ID Please flickr group.
- Cute 500 watt cat
- My new favorite expression: “Sneakier than a dehydrated grape brick.”
- Whoever put together the graphs on page 9 of this PDF datasheet (for an SMT DC-DC converter) should be shot.
- Hey Okies, what’s with your tasteless new license plates? (via).
- I bet that magnetically controllable liquid photonic crystals would be fun to play with.
- I could look at this table of data structures all day long. link.
- I bet that the people who run this blog are as freaked out by looking at Evil Mad Scientist as we are when we look at their page.
- I like LED Jack o’lanterns
- List of electrical plugs in different countries. Yup, that’s useful.
- I like that the BBC has an updated Dalek Cake recipe.
- Beware, there may be Daleks already lurking in your kitchen.
- I wish that I had a good excuse to build a web site based on tiddlywiki; I really like the interface.
- Speaking of awesome things, check out this video made with Google Street View. It should be longer.
Pumpkin Spice Truffles
The fall holidays are fantastic ones: Halloween is all about costumes and candy and Thanksgiving is all about food. Here is how to make one of our favorite fall treats: pumpkin spice truffles. (Yum.)
To get the note-perfect flavor of traditional American pumpkin pie, we use the spice ratio from the old-standard can of Libby’s pumpkin (here is the recipe from under the label). Bittersweet chocolate has a stronger flavor than that of pumpkin, so we actually use twice the spice of a pie for a small batch (well, small for us batch) of truffles. The amazing thing is that these pumpkin-free wonders taste uncannily like pumpkin pie. Not that anyone will have trouble distinguishing your truffles and a pie, but you just might get asked, “Are these actually made with pumpkin?”
Continue reading Pumpkin Spice Truffles
Time to Make a Cylon?
Yay! We finally got our copy of the Make: Halloween Edition.
This special issue is actually available in two different covers, but we particularly like thisversion because of that little starburst: “Make an LED Jack-O’-Lantern!”
On page 60, you can find the article that we wrote about how to build the Larson Scanner (named after Glen A. Larson); a scanning eye for your old-school Cylon or KITT pumpkin projects.
The article is actually a slightly updated version of our project from last Halloween, Make A Cylon Jack-O-Lantern. Last year’s how-to is still online— and we have recently checked to make sure that all the parts on the parts list are still available.
Either way, let’s see those Cylons! If you build one, please post your pictures in the Evil Mad Science Auxiliary.
Just in time for halloween: Bats
The animals that everyone hears about from Australia are things like koalas, wallabies and platypuses. But the real stars, as far as I’m concerned, are the bats. We saw a few bats in the zoos we went to, including ghost bats and flying foxes. But just walking along in the afternoon in the botanical gardens in Sydney, we looked up and happened to notice that what was hanging from the trees wasn’t leaves or fruit – it was bats. Hundreds of flying foxes. They chattered at each other and flew from one roost to another. While the echidnas were awfully cute bumbling along at the zoo, and the cockatoos were fun to watch at the park, it was the bats in the garden that stole the show.
Meet Big Daddy Hands
If you are handy with a soldering iron, you’ve probably come across one of these ultra-handy soldering tools. It is various known as a
third hand soldering tool, a set of helping hands, or, as it was introduced to me, as “Mr. Hands.”
Mr. Hands is a great guy to have around for holding a small circuit board or for holding two wires against each other. He provides a third (or even fourth) hand to hold things and prevents your fingers from getting burned. There are all sorts of clever mods that you can perform to them, and they are very cheap– typically $2-$6. You can also make your own equivalent with the same kind of budget, which is good from the standpoint of being able to choose different designs. (I’m partial to the alligator-clips-on-big-fat-wires method, myself.)
The only weakness of Mr. hands is, well, weakness. He’s small, can’t hold heavy or big things, and probably got picked last for kickball. And if it starts to cause a problem, then that’s when we bring out Big Daddy Hands, shown here with Mr. Hands for scale:
Same Bat Holiday, Same Bat Costume!
One year ago, Lenore wrote up her (remarkably popular) umbrella bat costume. If you didn’t build one last year, maybe you want to get started now for this year? In any case, she will be giving a demonstration of how to build it at the Maker Faire in Austin, TX, on October 20-21, 2007.
