Tag Archives: electronics

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Year 3

By Lenore Edman on June 21, 2009

Happy birthday to us! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is now three years old.

To celebrate, we’re rounding up our most interesting projects from this past year.

Quick projects and observations:

17 cool magnet tricks

The monetary density of things

Cheap Perpetual Calendar

Contact Lens Case Small Parts Tray

Simple LED Projects:

Quick, easy, temporary, and beautiful LED garden lights

RoboGames Awards

LED Ghosties for Halloween

Food Hacking:

The Hungry Scientist Handbook

South Indian Restaurant Menu Decoder

“That’s no melon!”

Hot Dog Bun Grilling Jig

Improved Custom Message Hearts

Now that’s an Apple Pie!

Eyeball Caprese

Fractal Snowflake Cupcakes

CandyFab

The CandyFab 6000

Papercraft

Cardboard Cat Chaise

Edge-Lit Holiday Cards

Hexagonal Stacking Boxes

Making a Frabjous

Electronics Projects

Interactive LED Dining Table Circuit

Giant seven segment displays

Dark detecting jack-o’-lantern

Simple Solar Circuits

Soft Circuit Merit Badge

Kit Projects

Meggy Jr RGB

Video Peggy in action

Peggy 2 RGB

ATtiny2313 breakout boards

Revised ATmegaXX8 boards

Crafty Projects

DIY d12 Handbag (of Holding)

Meggy Cozy

No-sew iPhone Cozy

Fabric Klein Bottle

Reupholstery with Used Denim

Missile Command Circle Skirt

Fishbowl Cat Quilt

Turning Mollie into Maulie

Bicycle Frame Lunch Bag

Sinusoidal Bracelet Design

Microcontroller Projects

Tennis for Two, a video game from 1958

Scariest Jack-o’-Lantern of 2008

70 bits of gaming goodness

AVR Serial Communication

POV Lissajous figures

Single sided circuit board

A Bulbdial Clock

Geek Design

Vector Snowflake Application

(Whew!)

This entry was posted in Art, CNC, Costumes, Electronics, EMSL Projects, Engineering, Evil Mad Scientist Shop, Microcontrollers, Open Hardware, Play with your food, Robotics, Vintage Technology and tagged art, bulbdial clock, candyfab, cats, cnc, CNCYOURFOOD, d12 handbag, diy, electronics, fashion, food, LEDs, lego, meggy jr. rub, peggy 2, pumpkins, robots, star wars, tennis for two, vintage tech. Bookmark the Permalink.

Soft Circuit Merit Badge

By Lenore Edman on May 20, 2009

The proliferation of spoof, nerd, science, and electronics merit badges has demonstrated that geeks like to show off their skills and accomplishments. One skill is particularly appropriate for the format: soft circuitry. By building your own soft circuit onto an actual badge you can demonstrate your mastery.

The size of the badge is just right for a simple circuit with a battery, a switch and an LED. The crowning touch is that the stitched circuitry can form the circuit diagram as well.

Continue reading Soft Circuit Merit Badge →

This entry was posted in Art, Basics, Electronics, EMSL Projects and tagged art, electronics, soft circuit. Bookmark the Permalink.

Peggy 2 RGB

By Windell Oskay on May 6, 2009

We filled up a Peggy 2 with 2×2 super-pixels consisting of red, green, blue, and white 10 mm LEDs. This makes an easy and big programmable full-color LED matrix.

Peggy fits 25×25 LEDs, so if you fill every hole this way, you wind up with a 12.5 x 12.5 pixel RGBW matrix.

And like whoa— you can animate it.

Yup, there’s video. The video is embedded below, and you can also view it directly at YouTube. (In either case, please excuse the scanline artifacts produced by our camera.)

One thing worth noting (and that we demo in the video) is that you can diffuse the big RGBW pixels into one continuous full-color display by placing a thin diffusing plastic layer above the LEDs– it really works well.

The demo code is an Arduino sketch, based on Jay Clegg’s timer-interrupt style grayscale driver for Peggy (demonstrated here), you can download it here (12 kB Arduino .pde sketch file). Besides the colorful flow shown in the pictures, this code also has a mode to light just the red, green, blue or white LEDs at a time.

This entry was posted in Electronics, EMSL Projects and tagged electronics, LEDs, peggy 2. Bookmark the Permalink.

A Bulbdial Clock

By Windell Oskay on April 8, 2009

Last year David Friedman published on his blog Ironic Sans an interesting design concept for something that he called The Bulbdial Clock.

That’s like a sundial, but with better resolution– not just an hour hand, but a minute and second hand as well, each given as a shadow from moving artificial light sources (bulbs).
We’ve recently put together a working bulbdial clock, with an implementation somewhat different from that of the original concept.

Rather than using three physically moving light sources at different heights, we use three rings of LEDs at different heights. Within each ring, we only turn on one LED at a time, so that we only have a single effective light source– it can light up at different places from within the ring. The three rings are located above one another so that they each project light onto the rod in the middle, making shadows of different lengths.

Additionally, for fun and clarity, we used red, green, and blue LEDs for the three rings, making each shadow hand of the clock a different color. Each ring has 12 LEDs, and the 36 LEDs are efficiently multiplexed by an AVR microcontroller that also handles the timekeeping part of the project. Continue reading A Bulbdial Clock →

This entry was posted in Electronics, EMSL Projects and tagged bulbdial clock, clocks, electronics, LEDs. Bookmark the Permalink.

Giant seven segment displays

By Windell Oskay on March 4, 2009

As part of the China trip last week, we had a little scavenger hunt, where the challenge was to build something with parts and tools acquired at the electronics markets.
Here’s what I found: a single-digit seven-segment LED display with twelve inch digit height. (Whoa!)
Continue reading Giant seven segment displays →

This entry was posted in Electronics, EMSL Projects and tagged electronics. Bookmark the Permalink.

A visit to the electronics markets of Shenzhen

By Windell Oskay on March 3, 2009

I’ve just returned from a week long trip to Shenzhen, China in a “geek tour” trip organized by Bunnie Huang, with some assistance from the fine folks at PCH International.

More than just a tour, this was also a tiny conference of open source and physical computing hardware hackers.

The participants were (from left to right above): Jeevan Kalanithi, Eric Schweikardt, Bunnie Huang, Nathan Seidle, Leah Buechley, myself (Windell Oskay), Tom Igoe, and David Merrill.

(Thanks to Tom Igoe for the photo. Thanks also to Dale Dougherty for helping to get such a great set of folks in contact for the trip!)

Shenzhen is a vibrant, bustling, young, and modern city of 8 million in southern China. Just across the border from Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the region around it comprise one of the most active and important manufacturing centers in the world today. (Hint: “made in China” sounds familiar.) The city itself is filled with people, restaurants, smog and shiny skyscrapers. At night freakishly large LED billboards illuminate the sides of apartment buildings and animated RGB neon displays ripple above nightclubs and bars. With a few more flying cars, it might do a good impression of Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles.

For me personally, one of the most interesting parts of this trip was spending some time in the vast electronic markets of downtown Shenzhen. The building pictured above, the SEG Electronic Market, is a focal point in the markets. Bunnie wrote quite a bit about this place two years ago (and it’s all true).

Continue reading A visit to the electronics markets of Shenzhen →

This entry was posted in Electronics, Field Trips and tagged electronics. Bookmark the Permalink.

Video Peggy in action

By Windell Oskay on February 18, 2009

For a while we’ve been meaning to try out Jay Clegg’s TWI-video hack for the Peggy 2, and we must say, it’s pretty nifty. Using this routine, we can take webcam video (e.g., from our MacBook Pro’s built-in camera), sample it in a Processing routine, and send it to be displayed on the 625 LEDs of the Peggy 2.
Continue reading Video Peggy in action →

This entry was posted in Electronics, EMSL Projects and tagged electronics, LEDs, peggy 2. Bookmark the Permalink.

Meggy Jr RGB

By Windell Oskay on November 12, 2008

Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It’s based around a fully addressable 8×8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play. The kit is driven by an ATmega168 microcontroller, and you can write your own games or otherwise control it through the Arduino development environment. Meggy Jr is fast, programmable, open source and hackable. And fun.
Continue reading Meggy Jr RGB →

This entry was posted in Electronics, EMSL Projects, Evil Mad Scientist Shop and tagged electronics, hacks, LEDs, meggy jr. rgb, open source. Bookmark the Permalink.

Maker Faire Austin Pictures

By Lenore Edman on October 23, 2008

We had a wonderful time at Maker Faire Austin. I’ve put some pictures and videos up in this flickr set for your enjoyment.

Our neighbors at Maker Faire were Kris and Carly who were doing very fun things with LEDs, like making Monopoly more fun by lighting up when you land on certain squares. The no-solder wiring system was very clever, and the flashing blue and red lights in jail were perfect.

This cute little robotics platform stopped by for a visit, but in order to see most of the rest of the faire we had to pry ourselves away from our table, which was tough. There was a nice collection of art cars, including this Chia Car. Maker Faire is wonderfully overwhelming, and we didn’t take very many pictures. Luckily, many other people took pictures too, and you can check lots of them out on flickr.

This entry was posted in Art, Education, Electronics, Field Trips and tagged art, electronics, games, makerfaire. Bookmark the Permalink.

The Hungry Scientist Handbook

By Windell Oskay on September 23, 2008

Today is the official release date for the Hungry Scientist Handbook, a new book by Patrick Buckley and Lily Binns.

The Hungry Scientist Handbook was conceived as a sort of cookbook for geek-centric food and– using the word a different way– as an a cookbook for food-oriented electronics– as evidenced by projects varying from polyhedral pies to LED lollipops.

We met Patrick and Lily at the 2006 Maker Faire, where they invited us to contribute a couple of chapters to their project. We did, and it’s finally out!

(We aren’t the only ones who are excited– we’ve seen write-ups at the LA Times and
Wired this week.)

We contributed a total of nine projects to the Hungry Scientist Handbook, some of which we have written about here. These include the Computer Chip Trivets, Crafty fridge magnets, Edible Origami, and (making a cameo appearance) the Lego Trebuchet.

We also contributed a few new cooking projects that involve dry ice: Dry (Ice) Martinis, Fizzy dry ice lemonade, and Dry ice root beer. (With Floating bubbles on CO2 as a bonus project.)

And… a brand new exclusive Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories electronics project that we developed just for the Hungry Scientist Handbook: Smart Coasters.
Smart Coasters are cast-plastic coasters for your drink that light up red when you put a hot drink on top and light up blue with a cold drink. The design is fully analog– no microcontrollers and no programming– and they incorporate a solar cell so that the whole thing is hermetically sealed: waterproof and washable. Complete step-by-step DIY instructions are included for both the electronics and the resin casting.

You can purchase the Hungry Scientist Handbook at booksellers including Amazon. Also visit their new web site, www.hungryscientist.com.

This entry was posted in Art, Electronics, EMSL Projects, Play with your food, Science and tagged dry ice, electronics, food, lego, magnets, science, the hungry scientist. Bookmark the Permalink.