All posts by Windell Oskay

About Windell Oskay

Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

OSHWA – The Open Source Hardware Association -Coming soon

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oshwlogo

The Open Source Hardware Association is Coming Soon!

OSHWA will be a non-profit
organization (status pending) working to spread the love of open source hardware. We’re still deep in the process of
working out all the details, but please bookmark oshwa.org, and check back there for
upcoming news.

OSHWA’s first project is a survey, “to better understand the Open Source Hardware community.” Catarina Mota has lead this project and created a survey along with David Mellis and John De
Cristofaro. The aggregate and anonymous results will be made publicly available in May. If you’re involved with the OSHW community, we’d invite you to take the survey.

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

Urban scientist: An unusual spider

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Red-backed Jumping Spider 7

Red-backed Jumping Spider 3

It’s always good to keep your eyes open, ready to see new things. I came across this striking not-particularly-small spider with a bright red velvety abdomen, just hanging out on the concrete side of a building here in Sunnyvale, California.

I’ve never seen one of these before! How might you go about identifying it?

Continue reading Urban scientist: An unusual spider →

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Playtime – Videogame mythologies

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Game of Life 15

The Maison d’Ailleurs (translated as “House of Elsewhere”), is a museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Switzerland.

A new version of our Interactive Game of Life exhibit, shown above, is part of their new show, Playtime – Videogame mythologies. The show is devoted to the culture of video games, and exploring how the relationship between play, the various manners of gaming, and technology interrelate.

Playtime – Videogame mythologies runs through December 9, 2012 at Maison d’Ailleurs.

Here is a short video (YouYube link here) showing off the new museum display:

We’ve also just posted an extended introduction to this project here in our post about our new Interactive Game of Life kits.

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Basics: Open Collector Outputs

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SN7407N

One of the joys of working with basic digital electronics– and logic gate ICs in particular –is that it almost works like building with a set of Lego blocks: One output goes here, which connects to the next input here, and so forth until it does what you wanted.

If you’ve played with chips like these, you’ve probably also come across chips with “open collector” outputs. And if not, they’re worth knowing about. Open-collector outputs form the basis of a number of clever tricks for level-shifting and interfacing between different types of logic, and from logic to other types of electronic circuits.

In what follows, we’ll work with the SN7407N, which is one of the most basic ICs with open-collector outputs. We’ll discuss what it means to have “open collector” outputs, and show some of the different ways that they are used. Continue reading Basics: Open Collector Outputs →

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A fantastic introduction to Maker Spaces

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Maui Makers from SelfMadeinHawaii on Vimeo.

Jerry Isdale, founder of Maui Makers, sent in this great clip about their maker space. (The video is embedded above, and the Vimeo link is here.)

The video, from TV series Self Made in Hawaii,
is one of the best introductions that we have seen to maker spaces (and, really, hacker spaces in general)– showing people working together, having fun and building awesome stuff.

And that’s exactly what maker spaces and hacker spaces are all about: There’s fire art, 3D printers, and electronics, laser cutters, CNC machines, and even some fine footage of an Egg-Bot in motion.

More information about the video is available at the Maui Makers blog.

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Basics: Power dissipation and electronic components

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Lovely Resistors

 

An ever-present challenge in electronic circuit design is selecting suitable components that not only perform their intended task but also will survive under foreseeable operating conditions. A big part of that process is making sure that your components will stay within their safe operating limits in terms of current, voltage, and power. Of those three, the “power” portion is often the most difficult (for both newcomers and experts) because the safe operating area can depend so strongly on the particulars of the situation.

In what follows, we’ll introduce some of the basic concepts of power dissipation in electronic components, with an eye towards understanding how to select components for simple circuits with power limitations in mind. Continue reading Basics: Power dissipation and electronic components →

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