Tag Archives: electronics

Time to Make a Cylon?

By on

Make: HalloweenStarburst

Yay! We finally got our copy of the Make: Halloween Edition.

This special issue is actually available in two different covers, but we particularly like thisversion because of that little starburst: “Make an LED Jack-O’-Lantern!”

On page 60, you can find the article that we wrote about how to build the Larson Scanner (named after Glen A. Larson); a scanning eye for your old-school Cylon or KITT pumpkin projects.

Red Eye

The article is actually a slightly updated version of our project from last Halloween, Make A Cylon Jack-O-Lantern. Last year’s how-to is still online— and we have recently checked to make sure that all the parts on the parts list are still available.

Either way, let’s see those Cylons! If you build one, please post your pictures in the Evil Mad Science Auxiliary.

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

Interactive LED Coffee Tables: Update and kits!

By on

PopSci_2007_10 Cool, our interactive LED coffee tables got a mention in the October issue of Popular Science!

What’s an interactive LED coffee table? (Funny you should ask….) It’s a coffee table that has hundreds of LEDs in the top surface that respond to motion above the table. We have (finally) put together a movie to give you a better idea of how they respond to their environment. You can see the movie on YouTube or watch it embedded:

The complete tables are for sale from Because We Can, our partners in design on this project. There are presently two models, The Ripple (left) and The Wave (right):

the ripple   the wave

Since we first showed these off, we have had a lot of inquiries about how you can make your own table like this. We are now producing (very large) electronic soldering kits so that you indeed can make your own.

Our kits include the giant printed circuit boards, components, instructions, LEDs, and all other parts needed to build the electronic portion of the table tops. Constructed, you end up with what essentially amounts to a single extra-ginormous circuit board that can sit underneath the clear or frosted glass (or plastic) top of your own table. Interesting in getting a kit? Click here to read the details!

(Revised 11/16/2007).

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

Matt’s awesome chip desk

By on

What does one do 434 discarded Itanium CPUs? Matt Tovey was inspired by our Chip Trivet, and used them to make this awesome computer desk.

   

The CPU modules were scrapped as the result of a supercomputer upgrade, and were presumably functional before having their heat sinks taken off– a herculean effort for that many CPUs! Matt says that the list price for the lot of chips was over US$800,000 in 2006 and that the desk contains about 2.8 TFLOPs of computing power, about the same
as 900 3.2GHz P4s.

Matt started with a plain desk, tiled in the CPUs, and added wooden edging and a beveled glass top. Nice work!

I just love the way that this desk looks. But it gives me an idea too– take it one step further, and what if it worked? You could use a single, giant PCB for the motherboard which sat underneath the glass surface of the desk. With that much area, you could fit in a lot of processing power. On the cheap (or moderately cheap), one could imagine instead filling the inside of a desk top with low-cost (even last-generation) PC motherboards to make a great looking beowulf cluster or render farm that doesn’t take up any desktop or rack-mount space.

Sadly, Matt’s page has moved on to the great /dev/null in the sky, but the mirror still shows some of the build photos.

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

More circuitry snacks

By on

cookies1

cookies4   cookies3

My old friend Kevin sent in these pictures of a massive array of tasty electronic treats that he and his family made for a group picnic at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Nice work!) If your diet is short on precision op-amps and instrumentation amplifiers, these just might hit the spot.

You can read our own article about circuitry snacks (dated July 11, 2007) here.

This entry was posted in Electronics, Play with your food and tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Five Electronics Tools You Might Not Know About

By on

resistor bendersuction toolchip inserterusing the crimperchip remover

You’ve got your wire strippers and your soldering iron…now what? You probably know that there is a standard set of essential tools that you need on your electronics workbench. You can find helpful lists of these tools at Lady Ada’s site and Dan’s Data.

However, real tool junkies always want just the right tool for the job. Here are five electronics tools you may not know you were missing. These esoteric tools go a bit beyond the basics that everyone should have.

Continue reading Five Electronics Tools You Might Not Know About →

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

Circuitry Snacks

By on

555 LED flasher 1

PCB with components   Joule thief 2

Here we present what is arguably the tastiest way to design and learn about electronic circuits: make circuitry snacks!

Two of our favorite things in the world are playing with electronics and playing with food, and so it is about time that someone finally got around to combining the two. We begin by gathering up appropriate snack-food building blocks and making food-based models of electronic components. From these components, you can assemble “circuitry snacks”– edible models of functioning electronic circuits. You can make these for fun, for dessert, for your geek friends, for kids, and for teaching and learning electronics.
Continue reading Circuitry Snacks →

This entry was posted in Education, Electronics, Play with your food and tagged , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

AlphaPOV: An alphanumeric persistence of vision display

By on

AlphaPOV4

You have probably seen persistence of vision (POV) toys at some point– little LED dot-matrix displays that, when waved around, display a picture or a message that seems to hang in mid air. We’ve been playing with 16-segment LED displays lately, and it some point it occurred to us that we’d never seen an alphanumeric POV display. So, we went ahead and tried it out, and hey– it works! AlphaPOV is the result. It’s a neat effect since the clearly defined segments– designed for text– introduce a certain degree of legibility into the display.

The starting point for building this project is our LED Micro-Readerboard. Normally, the micro-readerboard shows one character at a time, so that you can read it sequentially while holding it still. Here, we use a (very slightly) modified version of the firmware that blinks the characters on and off at high speed. Read on for details, AVR source code and a few more pictures.
Continue reading AlphaPOV: An alphanumeric persistence of vision display →

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

LED Micro-Readerboard, version 2.0

By on

 

LED Micro-Readerboard spells out MAKE

We’ve just finished updating the LED Micro-Readerboard (formerly the micro-readerboard LED ornament) to version 2.0. This version features longer battery life, the use of a standard common-cathode LED display, and a new set of phrases including optional holiday phrases. It’s an open-source project so you can download the code, order some parts, and go to town.We are also making it available as a kit, exclusively through the Make Store. The kit features a remarkable high-intensity LED display that enables vastly improved battery life.

Continue reading LED Micro-Readerboard, version 2.0 →

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

Maker Faire Bay Area 2007 was fantastic!

By on

Kill your television and make stuff!Maker Faire was a smashing success. The big message of the fair was summarized succinctly and stamped on the back of a card we were given: “Kill Your Television and Make Stuff!”

We had a great time in our little prototyping world off in the corner of the Expo hall by SRL. Near us Bathsheba Grossman had her beautiful sculptures, Fab@Home was printing with cheese and frosting, John Guy had his 3D CNC gantry next to his margarita machine, and Lee Krasnow had an entire workshop for his precision puzzle making. We were also by a couple of exhibitors (as opposed to makers): Epilog and Protopulsion, but I have to say, it seemed like the makers all got a lot more traffic than the corporate folks with their tradeshow-style setups. We were all off behind the Tesla coils, which stole our visitors’ attention hourly. Nobody could compete with the Tesla coils when they were running!

We can’t possibly list all of the cool things we saw, and we didn’t see half of the stuff there, but read on for some of the highlights for us.
Continue reading Maker Faire Bay Area 2007 was fantastic! →

This entry was posted in Art, Education, Electronics, Engineering, Field Trips and tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Interactive LED coffee tables

By on

BWC's new coffee table

Last year at Maker Faire, we showed off our interactive LED dining table. There, we met the fine folks at Because We Can, who make amazing mostly wooden things with a little help from their robot. We eventually all decided on collaborating to design and build a new series of interactive coffee tables. We’ve just wrapped up the project and are introducing them this weekend at Maker Faire.

Besides what is written about them on this page, you can read more about them on the
Because We Can Blog, and you can also see lots of photos in the product pages for the two different coffee table designs: the wave and the ripple.

The new tables are designed to look really great whether or not you can see the LEDs. The wooden bases are elegant and attractive, and also if you go up to one and touch it, it will respond by pleasantly lighting up in that area. The tables are designed to respond in a subtle and gentle fashion to stimulus provided by human interaction. They are normally dim and constant– the most you’ll see in a dark room is a faint glow of twinkling like the night sky. When you set your glass down on the table, however, the table “sees” the motion that induces a slow ripple starting in that location that spreads out to other areas of the table as it dissipates. The overall effect is a bit like touching a pool of water, in that your local disturbance turns into an overall gentle rippling, and eventually settles down. It is decidedly not a disco floor– there is no blinking, no programmed oscillations, or for that matter, any digital electronics at all– the circuitry is completely analog to improve aesthetics and reduce eyestrain.

Continue reading Interactive LED coffee tables →

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