Tag Archives: electronics

LED Holiday Project Kits

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Animated GIF of ornament

We have written instructions for building two sweet microcontroller-based electronics projects for the holidays: an alphanumeric LED christmas tree ornament and an LED mini-menorah (hanukkiah).

These are open-source projects; You can download and modify the source code, use it to program your own microcontroller, and solder the microcontroller to some LEDs to help make your own holiday decorations.

If programming microcontrollers is not your idea of a good time, we understand. Not everyone has (1) access to a microcontroller programmer, (2) the time and (3) the desire to modify the firmware of their christmas tree ornaments.

Low-cost open-source holiday project kits brought to you by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

In order to help our fellow citizens Evil Mad Scientists with their holiday projects, we have put together electronic soldering kits for these projects. (Updated: November 2007)

CompletedWhite

 

LED mini-menorah kits are now available at our new web store.

 

Lit up segments spell out the letter M

 

 

Kits for version 2.0 of the open-source LED Micro-Readerboard project are now available at the Make Store.

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What I took with me for Thanksgiving

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What I took with me for Thanksgiving

The lab staff is travelling this week. Here’s what I brought with me, which might give you a hint about some of our upcoming projects:


  • A: MacBook Pro
  • B: Cookbooks (We’re doing the cooking!)
  • C: AVRISP mkII microcontroller programmer box
  • D: Star-shaped cookie biscuit cutter
  • E: The microcontroller programmer itself (fits in the box)
  • F: USB cable for programmer (fits in the box)
  • G: Olimex development board for 20-pin AVR chips (fits in the box)
  • H: Power for the Olimex board
  • I: Ten Atmel ATtiny2313 microcontrollers (fit in the box)
  • J: Microcontroller target board with 17-segment LED display and battery box (fits in the box)
  • K: Sheet from ATtiny2313 data sheet showing pinouts
  • L: Four fresh nutmeg nuts. (Meg nuts?)

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Art lamp and JellyBean: Separated at birth?

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Twins

We made– and sold (!)– this art lamp a couple of years ago. It’s a life-sized hollow glass head glued to an aluminum base. Inside the head are two long, tangled, strands of multicolored christmas lights, each with a bimetallic “blinky” bulb. The two halves switch on and off quite irregularly in an animated effect that seems much more complex than the simple electronics should have produced. The end effect is a bit like neurons firing, or perhaps like the brain from a cheesy tv robot.

In this photo, JellyBean is sitting on the top of the bookcase with the lamp and is doing her best to blend in with the surroundings– cats are good at that.
See more pictures of the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Feline Auxiliary here.

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Vintage Remote TV-B-Gone Case Mod

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TVBGone - 1

Turn off that television in classic style!

Here we show you how to hack a TV-B-Gone into the case of a vintage television remote control, such that the original on/off button instead activates the TV-B-Gone. We also modify the power supply so that it runs off of a regular 9 V battery, instead of a set of lithium coin cells.
Continue reading Vintage Remote TV-B-Gone Case Mod →

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Halloween project round-up

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Headless horseman

Woo-hoo! We won the grand prize in the MAKE & CRAFT Halloween contest for our set of halloween projects!

    Just in case you missed them, here they are:

Apparently the world was ready for the invasion of Cylon Jack-o-lanterns— They made it onto TV, into magazines, and presumably onto a lot of front porches as well. Lots of people made their own and we’ve rounded up a list of some of the Cylon pumpkins (and umbrella-bat costumes) that we spotted this year. Read on to see where they showed up!
Continue reading Halloween project round-up →

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How to make hard drive PCB picture frames

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So, you’ve disassembled hard drives, taken the magnets out, made wind chimes out of the platters, and so on. One thing that you might have left over is a set of printed circuit boards. Funny shaped printed circuit boards, with holes in them. Here’s how to turn those leftover PCBs into fabulous geek-chic picture frames.
Continue reading How to make hard drive PCB picture frames →

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Building an Electric Motor

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What is a good science project and turns really fast? An electric motor! I built an electric motor for my school science project in third grade. It was fun to build and got a lot of attention at the school’s science fair.

I was looking in a book for a science project idea when I saw instructions for building an electric motor. My parents approved the idea, so Windell and I went looking for parts.
Continue reading Building an Electric Motor →

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Supercapacitor Contest: We Have Winners!

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We had a lot of fantastic entries in our supercapacitor contest! We now have a Grand Prize winner, two Second Prize winners, and a number of honorable mentions. A big thank you to everyone that submitted entries!

The Grand Prize (ten supercapacitors) goes to Stephen Kupiec, for his winning entry, “Supercap Project Luxeon V Throwie”:

A Luxeon V LED driven off of a LuxDrives 3021 buckpuck has been sporadically putting out a very short bright flash every 15-30 min on my desk startling coworkers. But it hasn’t been connected to power in over a month. The buckpuck has been harvesting power from 220 microfarad electrolytic capacitor which is in the circuit as a power line conditioner. Given a 1 farad supercap coupled with a very low (10000:1) duty cycle flasher circuit, a very distracting flasher could be made.

We selected this entry both for its originality, as well as for taking advantage of the low internal resistance of the supercaps.

Two second prize winners will get five caps each:

Chad Norman‘s entry is funny enough that it’s hard to read with a straight face:

Dress them up, adding little tiny bits of plasticine/playdough and dress them all up real purdy like. Then, using stop motion techniques, animate an epic saga of romance, death, intrigue and action with the supercapacitors as the actors.

From Mike Saz comes another very practical idea for using supercaps:

Mod your wireless mouse. They’ll soak up a day’s worth of juice in seconds, and you can stop buying AA’s, or worse, nicads.

Read on for the (long) list of honorable mentions!
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest: We Have Winners! →

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