The deadline for our Peggy 2 Clock Concept Contest is midnight, tomorrow (Tuesday) evening. Some of the existing entries are shown above, and they haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible.
We’ve got fourteen prizes, including awesome soldering kits and exclusive Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories sew-on patches. All you need to do to get one? Show us a clever way to display the time on a Peggy 2 LED matrix display. Let’s see those clocks!
Say hell-o to Diavolino. Yes, it’s yet-another Arduino compatible board, but it’s cheap and kind of neat. Simplified design, rounded corners, and shiny. Open source kit. You can get one at our store here.
We designed this primarily in response to local need in our San Francisco hacker community for low-cost boards for teaching.
In many ways, this project is reminiscent of and complimentary to our ATmegaXX8 target boards, which are low-cost, simple design circuit boards for programming AVR microcontrollers through an ISP connection. And while you can add one, those boards don’t have a place to put a USB-TTL cable. And so here we are. Continue reading Diavolino
Happy birthday to us! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has now been around for four years. We’ve collected some interesting projects from this past year to celebrate.
Microcontroller and Electronics Projects:
Moving from breadboard to protoboard
Revenge of the Cherry Tomatoes
Accelerometer with an AVR (updated)
Wallet-size LED Resistance Calculator
Science:
Gibberellic Acid and Giantism in Sprouts
Simple LED Projects:
Food Hacking:
Marmalade: easier than it looks
Kit Projects:
Crafty Projects:
Geek Design:
Typgraphical Character Coasters
And, don’t forget, you can win a Peggy 2 or one of 13 other prizes in our clock
concept contest, going on this week.
Related:
There are probably thousands of cool ways to build clocks based around an LED matrix, and we’ve seen some neat analog and digital clocks based on our Peggy 2 kit. But we’ve also come up with a few dozen other cool ways to show the time, and realized that we’ve only scratched the surface.
So today, we’re announcing a Clock Concept Contest: Show us your coolest idea about how to build a Peggy clock, and you could win one!
Continue reading Peggy 2: Clock Concept Contest!
Peggy 2 is our intelligent, Arduino-compatible (“freeduino” based), multiplexed 25 x 25 LED matrix, supporting up to 10 mm LEDs (or up to 5 mm LEDs in the Peggy 2LE version). It supports single-color LEDs at each point in the matrix, but you can mix and match different color LEDs throughout the matrix, and you don’t have to populate every LED location.
Since the whole matrix is available to control, it can be used to make an interesting clock in a lot of different ways.
One of the things that is sometimes helpful on a clock is to get slightly better precision than is available from a regular quartz crystal, and we’ve been using Macetech’s ChronoDot module on our Bulbdial clock kit. However it’s almost as easy to add the ChronoDot to the Peggy, and here’s how to do so.
INFORUM is hosting Mark Frauenfelder (BoingBoinger and editor of Make Magazine) and Adam Savage (Mythbuster) on June 14th at 6:00pm and we’re making an appearance at the Mini Maker Faire afterwards. We’re bringing our updated tabletop Pong, so if you didn’t get to play it at Maker Faire, here’s your chance.
The event is being held at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. You can get more info and tickets here. Hope to see you there!
Iron-on technology is amazing. Fusible webbing products like Wonder Under and Stitch Witchery have become ubiquitous. Even IKEA sells curtains with strips of webbing for no-sew hemming. And yet fusible webbing is usually dismissed by “serious” seamstresses. I’m here to defend the stuff and say that it definitely has its place, both for machine cutting custom iron-on fabric pieces and for more free-form projects as well. More importantly, here are some techniques that I’ve figured out for making strong custom iron-ons for a variety of purposes.
A common problem that you may come across when building “a box” to do something– whether a one-off gizmo or bona fide scientific instrument –is the rats nest of wires. A similar problem occurs when you need to run a bunch of basic wires out from your box to other devices. Unless there’s a standard cable lying around that does exactly what you need, you can end up with messy tangles of wires outside of your box as well.
There are many well-known solutions of course, as varied as elegantly laced wiring harnesses, cable tiesand teflon spaghetti sleeving, heat shrink tubing and cold shrink tape, and (possibly for the brave and/or insane) duct tape and paperclips.
One of the other basic methods– well known to many people who build electronics –is to twist wire bundles with a hand drill and a friend. This is a quick and awesome trick that makes durable cables, short or long, exactly to your specifications, and shockingly fast.
Continue reading Tricks of the trade: Twisting wire bundles
This weekend we brought our updated Tabletop Pong game to Maker Faire, where it survived two hard days of play by hundreds and hundreds of attendees. We were amazed by the reactions to it– particularly that such young and old people alike enjoyed playing it so much.
Of course, our first version back in January was a bit more iffy, and might not have survived a couple of hours at the fair. Here, we discuss the upgrades in some detail, complete with video and– now that it is working well –design files.
Continue reading Improving Tabletop Pong
