Here’s something fantastic you can do when you get bored at that holiday party: Construct complex fractals out of light using a few shiny Christmas tree ornaments. Who says the holidays aren’t exciting?
Continue reading Christmas Chaos
Category Archives: EMSL Projects
Holiday electronics kits: Great boxes of kits!
If you’re planning to get some of our holiday electronics kits in time for Christmas, please note that the remaining amount of time is decreasing at a rate of one second per second. Orders placed today (Tues. 12/19 until midnight) will ship via priority mail on Wednesday, and will (probably!) arrive by Saturday. Express mail shipping is also available; have your order in by Thursday (through midnight) for Saturday delivery.
Above, a box full of kits sits in the hallway just before a trip to the post office.
How to Make a Music Satchel
Much of the sewing I do is sort of off-the-cuff (pun intended.) This music satchel is a perfect example of sewing to fit the situation: It’s a set of speakers that you can wear while you’re riding your bike.
There are many reasons to take your music with you. The usual solution requires headphones. But sometimes you need to bring your party– and your speakers– along with you. We used to pull a giant stereo trailer along with us on social bike rides, and some of our friends still do (movie). But when it’s just you and a couple of buddies, and there’s ice on the ground, you don’t want to be towing 50 lbs of stereo around behind a bicycle. Granted, the speakers I used are nigh unto worthless and the amp eats batteries like candy, but they made just enough sound for our little group. I needed a small padded bag for them, though, so I made one.
Continue reading How to Make a Music Satchel
Kits are shipping!
The holiday electronics project kits are now shipping (Woo-hoo!)
How to make high-tech LED decorations for the holidays
Here we present two open-source, do-it-yourself, microcontroller-powered holiday electronics projects: A micro-readerboard Christmas tree ornament and a mini-LED Hanukkah menorah. Read on to see exactly what they do (Check out the video!), how they work, and how you can make your own.
Continue reading How to make high-tech LED decorations for the holidays
Holiday Electronics Projects: Technical details and Reference data
This article contains some reference data relevant to the holiday electronics projects.
Continue reading Holiday Electronics Projects: Technical details and Reference data
LED Holiday Project Kits
We have written instructions for building two sweet microcontroller-based electronics projects for the holidays: an alphanumeric LED christmas tree ornament and an LED mini-menorah (hanukkiah).
These are open-source projects; You can download and modify the source code, use it to program your own microcontroller, and solder the microcontroller to some LEDs to help make your own holiday decorations.
If programming microcontrollers is not your idea of a good time, we understand. Not everyone has (1) access to a microcontroller programmer, (2) the time and (3) the desire to modify the firmware of their christmas tree ornaments.
Low-cost open-source holiday project kits brought to you by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.
In order to help our fellow citizens Evil Mad Scientists with their holiday projects, we have put together electronic soldering kits for these projects. (Updated: November 2007)
LED mini-menorah kits are now available at our new web store.
Kits for version 2.0 of the open-source LED Micro-Readerboard project are now available at the Make Store.
Holiday electronics projects: Support discussions
This *was* the place to discuss tricks, tips, and troubles with the holiday electronics projects.
However, we’ve moved future support (and the discussions that were here) to the
Discussion Forums.
Programming the Atmel ATtiny2313 in Mac OS X
For a recent project, I needed to control sixteen or seventeen LEDs with a microprocessor. The one that I chose was the Atmel ATtiny2313, because it has 20 pins, with up to eighteen outputs, can run without an external oscillator, and is fairly inexpensive at around $2.00 per piece.
Since I’ve got a Mac laptop and no real serial or parallel port, I opted to go with a USB-based programming solution. Furthermore, I wanted to program in C, not assembler, and use open source development tools. Since I was (eventually) successful in all of these goals, I thought that I should write up a few notes about it.
Continue reading Programming the Atmel ATtiny2313 in Mac OS X
Sneak peek
Chips, tubes, boxes, solder…. What are those Evil Mad Scientists up to now?
update: cat… bag…
