It’s always good to keep your eyes open, ready to see new things. I came across this striking not-particularly-small spider with a bright red velvety abdomen, just hanging out on the concrete side of a building here in Sunnyvale, California.
I’ve never seen one of these before! How might you go about identifying it?
The Maison d’Ailleurs (translated as “House of Elsewhere”), is a museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Switzerland.
A new version of our Interactive Game of Life exhibit, shown above, is part of their new show, Playtime – Videogame mythologies. The show is devoted to the culture of video games, and exploring how the relationship between play, the various manners of gaming, and technology interrelate.
Playtime – Videogame mythologies runs through December 9, 2012 at Maison d’Ailleurs.
Here is a short video (YouYube link here) showing off the new museum display:
We’ve also just posted an extended introduction to this project here in our post about our new Interactive Game of Life kits.
Two years ago we designed an interactive exhibit of Conway’s Game of Life for the San Jose Museum of Art. The hardware that we used for that project eventually became the basis for our Octolively interactive LED kits.
We’ve recently had occasion to revisit our Game of Life project, and to build an all-new version of the museum exhibit. Along the way, we’ve rewritten the firmware from scratch and added a number of features. And today we’re pleased to announce the result: our new Interactive Game of Life Kit.
BarBot 2012 was a blast! Drink Making Unit 2.0 behaved like a champ, as usual. Our friends over at Make have posted some pictures from Friday and more pictures and video from Saturday. Thanks to all the people and robots who came out for the fun!
Photo credit: Kipp Bradford
This Friday and Saturday we’ll be at BarBot 2012 with Drink Making Unit 2.0.
The event is March 2-3, 8 pm to 12 am at PariSoma and is for ages 21+. Get your advance tickets soon as they are nearly sold out!
One of the joys of working with basic digital electronics– and logic gate ICs in particular –is that it almost works like building with a set of Lego blocks: One output goes here, which connects to the next input here, and so forth until it does what you wanted.
If you’ve played with chips like these, you’ve probably also come across chips with “open collector” outputs. And if not, they’re worth knowing about. Open-collector outputs form the basis of a number of clever tricks for level-shifting and interfacing between different types of logic, and from logic to other types of electronic circuits.
In what follows, we’ll work with the SN7407N, which is one of the most basic ICs with open-collector outputs. We’ll discuss what it means to have “open collector” outputs, and show some of the different ways that they are used. Continue reading Basics: Open Collector Outputs
This Saturday, we’ll be at the Exploratorium participating in the Open Make event focused on the theme “Time.” We had a great time when we participated in the very first Open Make event, and are glad to see the program continuing with a great lineup of themes this year. This time, we’ll be bringing several clock and time related projects.
The event runs from 10 am to 2 pm, Saturday, February 18, and will feature workshops, maker displays, and Dale Dougherty interviewing several makers on their time related projects. We hope to see you there!
