Ponoko Spring Design Challenge

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Ponoko Springtime Challenge Graphic


We’ve teamed up with Ponoko for a spring design challenge! We’re helping to judge and we’ve donated a Deluxe Egg-Bot Kit for the grand prize winner. Ponoko is also giving away vouchers for getting stuff made through their services.

Ponoko has made it so that anyone can have take advantage of prototyping tools like laser cutters and 3D printers that used to be either prohibitively expensive or inaccessible to individuals. You upload your digital designs, choose from a wide range of materials they stock, and then they fabricate them and ship the physical object to you. We’ve recommended them for folks who don’t have access to a laser cutter, but want to make custom handles for their Meggy Jr RGB or custom cases for their Bulbdial Clock.

The contest deadline is April 13, and we’re looking forward to seeing your entries!


Eggbot with Brass Hardware


The Deluxe Egg-Bot Kit is available here.

This entry was posted in Eggbot, EMSL Projects, Engineering and tagged . Bookmark the Permalink.

ISP Shield Kit

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ISP Shield

The Evil Mad Science ISP Shield is a new open source hardware kit that we’re releasing today.

It lets you use your Arduino (or shield-compatible clone, such as the Diavolino) as an AVR ISP programmer, for example to burn bootloaders onto “raw” AVR chips, directly within the Arduino programming environment, either in the provided ZIF socket or on an external target board.

You can read more about this process here.

The circuit is designed to be compatible with the “Arduino as ISP” option in recent versions of the Arduino IDE. It is based on a number of prior hardware implementations, most closely the version by Andre Knoerig at Fritzing.

Complete documentation, including assembly instructions, design files, and basic usage information is available on the Evil Mad Science Wiki.

This entry was posted in Electronics, EMSL Projects, Evil Mad Scientist Shop and tagged , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Open Source Hardware logo: Up for public vote!

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oshw logo candidate

After an initial round of judging 129 entries (Whew!), The effort to establish a logo for open source hardware has moved onto the next stage. We’ve narrowed the field down to ten finalists. And, voting has been opened to the public, so go vote!

We’re putting our own vote in for “#95,” the geared logo by Fred PRATE, shown above with variations. It’s one of the few that suggests both mechanics and electronics, and it will look darn good milled into a hunk of metal or silkscreened onto a circuit board.

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Gaunt and Glimmering Remains of Gastropods

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1. Wetlands

Here at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, tall grasses and other slender plants thrive around the edges of our often-salty marshes.


2. Tall grass

Towards the end of every summer, as the grasses start to dry out, you’ll sometimes see a gleaming white jewel, shining from the top of a stem.


3. Mysterious shiny thing

And if you look closer, it becomes quite a puzzle what that might be. A chrysalis? A gall of some sort?


4. Isolated, white

But it turns out to be both simpler and stranger than that. The little jewels are actually the desiccated shells of brown garden snails, bleached by the summer sun.

5. Snails!

The common garden snail in this area is helix aspersa, the culinary snail of France, imported here in the gold-rush era by a Frenchman who intended to sell them as food. Normally, they are chestnut to ebony in color, with lighter striations.

4. At least eight

But the snails that we find in the grasses– I count at least eight in this picture –have dried up after their food sources, and have been left to sit in the sun for much longer than they would like. Seems clear enough that they climbed up the stem for a leafy snack while the plant was still green, but didn’t make it down in time.

9. Faded

7. Bleached

8. Anise

Depending how long it’s been, the shells may still be striped, faded, or fully bleached. In some cases the shell is long empty and backlit by sunlight. In others, the resident has only recently passed.

In some cases the surface luster weathers shiny like a jewel, catching your eye from a distance. And that’s how we end up with ornamented grasses, glittering with the gaunt remains of gallic gastropods.

This entry was posted in EMSL Projects, Nature. Bookmark the Permalink.

Geek Books!

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Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred

We recently received review copies of four relatively new books from No Starch Press. Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred is a collection of technically oriented how-to projects covering a lot of the same ground that we cover in our projects here; sewing projects, music projects, electronics projects and others.

Lego Idea Book

The other three books are Lego Technic Idea Books: Fantastic Contraptions, Simple Machines, and Wheeled Wonders. And these are a phenomenal collection of assemblies and subassemblies providing the kind of masterful insight into Lego construction that comes from many years of careful study.

Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred

Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred by David Erik Nelson is largely descriptive, with diagrams and pictures sprinkled throughout. It covers an amazing range of activities and skills, including sewing, glueing, woodworking and soldering. There’s even a nice how to solder section.

Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred

Interestingly, none of the electronics projects requires programming. Shred refers to music, as many of the electronics projects are audio based. Many of the non-electronics projects are also musically inclined, but there is plenty for everyone in this book, from boomerangs to rockets.

Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred is a good introduction to making stuff, and is clearly oriented toward doing things with kids. It would be nice if it had full-color photography. Some of the projects have supplemental material which is worth checking out on the Snip Burn Solder Blog.

Lego Idea Book

The Lego books, by Yoshihito Isogawa are slim and nearly wordless. The main exposition happens in the table of contents, where the symbols that head each section are described.

Lego Idea Book

The body of the books unfold with beautiful full-color photography. The contraptions are cleverly constructed of different colors to make the mechanisms and assembly clear.

Lego Idea Book

Many of the assemblies seem obvious in retrospect, but the thought that went into them is deep and clear.

Lego Idea Book

Not all of the assemblies are obvious at first glance, and many are quite complicated, like this gear reduction assembly that allows two speeds in addition to direct gearing. For anyone who loves Lego, prototypes in Lego, or loves mechanical assemblies, these books are definitely required viewing, and we’re not sure how we lived without them for so long.

(Full disclosure: we received these review copies from No Starch Press, and Evil Mad Science is mentioned favorably as a resource in Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred as a resource. That could have influenced our opinion. Also, we like Legos.)

This entry was posted in Electronics, Engineering, Reviews and tagged . Bookmark the Permalink.

Open Source Hardware Logos

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Hey internet: You’ve got some good artists out there, and we could use a little help, right now!

Today is the last day to submit entries for the new Open Source Hardware logo — There are over 100 entries so far, and you can enter your own sketch by posting it there in the forum.

The official requirements are that it is (1) easy to print/see on a circuit board or schematic document and (2) that it signify “open-ness.” To part (1), I’d add, it should be easy to carve/see milled into a block of aluminum– open hardware isn’t just about electronics! –and to part (2), I’d add that locks and keys aren’t always the best way to indicate that something is “open.” (Locks are often shut. There are plenty of things that never are– Klein bottles come to mind.)

So, now is the “last minute” — and time to send in your own entry. We’ve got a whole lot of entries that won’t look good on a circuit board (or milled into aluminum), and a whole lot of entries with locks and keyholes that don’t necessarily send the right message. Care to lend a hand?

This entry was posted in Everything Else, Open Hardware and tagged . Bookmark the Permalink.

PeggyDraw 2

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peggydraw2

 

We are pleased to finally release PeggyDraw 2, a little bit of long-delayed software. It’s a Processing application that you can use to draw simple 1-bit animations on a 25×25 grid. The neat bit, of course, is that you can press the “Save” button, and the file that it saves is actually an Arduino program, ready to be programmed onto a Peggy 2.

 

You can download PeggyDraw 2 right here. It’s fully built in Processing, so that it works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Also, open source, designed to be adaptable.
Some things to note about this program:

 

  • If you don’t have Processing on your computer, download it here.
  • The editing interface is easy point-and-click. Try it out to see how it works.
  • You can individually pick different delay times per frame, as low as 20 ms, or give every frame the same duration.
  • The frame data is stored in Arduino program memory, so you’re only limited by the flash memory in terms of frame number– over 250 frames fit on an ATmega328P.
  • The output file is located in the PeggyDraw2 sketch directory, inside a directory named “PeggyProgram” “data.” The file is called “PeggyProgram.pde.”
  • You can both save a file and later reload it for editing.
  • The formats used in PeggyDraw 2 should be easily adaptable to write sequences for other types of LED grids, even of different aspect ratio and control software.

And, special thanks to Matt Mets, http://cibomahto.com for assistance with Processing.
Update, 3/19/2011: We’ve posted a new version, PeggyDraw 2 v. 1.1, available here. Note that the output file is now stored in the “data” directory, not a separate “PeggyProgram” directory.

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