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We have seen a few Rotating POV Globe in the past. Scitech has a Arduino based Rotating POV Globe which looks quite nice, the refresh rate of the camera screws up the effect a bit but I assume it looks perfect in real life. “The Rotating POV Globe utilizes the arduino uno as the central control brain which contains an Atmel AVR microcontroller. Essentially we have a rotating ring which contains up to 32 LEDs in this particular configuration. As the ring rotates, changes in the configuration of the LEDs will give the impression of a consistant and persistant globe or sphere covered in LEDs. The best way to describe the construction of a Rotating POV Globe is with a description of the hardware followed by a description of the software.”
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You might remember the Timing Chain Clock that was featured earlier this month. Steve Moseley left a comment letting us know that there is actually one similar to what I was saying would be cool to see. I was thinking that it would be great to have the Timing Chain Clock have three gears and chains so it could show hours and minutes. Well Youtube user Mosignose actually has built something similar, the chains run in a loop with the numbers attached in a different way but the idea is the same. |
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When you squint a bit and loose scale these mandarin oranges look a bit like small pumpkins. I wanted to rev up the Halloween spirit around the house and without a real pumpkin to carve I settled for the next best thing. That is of course a laser etched pumpkin carving onto a mini orange which is lit from the inside using an LED. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out since there is so much water content in an orange, I thought it might not even remove any material because of this. Thankfully I was wrong and the fruit etches quite well! I downloaded the image from this Halloween carving site. I used trial and error on the 60 watt laser machine to see what speed and power would work the best to etch the orange. Turns out that a speed of 400 and a power of 40 works great to remove the outer orange color and leave the white inner part of the peel. With a speed of 100 and a power of 95, three passes is what it took to blast away the entire peel right to the flesh of the fruit. There is a bit of inconsistent cutting since the small fruits have a very curved surface making it impossible to keep the entire etching area in focus. A rotary unit could be used to solve one axis of curvature but the results were good enough without adding any more complexity… The following components were used to light the guts of the orange (that wants to be a pumpkin):
To make the circuit simply solder the resistor to the long lead of the LED, then connect the red battery snap wire to the free end of the resistor. Finally solder the black wire to the short lead of the LED. Now when a battery is connected your LED will light. Look at the completed circuit in the picture gallery below. Please note that the LED shining through the mini orange has been exaggerated by using a long shutter speed. It does produce a nice glow with the room lights out but it doesn’t look like the very bright orange picture to the naked eye. |
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Youtube user misperry has been making a ton of electronic tutorial videos. These three videos go over how to use the capacitive touch modules that are built into many PIC microcontrollers. These videos go over how to design a circuit using the 16F727 microcontroller which has M-Touch, this is what Microchip calls the capacitive sense modules. |
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The MD-80 Mini DV Spy Camera is a great low cost camera, don’t expect it to be a replacement for your HD camcorder which cost you a 5 hundred bucks though since it can be found in many places for less than $20. Considering the price you get a ton of technology packed in a small device. The first thing I noticed with mine is that it has a time stamp with the wrong time. To change the time stamp all you need to do is place a file called TAG.TXT in the root directory with the following content. [date] I am surprised that there is no way to turn the time/date stamp off though. I have never seen a video camera that didn’t have a way to turn off the stamp. I guess considering the price of the recorder one could just look the other way but the guys at US Water Rockets have taken some crazy steps to remove the Time Stamp from a MD-80 Mini DV Spy Camera. They love these tiny cameras for recording the flight of their rockets. It isn’t exactly easy though since it involves removing the F16-100 serial memory chip and using a TI Launchpad to reprogram it.
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If you want to wear a set of glasses that will make you look like a cartoon character look no further than Blinking and Winking Laser Cut Eye Project. They can wink, blink and if you shine a bright light at them they will squint. If you are interested in making one for yourself Ben has made the Arduino code available here.
Stupid Pet Trick – Blinking LED’s from B.Light Design on Vimeo. |
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The circuit above is the Halloween Spooky Audio Trigger, it has a door contact sensor connected to it and when it detects that the door has opened it waits for a short time before scaring the pants off your trick or treaters with some spooky sounds! The detection of the door opening is actually the simple part, the more complex part of the Halloween project is how the Nerd Kit is programmed with the audio in a fashion that can fit into the limited space available.
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