MiniPOV Cylon firmware

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MiniPOV3 Cylon   MiniPOV3 Cylon head-on

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.

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Halloween projects and Texas

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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!

Headless horseman   
How to hack LEDs into Lego minifigures for Halloween (Link)

 

FSM Costume - 01.jpg   
Make a Flying Spaghetti Monster Costume (Link)

 

   Croc Costume - 10.jpg
Crocodile Costume (Link)

 

Attaching long wires 2   
Easy Itty-Bitty Blinky LED Jack-O’-Lantern (Link)

 

Dalek Body-- under construction   
A Robotic Dalek Pumpkin (Link)

 

See also:

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October Linkdump

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Pumpkin Spice Truffles

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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 →

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Time to Make a Cylon?

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Make: HalloweenStarburst

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.

Red Eye

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.

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Just in time for halloween: Bats

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bats hanging like fruit

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.

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Meet Big Daddy Hands

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Mr. 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:

Useful!
Continue reading Meet Big Daddy Hands →

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Interactive LED Coffee Tables: Update and kits!

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PopSci_2007_10 Cool, our interactive LED coffee tables got a mention in the October issue of Popular Science!

What’s an interactive LED coffee table? (Funny you should ask….) It’s a coffee table that has hundreds of LEDs in the top surface that respond to motion above the table. We have (finally) put together a movie to give you a better idea of how they respond to their environment. You can see the movie on YouTube or watch it embedded:

The complete tables are for sale from Because We Can, our partners in design on this project. There are presently two models, The Ripple (left) and The Wave (right):

the ripple   the wave

Since we first showed these off, we have had a lot of inquiries about how you can make your own table like this. We are now producing (very large) electronic soldering kits so that you indeed can make your own.

Our kits include the giant printed circuit boards, components, instructions, LEDs, and all other parts needed to build the electronic portion of the table tops. Constructed, you end up with what essentially amounts to a single extra-ginormous circuit board that can sit underneath the clear or frosted glass (or plastic) top of your own table. Interesting in getting a kit? Click here to read the details!

(Revised 11/16/2007).

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