Justin over at WyoInnovations writes:
“My 14 year old daughter put together the Larson Scanner Kit offered by the Evil Mad Science Laboratories (EMSL). We have put together quite a few soldering kits around here and this one is, simply put, the best “learn-to-solder” kit I’ve ever come across.”
Thanks, Justin!
Kits are in stock over at the Evil Mad Science store, just in time for Halloween!
Bottles Of Hope By Peter Sid from peter sid on Vimeo.
Peter Sid wrote in to tell us about his “Bottles of Hope” chandelier that he has entered into a design contest at Apartment Therapy. Evocative of the famous Droog Milk Bottle Lamp, Peter’s design features an array of 108 chemotherapy bottles, individually lit by LEDs. (Chemo bottles have been decorated and repurposed since 1999 by the Bottles of Hope project, hence the name.) We’ve embedded Peter’s slideshow video above. If you can’t see it here, you can click here to view it at Vimeo.
We’re out here in Queens for Maker Faire NY 2010, at the New York Hall of Science– which is also the former 1964-65 World’s Fair grounds. Amazing location, and it’s amazing to see everything coming together for this weekend.
You can see more pictures from today in this photo set. We’ll hope to see you there this weekend as well!
One of the standard progressions in electronics is to smaller and smaller packages for electronic devices. While this is wonderful in so many ways, it’s a pain in others. Many of our projects call for soldering components to a circuit board, where you have (for example) a microcontroller, some LED drivers and some LEDs. As miniaturization progresses, it has become harder to find big, easy to solder “through hole” versions of the LED driver chips that we like. We can be sure that eventually it will become difficult to find microcontrollers or even LEDs except in fine-pitch “surface mount” packages.
Many surface mount components are actually just fine for hand assembly with a soldering iron, or with a skillet or toaster oven, if you know what you’re doing.
But among the hardest of the packages to deal with– as in darn-near impossible for a hobbyist –is the Ball Grid Array, commonly referred to as BGA. BGAs can be any number of different integrated circuits — that don’t have leads on the sides, but instead have a grid of solder balls on the bottom. This allows for rather extreme miniaturization, since the whole package need not be much larger than the chip. The packages range from tiny logic gates, with only a few contacts, to great big CPUs and FPGAs with thousands of balls. Soldering these is not trivial, since every solder ball on the chip has to melt to the solder below on the circuit board, usually with the help of a specialized oven that pre-warms the bottom side of the board. Circuits with BGAs are usually inspected by X-ray, because it’s the only way to check all of those solder joints trapped under the chip.Given all that, you can imagine my surprise at coming across this BGA-packaged soap as a “bath bar” at a hotel. It’s well known that hotel bars of soap are small, but I never expected that they’d have to go to such extremes.
When Pluto was “demoted” from being a planet some years ago, I thought that it was pretty stupid. After all, I had learned about our set of nine planets as a simple fact in grade school. If anything, I had expected the number of planets to grow as they were discovered, not shrink.
What’s the big deal? Why not just grandfather Pluto into the club? The principal consequence of which objects are called “planets” is how many little plastic balls go into a solar-system model kits, right?
Well, yes and no. It turns out that our solar system has a huge number of objects. Not just the sun and a handful planets, but also hundreds of thousands of other cataloged objects (“minor planets”), the vast majority of which are now classified as small solar system bodies. These include most of the main-belt asteroids, comets, centaurs, trojans, kuiper-belt objects, scattered-disc objects, and other trans-neptunian objects. And, we will discover more.
Today Pluto, like Ceres, is proudly known as one of our five wonderful dwarf planets.
What distinguishes these dwarf planets from their larger and more familiar cousins? An intuitive and powerful discriminator: Simply put, planets are out there orbiting on their own, while dwarf planets are found in belts of objects that share the same orbit. Putting this in mathematical terms, there’s a stark difference between our eight planets– which dominate their orbital neighborhoods –and our five known dwarf planets, which at best make up mere fractions of their respective belts. Now that we’ve recognized the difference between major planets and dwarf planets, it’s clear as day which group Pluto belongs to.
And, despite poor Pluto, the minor shame of having “lost” one of our planets seems more than made up by the discovery in 2003 of Eris— a dwarf planet both larger and (usually) more distant than Pluto. Already, some dozens of other dwarf planet candidates have been identified, and there are countless others yet undiscovered.
The simple fact is that we live in an exciting time of discovery. While it may feel natural in a sense to enshrine an immutable list of “the planets,” it is instead our humble duty as scientists to accept that we don’t — and almost certainly never will –know everything.
We have mentioned Eggbot several times this year as we demonstrated it at Maker Faires in San Mateo and Detroit, as well as at the California state fair. And today, we’re very pleased to (finally) reveal the the design of our new kit.
This week, Brad wrote in with an interesting question: Can you program the ATtiny25 on one of our ‘tiny2313 target boards? And the answer is yes: you can, with just a trivial modification.
Okay, back up– a little context here. The ATtiny25 and the ATtiny2313 are examples of AVR microcontrollers, the little brains that power many of our projects.
To program these chips, we use a usbtinyisp programmer, hooked up to a minimalist target board.
The target board basically provides a programming header that’s hooked up to the right pins of the chip, plus some way to power the chip– often through the programmer itself.
After hand-wiring up one too many minimalist ‘2313 boards like that, we also made a printed circuit board version of the ‘2313 target board. Normally, it looks something like this, with an ATtiny2313 in a ZIF socket:
But, back to the question. The ATtiny25, ATtiny45, and ATtiny85 are a family of 8-pin AVR microcontrollers that are not pin compatible with the ‘2313. However, at only 8 pins instead of 20 pins, they’ll definitely fit in the socket… somewhere.
Looking at the datasheets and pinouts for the the ’45, ‘2313 (and the ‘168 that we also have a target board for), we can identify the lines used for programming: MISO, MOSI, SCK, and RESET:
So, adding a wire from ground– pin 10 of the ‘2313 –to pin 4 of the smaller chip (an ATtiny25 in our photo), and lining up pin 1 to pin 1, we’re ready to go. And yes, it works like a charm.
If you do use this method, there are a few (possibly obvious) things worth noting:
Going one step further, you could also potentially program the ’25/’45/’85 from the ‘168 target board: it only takes a couple more wires. To do so, line up pin 1 of the ’25 to pin 9 of the ‘168. Add two wires this time, from board-reset to chip-reset, and from board-ground to chip-ground. You’ll also need to connect AVCC (analog power supply) to VCC. A little more work, yes, but still a good hack.
