Category Archives: Microcontrollers

Callie’s Crown

Callie's Crown

Last year while attending FIRST robotics competitions with the Firebots, I had the privilege of serving as a judge at both the Central Valley Regional and the Sacramento Regional. Judging gives an opportunity to get to know the folks involved in the competition, whether they’re students, mentors, or other volunteers like you. I’ve judged and volunteered at a few events now, and one of the great things to see is the way that the community builds and nurtures itself.

Neopixel Tiara by Callie

One of the students I met in past years, Callie, had graduated from her team, but keeps coming back as a volunteer. Callie was refereeing at both events, and shines brightly as a role model. Literally. She built an LED tiara and programmed it to light in the event colors of red, white, and blue.

Neopixel Tiara by Callie

She let me take a few pictures of it. It is made with Adafruit Flora Neopixels, a Gemma controller and a small LiPo battery.

Callie and her crown

She’s a student at UC Davis, and is a truly wonderful role model for the high school students at the events. While you don’t necessarily need an LED tiara to shine as a role model, Adafruit does have a tutorial so that you can make one, too.

AYAB: A new interface for vintage knitting machines

Machine knitted versions of the AYAB and the Evil Mad Scientist logos

AYAB — All Yarns Are Beautiful — is an open source hardware and software project that provides an alternative way to control the widely-loved Brother KH-9xx range of knitting machines using a computer. There are other hacks (such as Img2Track, Knitic and electro-knit) which work with certain machines in certain conditions. The AYAB interface works with all Brother KH-9xx machines except the KH-970.

AYAB control board

We’ve just launched a new interface board for the AYAB project. They’ve written about it on their site, and you can read the product details on our store page for it.

Historically, these machines were programmed with semi-transparent picture cards which were scanned by the machine line by line. For later machines, you could enter a pattern via lots of tedious button-pressing. Some models had an add-on gadget that connected to your vintage TV.

Knitted image of Live Long and Prosper hand gesture

With the AYAB interface, you can provide an image of up to a 200 pixel (or needle) size from your computer. The control is done by an Arduino-compatible microcontroller board, which replaces the vintage control board. We are excited to be helping to bring new capabilities to these beloved machines.

Epic Cylon costume with Larson Scanner

By Warren Goodwin

Warren wrote in on Facebook:

I just received your Larson scanner for my Foam Cylon helmet today … I have since this video diffused the light inside the clear conduit pipe the LEDS are held inside of to make the LED effect a bit more smoother.

He has been posting updates of the costume on facebook.

Cylon costume with Larson Scanner eye
By Warren Goodwin

RGB Interactive Table

IR_Table

Craig shared this project which evolved with the assistance of the Octolively project.

Thanks for the previous help you gave me when I was designing my own IR proximity boards. I thought you may want to have a look at the finished item.

I have attached a picture of the 25 100mmx100mm boards and a video of the table working. Each one had a SOIC PIC 18F26K22 on it, with 9 IR transmitters and receivers and 9 x WS2812b addressable LEDs on. They all kind of communicate with each other so that each board does the same IR reading of the same ‘pixel’ at the same time as the others. I simply have a pin on the board which outputs low whan it is working (taking a reading’, then after it is done, it changes to an input pin, it continually looks at this pin until it goes high, meaning all the other boards have also completed that particular reading and then it’s on to the next one.

I also have a calibration function so any thickness opaque covering can be put on the table top.

I have 2 buttons on it. One to change the colour (including the rainbow fade) and also a button to change the fade speed.

IR_Table

Thank you, Craig, for sharing your project! We’re glad you were able to get inspiration and helpful information from one of our projects.

 

 

Interactive LED Christmas Tree

LED Christmas tree on Octolively derivative boards

Our friends at Mouser sent us this picture of their Octolively derived display, updated for the holidays:

We continue to have fun with your Octolively module design. In the attached photo you can see why we decided to use sockets for the LEDs on our boards.  We plan on changing out the display for each of the holidays.

I was a little concerned at first about using the red LEDs with resistors that were chosen for white or blue, but they’re socketed, so replacing any that get damaged by overdriving should be easy! Looks like a fun way to celebrate at the office, and the snowflake tree-topper is a nice touch.

DIY Mega Menorah 9000

LEDs in breadboard

Over on twitter, @shaiss says:

This is why #OSHA is awesome! In a pinch+some parts we made our electronic menorah. @EMSL design &  @adafruit trinket.

If you want to roll your own, the open source hardware documentation is on our wiki. If you’re not keen on the breadboard aesthetic for your hanukkiyah, you can still get the Mega Menorah 9000 kit.