While trying to figure out what to do with about 75 pounds of fruit that our citrus trees bestowed upon us in January, we came across an interesting fact: marmalade is really easy to make. People of older generations may know this already, but so far as we knew, marmalade was one of those mysterious things that strictly comes from a jar. It turns out that all you need is citrus fruit, water, sugar and some time on the stovetop.
Question: What the heck is PONG supposed to be?
When you’re playing it, it feels like the video game representation of some real-life sport. You’re bouncing a ball back and forth with another player, which at first glance sounds a lot like like table tennis, AKA ping pong– and that would seem to explain the name. And yet, PONG is two-dimensional and free of gravity. The ball goes in a straight line, at a fairly constant rate of travel. And you don’t play ping pong by rotating a wheel. Come to think of it, it’s not a darned thing like ping pong. So what the heck is it?
To answer this important question, we built this real-life Tabletop Pong game.
Continue reading A playable game of Tabletop Pong
Some time ago, we wrote up a tutorial about using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller. A couple of years have passed, and so we’ve returned to update and clean up some loose ends on this project.
Continue reading Basics (updated): Using an accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller
Woo-hoo! We got a box of MakerBeam to keep us busy through the long dark winter evenings. For more info, see their kickstarter page, and the google group. They’ve been busy actually getting stuff made, so we’ll forgive them for not updating much lately.
The beam cross section is shown here with an LED for scale.
Joyce and Kaufman sent in this truly fantastic Star Trek Pez LED menorah that they made. Joyce made it last year to hold candles, and this year Kaufman brought it right into the 24th 21st century by mind-melding modding it with one of our Deluxe LED Menorah kits.
Let’s give them both double credit for a fantastic job. Overengineering at its finest, this is.
Ever since our wine charm project, we’ve been amassing an ever-growing collection of interesting-looking electronic components. It turns out that they happen to make pretty good Christmas tree ornaments.
Back in April, we posted a little project in which we demonstrated a simple Bulbdial clock, based on the original concept from IronicSans.com. We had a lot of feedback on the original project. We listened to it, learned from it, and finally designed a kit around the concept.
It’s new… and we shall call it Mini Peggy.
Peggy 2LE (“little edition”) is a diminutive version of our popular Peggy 2 LED “pegboard” an open-source LED matrix display. Peggy 2 is big, designed to fit a 25×25 grid of 10 mm LEDs. Peggy 2LE is mostly the same, just smaller: it’s designed to fit 5 mm LEDs.
Here’s the family photo: Big ol’ Peggy next to the new Mini Peggy, Peggy 2LE.
Continue reading Peggy 2LE
A simple design project for font lovers: Single-character typographic coasters.
