Small Parts Tray made from Contact Lens Cases

Parts Tray-6


Contact lens cases make great small parts containers. They are designed with curved ridged sides to allow easy retrieval of small slippery things. They have watertight seals, guaranteeing that your parts won’t fall out. With a bunch of cases, a little hot glue and a mounting surface, you can have a cheap, reliable, easy to use storage system.


Parts Tray-14

Continue reading Small Parts Tray made from Contact Lens Cases

Neighborhood Holiday Parade


Lakewood neighborhood holiday parade




Yesterday was the Lakewood Neighborhood Holiday Parade, and this was our second year watching it. It is a charming tradition: the middle and high school bands march together and play holiday music, all the local classic cars come out (some of them bearing local politicians), and they host a toy drive. It was bright and sunny and all the classic cars shone. For more pictures (from both this year and last) you can check out my flickr set.




Lakewood neighborhood holiday parade

Programming Meggy Jr RGB

Last week we released an Arduino environment library for the Meggy Jr RGB. The code is an open source project here, and the downloadable package comes several example programs, ranging from very simple to moderately complex. (One of the examples is a new game called Froggy Jr, where you help your a little round green frog cross the street and then a river.)

Today, to make it all a bit more useful, we are releasing the Meggy Jr RGB Programing guide, which you can download Here (600 kB PDF file).

Continue reading Programming Meggy Jr RGB

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.
Continue reading Binary Birthday