After seeing our photomask coasters, a friend gave us this giant photomask as an art piece. While we’re not certain what this was for, our best guess is that it is a mask for the lead frame for some device in an SO-20 package. The overall size is about 18″ x 24″ and about 1/8″ thick.
Shown with an SO-24 device on the edge of the plate for comparison. (Didn’t happen to have a correctly sized 20 pin device handy.)
The transparent lines show where the metal will be after processing and the black portions are where the metal will be removed. When you line up the 24 pin device on the plate it is a bit misleading, as it obscures the fact that those two outer transparent lines aren’t actually for device leads. It does confirm that it is sized correctly for a 1:1 mask for a device with a 0.050″ pin spacing, and the central square looks like the right width for a device in an SO-20 package as well.
Tangentially related: CCD wafer
Even after one too many flats, a used bike inner tube has plenty of uses. One more to add to the list: it can be used as a cushion between a tree trunk and a staking wire.
Cut the valve section out and cut the tube in half. For extra padding, use a double layer of tubing by pulling a section of tube through itself.
One regular bike tube makes two generously sized padding pieces, even after doubling them over. You’re ready to thread your wire through and stake up your tree!
You can also trim off a few pieces to make bike tube rubber bands.
What is it? Hint: your life depends on tools like these.
Some time ago we wrote about five relatively obscuretools for doing electronics. But, five tools barely scratches the surface of the stuff out there, and here are a few more of our favorites. In this roundup we’ve collected some handy–and even important –tools along that you might not have seen before, along with some best-of-breed versions of everyday electronics tools.
Over the last few years we’ve been excited to be part of the rapidly growing open-source hardware community. One of the recurring issues in this community has been the lack of agreement on what constitutes an acceptable license for open hardware. For open source software, there’s a common language to start with: the Open Source Definition. But where is the analogous root document for us hardware folks?
Of course, there simply isn’t one. Or rather, there hasn’t been one until now.
Over the last few months, we’ve been helping to hammer out a draft definition of what it means to be open source hardware, in collaboration with open source stars including folks from Chumby, Bug Labs, Sparkfun, Arduino, Adafruit, MakerBot, Eyebeam, Make, and Creative Commons, amongst others. It’s a modest but important step in defining what it means for a project to be open hardware.
The current draft definition is labeled version 0.3, and hopefully we’ll be advancing it towards a 1.0 in the coming months. There’s an Open Hardware Summit scheduled to take place before Maker Faire NY. As things advance we’ll be working on ways to connect to actual licenses and to the other needs of our community. If you have the inclination, please check out the draft and see what we’ve been up to.
Yes, we’re venturing out of the lab:
Saturday, July 17, we’ll be demonstrating Egg-Bot at the California State Fair in Sacramento. We’ll be in the Industrial & Technology Education building.
Sunday, July 18, we’ll be taking Tabletop Pong (and maybe Tennis for Two) to California Extreme in Santa Clara, CA. California Extreme is an event with a terribly vague name that is probably your only chance to play Gauntlet, Orbiter-1, and Hyperball on free-play!
July 31-August 1, we’ll be in Detroit, MI at Maker Faire with Bruce Shapiro and Egg-Bot.
We hope to see you there!
EggBot photo from San Mateo Maker Faire 2010 by madichan (licensed under cc by-nc).
Our neighbors stopped by with buckets (yes, buckets) of excess plums. Not that you’ll necessarily be so lucky, but if you should happen to find a nice supply of plums, here’s something awesome you can make with them: Indian style plum chutney. Perfect for topping your samosas or naan, and at least as easy as marmalade.
Our Egg-Bot kit— a compact open-source robotics platform –is on schedule to come out later this summer, and we could use a little help getting it ready. We’re looking for 2-3 more volunteers with programming experience to help us test and polish our cross-platform Inkscape driver.
As a volunteer, you’ll get (1) to be one of the first to play with these awesome little machines, (2) an acknowledgement in the kit release, and of course (3) a prerelease Egg-bot kit (screwdriver-type assembly but no soldering required) that you can keep.
Here are the baseline requirements:
At least two platforms (of Mac, Linux, and Windows) that you can test things on
Programming experience in Python
US resident (A matter of mailing time, in this case!)
Enough free time and enthusiasm to help out with the project this month
If you meet these requirements (especially the enthusiasm part), drop us a line on our contact form and let us know a bit about you. We’ll be accepting applications through July 9.
We’ll be giving bonus points for the following as well, so be sure and let us know:
Enthusiasm for and/or experience in robotics education
Here are the winners from the Peggy 2: Clock Concept Contest! We had a lot of fantastic entries, and had a verydifficult time deciding on not just first prize but on the runner ups. Thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to our fourteen winners!
First, our Ten Runner-ups:
1. Neat radial concept clock by rsx2112, complete with a demo appwritten in Processing. This is based on using the LEDs off-board, controlled by the Peggy 2.
2. Binary sudoku by jsarik
3. “Binary” morse code clock by Will Grainger. Above is the youtube demo of this concept.
We had no idea that numbers looked so cool in Morse code.
4. Flickering candle clock and hourglass clock concepts by Tom of Nekomi Tech. The twelve candles burn down their way through twelve hours, and the matched hourglasses give hours and minutes, perhaps by number of rows and/or number of dots.
5. The awesome Lab Clock from Emo Mosley.
6. Radial sand clock by Lego Robotics Instructor hastypete, with different-colored LEDs in rings. Can be used as a polar clock (left) or as an unusual sand clock (right).
7. Wedding clock by Squall Line Productions and Jared Style Design. Much more about this clock in this photoset.
8. “The Sands of Fuzzy Time” by C_Dave, featuring dripping sand and “fuzzy” text like you’d find on a word clock
9. We adore this simple “Crazy Eyes” Clock by pepehdez. “Small Eye = Hours, Big Eye = Minutes”
10. Among the different entries by Rouverius, we liked this one the best: a retro-game maze, where your health and gold give the time.
Our three Second Prize winners are as follows:
1. “Mascara de luz” (Mask of light) by Antonio Capo– a 3D sculpture made by cutting acrylic rods to different lengths, and lighting them selectively with the LEDs to simulate the passage of the sun during the day– a sort of advanced sculptural sundial. From what we can tell, this isn’t just a concept: he’s actually built it too (although perhaps not initially as a clock). Much more information about this fantastic project is available and linked from here.
2. World clock concept by AlliedEnvy. A classic design and clever use of the fixed LED colors. A neat thing that you can do on a clock like this is to change how far the sunlight extends by season.
This clock displays a city landscape that changes according to the time of the day. Time of day is shown by the lengths of the four buildings, and it also shows moon phase and weather.
And finally our First Prize winner:
This “station clock” by Jellmeister take advantage of the limited video capabilities of the Peggy in a surprising and elegant way.
It uses Peggy’s 25×25 matrix to follow the minute hand seamlessly around an old-fashioned station clock (Victoria in the example shown). Gradually moving by slowly changing the “anti-aliasing” allows this to move without any noticeable instantaneous change, to make the clock elegantly eye-catching rather than constantly attention-grabbing. Showing enough of the centre of the clock face allows the hour hand to be read as well, allowing instant easy telling of the time.
Again, our congratulations to all of the prize winners, and to everyone else for making us wish that we had set aside more prizes for the contest.
The deadline for our Peggy 2 Clock Concept Contest is midnight, tomorrow (Tuesday) evening. Some of the existing entries are shown above, and they haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible.
We’ve got fourteen prizes, including awesome soldering kits and exclusive Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories sew-on patches. All you need to do to get one? Show us a clever way to display the time on a Peggy 2 LED matrix display. Let’s see those clocks!
