I currently have a cheapo soldering iron from radio shack. It’s great for making speaker wire and stuff like that. I am concerned that dealing with these delicate boards if it is the right tool. Do you guys have a certain one that you might recommend? If I accidentally break a board I’d like it to be for something cooler than I used a bad soldering iron.
The iron that you use makes a big difference in how long it will take you to build a kit. Using an ultra-low-end soldering iron can make it take much longer to assemble a kit, and will make mistakes easier to make.
Our favorite soldering irons are made by Metcal, but they start at a few hundred dollars, so they aren’t practical for everyone. If you’re lucky enough to live near an electronics surplus shop, they sometimes have used medium-high end workhorses like our backup and travel soldering iron shown above. Replacement parts are available for these, and they last nearly forever.
For a relatively inexpensive, but still reliable soldering iron for electronics, we recommend the WLC100 by Weller, which is about $40 new. Whatever one you end up getting, we recommend one of this design— a “pencil shape” soldering iron (not gun!) with a reasonably fine point tip, and a base that holds the iron and a wet sponge.
Once upon a time in the 1980’s, computers had 1-bit displays, and the world was in (at least, so we understand from the pictures) gray scale. Those grays were often represented by various types of dithering patterns, of which one of the most classic is Atkinson Dithering.
Atkinson Dithering is named after Bill Atkinson, the developer of classic Macintosh applications MacPaint and HyperCard, where this type of dithering contributed heavily to the look and feel of computer images in the era.
There are already a number of neat applications (listed below) that can perform Atkinson dithering on source images. Today we’re releasing a neat little Processing sketch that takes video from your webcam and performs Atkinson dithering on it in real time, to produce live video continuously processed with the effect.
Screen shot: Zener grudgingly sits in front of the webcam for dithering. With Atkinson dithering, grays and detail are preserved well, but bright and dark regions tend to be washed out.
The net result is quite surprising, because dithered images like these feel like they should only exist in an era long before webcams and computer video. And yet, they move.
The Atkinson dithering algorithm itself is a modified version of Floyd-Steinberg dithering, where the “error” between the intended gray level at each pixel and the black or white dot that is actually drawn at each pixel is distributed to neighboring points.
Windell demonstrates the “right hand rule,” a common gang sign amongst physicists.
There are actually two versions of our “mirror dither”program, at different sizes. One runs with full resolution in a modern 800×600 window. The other, shown above slightly reduced, is just 512×342, with rounded corners and a black border— giving you live dithered video, the same shape and size as an original Macintosh screen.
You can download the two versions of our program here. The program is a “sketch” file that runs within Processing, which you can download here for your operating system. (We’ve written and tested it under Processing version 2.0b6; other versions may work as well.)
And as we mentioned, there are also already plenty of good applications that perform Atkinson dithering for still photos:
Our friend RobotGrrl, who hosts the weekly Robot Party, is running an Indiegogo fundraiser for RoboBrrd, her charming robot kit project. We’ve enjoyed watching the development of this project (sometimes up close!) and we’re excited to see it take flight. To get your own RoboBrrd or just support the project, contribute now!
Today we’re releasing a major update to Alpha Clock Five, our alphanumeric LED desk clock, alarm clock, and data display device.
Alpha Clock Five still has five remarkably bright, remarkably huge 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays. But for version 2.0, we’ve rewritten the firmware from scratch. It’s packed with new features and it is simply a joy to use.
To name a few of those new features, Alpha Clock Five now:
Has a built-in calendar function so that it can smoothly alternate between displaying the time and date— a neat trick for a desk clock.
Smoothly fades between numbers (or letters) on the screen.
Has a five letter word “art clock” mode where it displays randomly chosen five-leter words from a built-in dictionary.
Allows you to use the second hardware serial port to daisy-chain multiple Alpha Clock Five units together for text or data display applications— for example, as we have done in the photo above.
And, here is one more thing that we’ve been cooking up for a long long time:
The all-new White Edition of Alpha Clock Five— with five 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays, now in stunning white. (And, shown above with a phone for scale.)
Alpha Clock Five firmware v. 2.0 is now shipping on new Alpha Clock Five kits, and is also available as a download and free update for anyone who already has an Alpha Clock Five with the original firmware. Please see our documentation wiki for details.
Read on for more about what’s new in Alpha Clock Five v. 2.0, and about the design of the White Edition.
Halloween, one of our favorite holidays, is fast approaching. We’ve updated our Halloween Projects Archive once again to ensure that all of our Halloween projects are gathered together in one convenient location. If one of our projects inspires you to make something, we’d love to see the results in the flickr auxiliary.
Eric over at Low Voltage Labs has posted up his design for a simple PCB ideal for putting an LED into a pumpkin. This is very much like our simple LED pumpkin project but in a neat, reusable format. And it makes a mighty cute little jack-o-lantern all on its own.
He has made it available as a kit with PCB, switch, resistor, battery holder and the same candle flicker LEDs which we love so much. Unfortunately, the kit is currently sold out. Hopefully he’ll make more, if not in time for this Halloween, then at least for next year.
Just announced on the OSHWA site, the OSI and OSHWA have signed a co-existence agreement around the use of the community generated open source hardware logo. From the announcement:
This agreement means that each group separately has control of their respective logo and in particular that the Open Source Hardware community will be able to continue to use the Open Source Hardware logo.
We’re very happy that the open source communities were able to work together on this issue.
All of these presenters build on the past two years of excellent content at the summit, and we look forward to the inspiring speakers of years to come.
Photo of OSHWA board members Windell Oskay, Nathan Seidle, Wendy Seltzer, Alicia Gibb and Catarina Mota at the 2012 Open Hardware Summit by Jacob Gibb.