Alex at Hackster.io posted an awesome build video for the Three Fives Kit!
Linkdump: April 2018
- Dynamic Müller-Lyer Illusion
- Could Venus have a bacterial infection?
- How the bones in your hand change as you grow up
- Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? Probing a simulated 6502 and evaluating it like a set of neurons
- A Sinclair Scientific Calculator Emulator that you can build
- A LaTeX package to add coffee stains
- Diffraction gratings, now in chocolate (YouTube, via Hackaday)
- LED Snailies?
- Precise Parts: Custom machined adapters for astronomy
- Sam Zeloof lithographically builds an amplifier IC in his garage
- An Exploration into 3D Printing on Pre-stretched Fabric
Bay Area Maker Faire 2018
For this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire we are excited to be collaborating with Eric Schlaepfer and Ken Shirriff. We’ll be bringing decapped chips like the MOS 6502, the 555 timer and 741 op-amp along with microscopes to let visitors see what’s inside of famous and interesting integrated circuits. We’ll also be bringing large scale reference models, including the MOnSter 6502.
Maker Faire is May 18-20 at the San Mateo Expo Center. If you’re looking for us at Maker Faire, our exhibitor number is 65553 and our project name is Uncovering the Silicon. We look forward to seeing lots of you there!
Electronics Flea Market: Now in Sunnyvale
We’ve written about the Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market many times before. Make that many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times before. It’s a great source of inspiration, beautiful objects and interesting conversations.
We’re writing about it now because it has moved locations! The April 14th flea market will be at the parking lot of the Sunnyvale Fry’s. We’ll hope to see you all there this weekend!
Linkdump: March 2018
- Quick Sort explained by IDEA instructions
- Daytime fireworks are a thing. (Second example.)
- An air breathing electric motor for low earth orbit satellites
- Automatic Machine Knitting of 3D Meshes
- How two photographers captured the same millisecond in time
- 8-bit emergency kit
- Urgent Need To Be Remembered, an anamorphic sculpture by Jonty Hurwitz
- A video showing the inside of an automatic mahjong table. Watch carefully to see how the tiles are flipped upright.
Lemon Ginger Marmalade
- 8 cups (Meyer) lemon pieces
- 1 cup lemon juice
- 1 cup water
- 3 Tbsp grated ginger
- 2/3 cup ginger matchsticks
- 6 cups sugar
First cut up the lemons into small pieces and remove any obvious seeds. After juicing lemons, we’ve found that straining it through a julep strainer holds back the seeds but allows most of the pulp through.
Our favorite tool for grating ginger is a fine microplane. For making matchsticks, a mandoline slicer makes short work of it.
Put the lemon pieces, lemon juice, water, grated ginger, and ginger matchsticks in a pot and simmer until the lemons start to soften. Add the sugar. Stir regularly and cook to the desired consistency. To test consistency, put a spoonful on a plate in the fridge. If it’s too runny after cooling for a few minutes, keep simmering and test again after a few minutes.
Makes about four pints. If you want to can it for longer storage, Ball has a nice introduction to canning on their website.
Other fruit preserves from the Play with your food archives:
Tap List with AxiDraw
The folks at Sac City Brews use an AxiDraw to create their tap list. The AxiDraw plots out the beer name, info and logo onto a piece of acrylic which gets mounted in the tap list above the bar.
Best of all, they’ve mounted the AxiDraw in plain view, so patrons can see it getting ready for the next beer to go on tap. (You can see video of it in action in their Yelp pictures.)
If you’re in Sacramento and are looking to try out a new tap house, check them out. Thank you to Todd for sending us the pictures!
Linkdump: February 2018
- How Carob Traumatized a Generation
- How Christine Peterson coined the term ‘open source’
- OpenSC2K: An open source remake of SimCity 2000
- A deep dive into the history of the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company (via @john_overholt)
- The ReCode Project is a community-driven effort to preserve computer art by translating it into a modern programming language
- Unfamiliar cat petting simulator
- The classic Handbook of Mathematical Functions by Abramowitz and Stegun has become the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions.
- Fabric linear motor
- Your data, on an 8-inch floppy disk
- A new proposal for distant a space telescope, using the sun as a gravitational lens to observe exoplanets
- System Bus Radio: A program to transit AM radio from computers and phones without radio transmitting hardware
- Photos of the SF Bay Area, taken from a U2 at the edge of space
Presidents Day @ The Tech
On Monday, February 19, we’ll be celebrating Presidents Day at The Tech Museum in San Jose.
Spend your Presidents Day with us! We’re bringing you even more hands-on science fun than usual. You’ll build straw rockets and design colorful climbing robots. We’re also teaming up with Kickstarter to give you a sneak peek at some new tech.
The hours are 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. and we’ll be bringing the MOnSter 6502 and demonstrating how microprocessors work with our giant version of the classic MOS 6502.
Spaceship Cockpit with a Larson Scanner
Lee at Sawdust and Solder is building a kids spaceship cockpit and used a Larson Scanner for one panel.
I wanted to spread out the LEDs over a large arc to simulate the sweep of a radar screen. The idea was to make it a scanner to look for other ships, class-M planets, or whatever is required. So I decided to mount the LEDs on the acrylic panel and wire them back to the board. I also decided to use my own switches mounted to the panel rather than the ones supplied with the kit. I used my Shapeoko CNC to cut out the acrylic panel.
After I painted and weathered the acrylic panel, I engraved the text (again, with the CNC and a v-carving bit) and then assembled everything.
There’s a ton of documentation and some good tips in the post. Check out the other parts of the cockpit project Lee has posted, too!
