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.
Continue reading A dark detecting circuit for your jack-o’-lantern
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.
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.
Continue reading A Sinusoidal Acrylic Bracelet Design
On our last trip to Urban Ore, we found this fantastic example of illustration as an element of industrial design. The “Sun Dial” on this 8mm Bell & Howell 333 wind-up movie camera is absolutely foolproof. If only all camera controls were so clear!
Here’s what the rest of the camera looks like. Sorry about the busy background–those pretty tube boxes are awfully distracting. You can see the normal, wide, and telephoto lenses here. Note that the red and yellow rectangles on the viewfinder correspond to the ring color on the lens choice as well. (Where’s my digital conversion for this thing, anyway?) |
This will be interesting to a small subset of our readers, but we’re finally seeing ATmega328P chips in the wild. This is a new chip from Atmel that is nearly identical to– but with twice the memory of– the popular ATmega168 microcontroller, the microcontroller in the Arduino and in our (Arduino-compatible) Peggy 2.0. They are still in short supply, but they’ll be a lot of fun to play with. :)
In the photo is one of these on one of our “business card” AVR target boards that we designed for the ATmega48, ’88, ‘168, and ‘328, so it’s finally lived up to its name.
Insalata caprese, an Italian classic, becomes an instant halloween classic as well.
The traditional ingredients for this delicate salad are fresh mozzarella, basil, plum tomatoes and olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Our version goes only slightly further, adding a thin slice of olive as the garnish. And, a clever trick produces perfectly round pupils every time.
Continue reading High Cuisine for Halloween: Eyeball Caprese
Today is the official release date for the Hungry Scientist Handbook, a new book by Patrick Buckley and Lily Binns.
The Hungry Scientist Handbook was conceived as a sort of cookbook for geek-centric food and– using the word a different way– as an a cookbook for food-oriented electronics– as evidenced by projects varying from polyhedral pies to LED lollipops.
We met Patrick and Lily at the 2006 Maker Faire, where they invited us to contribute a couple of chapters to their project. We did, and it’s finally out!
(We aren’t the only ones who are excited– we’ve seen write-ups at the LA Times and
Wired this week.)
We contributed a total of nine projects to the Hungry Scientist Handbook, some of which we have written about here. These include the Computer Chip Trivets, Crafty fridge magnets, Edible Origami, and (making a cameo appearance) the Lego Trebuchet.
We also contributed a few new cooking projects that involve dry ice: Dry (Ice) Martinis, Fizzy dry ice lemonade, and Dry ice root beer. (With Floating bubbles on CO2 as a bonus project.)
And… a brand new exclusive Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories electronics project that we developed just for the Hungry Scientist Handbook: Smart Coasters.
Smart Coasters are cast-plastic coasters for your drink that light up red when you put a hot drink on top and light up blue with a cold drink. The design is fully analog– no microcontrollers and no programming– and they incorporate a solar cell so that the whole thing is hermetically sealed: waterproof and washable. Complete step-by-step DIY instructions are included for both the electronics and the resin casting.
You can purchase the Hungry Scientist Handbook at booksellers including Amazon. Also visit their new web site, www.hungryscientist.com.
The cheerful vintage packaging card for these lovely Kenberry stainless skewers proclaims that “whatever you like, it will taste better on a skewer.” This set came from the hallowed halls of Urban Ore in Berkeley. It is hard to imagine anyone who could have resisted the exhortation to “enjoy barbecue taste thrills year round indoors & out!” More pictures including close ups of all of the suggested skewer uses (“for individual shish-kebob service,” “for meat birds,” and “for good eating”) are in this flickr set for your enjoyment.
You’re headed somewhere on your bike and you want to bring your lunch along. Maybe you’re commuting or just headed to the park. Backpacks get warm, so you’d rather not wear one, and you don’t have a rack on your bike to pack your lunch on. Here’s a solution: a bike frame lunch bag you can make that will perfectly hold a box of leftovers or a sandwich. This one is designed for a standard “entree” sized plastic container, which is reasonably waterproof and acts as a structural integrity field for your sandwich.
The Mignonette is a minimalist handheld gaming platform that we helped to design in a collaboration with Rolf van Widenfelt and Mitch Altman.
The Mignonette is based on an AVR microcontroller (either the ATmega88 or ATmega168) hooked up to drive a 5×7 bicolor red/green LED matrix display, for a grand total of 70 bits of gaming goodness under your total control.
