We’re getting into the spirit with a couple of seasonally appropriate decorations. The Rebel Alliance Ornament and the Imperial Crest Ornament for EggBot are both available on thingiverse. Our guide to printing ornaments with the EggBot may be helpful, too.
Both designs are derived from a set of silhouettes from vecteezy.com.
It’s the time of year we post a link to our Holiday Project Archive! Head over for cookies, decorations and food projects.
Our friends at Mouser sent us this picture of their Octolively derived display, updated for the holidays:
We continue to have fun with your Octolively module design. In the attached photo you can see why we decided to use sockets for the LEDs on our boards. We plan on changing out the display for each of the holidays.
I was a little concerned at first about using the red LEDs with resistors that were chosen for white or blue, but they’re socketed, so replacing any that get damaged by overdriving should be easy! Looks like a fun way to celebrate at the office, and the snowflake tree-topper is a nice touch.
Our friend Fran has been making holiday ornaments with the EggBot and writes:
I just wanted to let everyone know that I have finally gotten to be able to use the Pilot Gold/Silver Markers.
She suggests dividing the drawing into layers so that after each layer you can take the pen out to shake it to keep the ink flowing. We’ve added her tips to the wiki page about choosing pens for the EggBot.
If you have other tips for which pens you like to use or for working with ornaments, we’d love to hear about them!
Over on twitter, @shaiss says:
This is why #OSHA is awesome! In a pinch+some parts we made our electronic menorah. @EMSL design & @adafruit trinket.
If you want to roll your own, the open source hardware documentation is on our wiki. If you’re not keen on the breadboard aesthetic for your hanukkiyah, you can still get the Mega Menorah 9000 kit.
After some troubleshooting and finishing her Deluxe LED Menorah kit, Judith wrote to say:
That’s me showing off success! I want to thank you again for leading me through the process- and just in time for Hanukkah. I’ll really enjoy using it.
Thanks for sending the picture and sharing your success with us!
I came across some slips of paper from Maker Faire New York this year which can best be desribed as ephemeral low resolution digital art. Above is a B&W selfie from the Qduino Mini Thermal Printer.
The ASCII Art Camera from Hive76 used a small inkjet printer and a webcam.
Plinko Poetry created poetry by detecting the path of a disc falling between pegs across scrolling headlines.
The most extreme example of this art form I came across was the word.camera ITP project by Ross Goodwin which algorithmically generates a sort of novelette from a source picture.
word.camera uses convolutional neural networks (via Clarifai) to extract concept words from images. It expands those initial words (mostly nouns) into sentences and paragraphs using a lexical relationship database (ConceptNet) and a flexible template system.
The source picture for mine can be viewed on the word.camera site along with the full text. You can generate new ones by uploading a picture, but that is not nearly as satisfying as interacting with it in person. The physical project was housed in a vintage camera body with a small thermal printer, so that the camera itself was generating the art.
The confluence of inexpensive electronics and relative ease of working with embedded systems that made all this art possible can also generate unexpected results. This last piece of accidental glitch art is from Quin’s project: while trying to print a picture, it encountered an error and gave me a printout of unintelligible characters interspersed with bits of picture.
Related: CNC halftones with ASCII art
The Evil Mad Scientist Thanksgiving Sale is running now through Monday. Coupon code TURKEY will get you 10% off sitewide, and we have a list of kits on additional discount on our specials page. Thanks for being our awesome readers and customers!
Introducing the Boldport Buggy kit.
This simple and playful soldering kit is based on the on the beautiful Buggy circuit board designed by Saar Drimer of Boldport.
The first version of this circuit board was created as a badge for the hardwear.io hardware security conference in The Hague. This new version of the Buggy is a complete kit, featuring an updated circuit board, with a power switch and six candle-flicker LEDs.
A cool detail is that its six legs are actually the current-limiting resistors for those six LEDs. They are posable (giving it quite a bit of personality) and we have given it little red tubing socks to cover up the otherwise-conductive feet.
The Boldport Buggy kit is available now at our store, and you can read more about its design at Boldport.
