Category Archives: EMSL Projects

Binary Birthday

Binary Birthday

I am this many.

Have you ever heard of the unary number system, i.e., base-1 numerals? That’s the formal designation of tally marks– a means of representing a number symbolically by using symbols, where the number represented is equal to the number of symbols. While easy to grasp, it’s also a rather inefficient system, so we don’t find too many uses of them in modern life. One of the places that we do (almost) always use the unary system is on birthday cakes, where a birthday cake has one candle per year. This is fine for small numbers, but positioning, lighting and blowing out candles becomes impractical past a certain point.

Here’s a better way: A binary birthday candle. It consists of a single candle with seven wicks, where the wicks that are lit represent the birthday individual’s age in binary. This single candle design works flawlessly to represent any age from 1 to 127, never requiring anyone below the age of 127 to blow out more than a mere six candles at a time.
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Meggy Jr RGB

Meggy Rainbow

Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It’s based around a fully addressable 8×8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play. The kit is driven by an ATmega168 microcontroller, and you can write your own games or otherwise control it through the Arduino development environment. Meggy Jr is fast, programmable, open source and hackable. And fun.
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Business card AVR breakout boards: Version 1.1

Card version 1.1

We’ve just released a new version of our super-handy business card sized target board for programming 28-pin AVR microcontrollers like the ATmega168 and ATmega328. These are just the thing for programming these chips through an ISP programmer like the USBtinyISP.

We use these for a lot of our simple microcontroller projects; Tennis For Two and the Lissajous POV come to mind. The new version has basically the same design but adds some extra prototyping area and makes the holes big enough to accept a ZIF socket:

ZIF Kit
Like the original version of this target board, this circuit board is a fully open source hardware design. For much more information– including the detailed design files– please see the update that we’ve added to the end of our original article about this project.

LED Ghosties for Halloween

LED Ghostie

You can make these simple LED ghosties (based on LED throwies) from a soda bottle, a couple of LEDs and batteries, string, and a scrap of fabric. Hang them in your trees, your haunted house, or in your porch for Halloween. They look especially excellent because the eyes seem to float in mid-air behind the fabric.
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A dark detecting circuit for your jack-o’-lantern

DarkPumpkin - 13   DarkPumpkin - 11

Here’s an inexpensive electronic circuit that you can build to put in your Jack-o’lantern. It provides power to drive a few LEDs at night, and automatically turns them off during the daytime. It’s a simple and automatic dark-detecting circuit that you can use to for your very own photosensitive pumpkin.

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A Sinusoidal Acrylic Bracelet Design

Acrylic Nesting Bracelets

Sleek sinusoids for your wrists. Laser-cut acrylic.
A free design from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, complete with dowloadable files so that you can make your own. (And isn’t this a good time for your first laser project?)

In case you haven’t been bitten by this particular bug yet, here’s a quick intro. Laser cutters are an awesome tool in the modern DIY arsenal. This type of laser is a lot like a laser printer, but uses deep infrared carbon dioxide laser that can cut or engrave most plastics. You can find these at hacker spaces like NYC Resistor and membership shops like TechShop and The Sawdust Shop, so it’s finally getting to the point that almost anyone can learn to use one. However not everyone lives by a laser shop, so sites such as Ponoko, Pololu, and Big Blue Saw offer laser cutting services and enable you to submit jobs from anywhere.
Acrylic Nesting Bracelets
Our bracelets are cut from a single sheet of acrylic (using a laser, obviously!) in concentric wavy rings to form a nesting set of various sizes. The light plays through the transparent acrylic in fun and fascinating ways.
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