Monday, December 31, 2018

Chinese Character Hex Bitmapper For Sino:bit

In an effort to help realize the goal of making the Sino:bit accessible to novice coders in non-Latin based languages here is an app that allows you to paste a Chinese character and get a char array representing a bitmap version of the character. The array can be uploaded and displayed on the Sino:bit with the Arduino IDE.

Thursday, December 27, 2018

Hexadecimal Bitmap Codes for Sino:bit

The Sino:bit is a big LED matrix based on the Calliope mini and developed by Naomi Wu. It's also a lot more, with a bunch of sensors and accessible pins on the board, like the Calliope and the BBC Microbit. The matrix has 12 X 12 LEDs and is fun to make bitmap images for. I made a P5 app on Glitch for designing bitmaps and downloading the Arduino code to display it on the Sino:bit.

Saturday, December 15, 2018

Milling PCBs: Tinkercad Circuits, Eagle, Carbide Copper, and Carvey

This workflow for designing and milling a single-sided PCB on the Carvey CNC is an updated workflow from that which I worked out last year when I first started doing this in my high school classroom/maker space. This workflow is much simpler, and allows my students to make their own simple PCBs in less time and with less frustration, while still giving them an experience of circuit design, PCB layout, and hardware integration to container design.