VFD Filament Driver Circuit

Don't give up! I spent the last 3 years troubleshooting this circuit with an LM4871 chip with the goal of supplying a low voltage alternating square wave current across the filament of vacuum fluorescent displays. Spoiler alert: it was the addition of a single 10Ω resistor to lower the voltage from ~5V down to ~3.3V.

Mycelium Bluetooth Speaker

 

Someone gave me the electronics to a bluetooth speaker so I figured I had to make a mycelium case for it.

Arduino Controlled 5V Relay for Christmas Tree Lights

Our christmas tree lights plug into the wall behind the tree and are always hard to reach without sprinkling needles on the floor when we want to turn the lights on or off. This year I made an Arduino controlled relay that can turn the lights on and off with a switch that extends out next to the tree. Here is a video of the switch in action:

Hacked an Answering Machine

I found this old answering machine and originally thought it was a good find for just harvesting the 7-segment display. But as it sat around my work table it occurred to me it would be fun to use the display and buttons to insert a Simon game inside the case. I put it off because it seemed daunting but once I started on it yesterday it turned out to only take a day to put together.

Hacking Salvaged LED Displays (Part II)

Good news! I just found a discarded VCR with an LED display. That means it's time to salvage the display and make a project out of it. While the last post on 7-segment displays was a single digit, standard display, this one actually turns out to be 10-segment with non-numerical segments. So it will be an exercise in figuring out how a non-standard display works. In this post I will go over my process for hacking a display like this. If you're interested in doing this for a simple, standard 7-segment numerical display see this other post.

Vacuum Fluorescent Display Adventures

I found an old 1986 microwave up the street to take apart. My favorite part to salvage from microwaves is the turntable motor but this one had a very special numerical display. I could see it wasn't your usual LED display but is encased in glass and filled with interesting metal plates and fine filaments.

Raspberry Pi Classroom Table Timelapse Documentation

After trying to document spring plant and tree growth with a Raspberry Pi timelapse setup I found the variation in lighting over long periods of time produced a lot of bad footage. But I figured using this in the classroom to do timelapse recordings of students working at the table could be useful and not face the same problem of changing lighting conditions. So I created a mashup of my old Replicator 2 3D printing monitor with the timelapse program that conveniently attaches to our hanging outlets and managed to bang out a pretty quick set up for this. I start the program by logging in to a headless Raspberry Pi Zero wifi and the pi waits for a button press to start snapping pictures at 5 second intervals for 15 minutes.

Reinventing the Mallet

I've been making scrap wood mallets for a couple weeks now and I can't stop. For one thing I do like them as a tool; multi-purpose, perfect for knocking things that a hammer would damage or require careful aim for. But also they are simple to make, yet require enough forethought to meet some basic requirements; that the head not fly off, that it satisfy size and proportion constraints, that it not split apart. There are many videos on how to make an awesome mallet and I did watch them. But obtaining just the right heft by filling inner pockets with BBs or creating interlocking parts with dowels is not what I'm after.

Hacking IKEA LEDBERG flexible rgb lightstrip

I got a roll of awesome rgb lights at IKEA and used part of it to make an infinity mirror (sorry the link is to IKEA Europe but for some reason it's not on the US site, but anyway it was here in large quantities in Brooklyn). It's made to cut at certain points marked with a scissors and I only used a few feet of a 5 meter roll for the mirror project. So at the time I thought I would figure out eventually how to use the rest. It would be a shame to throw away.

Laser Cut Boxes and Light Up Plushies: Pulling Out All the Stops In the Maker Space

I just did a hard and fun project with two English teachers as part of their 11/12 grade students reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. They made stuffed monster plushie dolls with hand sewn LED circuits and designed wood and acrylic boxes to "contain" them (containing the monster being one of the themes in Frankenstein).

Making a Strobing Zoetrope at DDD

Design Do Discover

I loved participating in Design Do Discover 2017! The people and facilities are fantastic and I really enjoyed taking a project idea from start to finish (-ed enough) in the 2-day whirlwind workshop. I just want to document here our process of making a zoetrope, which I went in thinking I would like to make. One of the best parts of D3 was experiencing the epiphany that in the process of trying to make something you come to understand something so much better than if it were just explained or shown to you. The thing I came to understand was how persistence of vision works.

ShapeTiler App with WaterColorBot

I updated my Shape Tiler program,
made with Processing.js,
to be a standalone version that exports a PDF of your shape tile, which you can then import to Inkscape and send to your WaterColorBot to draw. Why make a plotter draw your shape tile design rather than just printing out the png from the online version? I don't know! But it's fun to watch.

LilyPad Arduino In the Classroom: Interactive Shirts

Last summer as a participant in the Constructing Modern Knowledge conference I had the opportunity to develop a project with the LilyPad Arduino (and meet Leah Buechley!). I worked with a wonderful group of educators to prototype a hat that lets you know with LEDs when you should apply sunscreen. I had only prototyped circuits with the LilyPad before, never actually sewing one into a project, so one big thing I learned during that project is that embedding the components into fabric involves as much problem solving and time as programming and prototyping the circuit.

Daisy Chained NeoPixel Ring Flower Garden

pic.twitter.com/OOh0bXBzns

— Erik Nauman (@openblackboard) March 25, 2016

I've had this recessed frame kicking around for a long time and finally came across a good use for it. Inspired by the story of a student's flower garden Logo program in Teaching With Logo by Molly and Daniel Watt, I picked up some NeoPixel rings at my local go to hobby store, Tinkersphere, and set about learning how to daisy chain them into one circuit.

Lynn's flower garden

Stepper Motor Player

I took some stepper motors out of some old printers to play with. Newer printers seem to use DC motors, but I love finding steppers because they make such nice sounds. I spent a while on this project just figuring out how to get the steppers to work and some different options for

Games and Controllers With Scratch, MaKey MaKey, and 3D Printing

I first wrote this post a year ago. This past year I revised a couple things as I did the project again, and the revisions will be noted.
We got a Makerbot Replicator 2 last December (now a year-and-a-half ago) and one of the projects I came up with turned out really well, and I think is worth sharing. My 7th graders designed key press controlled games in Scratch, then designed hand-held controllers with embedded switches, and we connected MaKey MaKeys to the leads on the switches for a great game experience. The highlights

LED Handbell Gloves

This project was quite long in development, more than a year, in fact! I learned a lot about technology design so the process is worth recounting. Two then-juniors I taught in a robotics class, Susannah and Nicki, now graduated, asked me for help with an idea they had. They were members of a handbell group they had played with for 5 years and wanted to make handbell gloves that light up each time they play a bell, unveiling the gloves for one piece in their final concert. We batted around some ideas. They thought about using a Lilypad Arduino and an accelerometer but I thought we

Controlling 8 X 8 LED Matrix With the MAX7219

At first it was annoyingly difficult to get this LED matrix working properly but after putting it down for a month and coming back to it I suddenly have it working. We have a spiral staircase leading up to a Mac lab and my office and the student and teacher traffic always leads to an annoying jam when people

Keeping Multiple Electroluminescent Wires Bright With An Arduino

I recently helped a student with a nice, provocative installation with kitschy religious imagery that used EL wires to simulate a neon sign. She had a border, made by a yellow wire, framing three words in orange, each made by its own wire. She wanted the border to stay lit while the words blinked on and off. If you've ever worked with EL wires you will know that if they have the same power source, such as an Arduino (with El Escudo Dos controller) the more wires that are lit at once the dimmer they all get, since the voltage is shared. She really should have done the words with one wire but she

Hands On Tech: Making Ceramic Tiles

Inspired by the brilliant work of Gary Donohue and Josh Burker, I have been working on a project with some of our art teachers that has exciting possibilities. It started with Gary describing his workflow that allows elementary students' line drawings to become 3D printed pieces. Then Josh took that in another direction with 4th graders using Turtle Art to make patterns that can be printed as presses for making clay tiles.
One of our art teachers said this is the idea that fills in the missing link for him with 3d printing--the link between hand-made artwork and digital manufacturing. Other teachers responded similarly, feeling little affinity for a machine that prints digitally designed objects until they could see how hand craft can be a vital part of its use.
I'm working with a high school art teacher and her ceramics class. I made a Processing sketch they can use to generate patterns from several different shapes. Check it out, it's here: http://openblackboard.com/processing/shapetile/.

Conceptually the code of the program is very similar to the one Josh presents above for Turtle Art. Each shape object is made up of a shape method, called by a row method that draws the shape across the window (and a second offset row if you set offsetEvenRows to true), called by a makeRows method that repeats the rows top to bottom. The amount of horizontal and vertical overlap is determined by the slider numbers you give the shape, as well as the size of the shape.

After configuring the shapes they way you want click the save button and download the image. You will want to tweak it before you get your final pattern.
The next step is to crop the image down to what you want just for the tile, so open it in Preview, or some image editor on a PC, and crop down to the desired area. Since you probably want the tile to repeat horizontally and possibly vertically as well this may be tricky, especially if you are aiming to have a square tile.

Save the cropped image and open it in Illustrator. Now you will trace it to prepare it for conversion to a vector graphic. Click Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options. Check Preview and spend some time trying the different Presets. When you have one you like, click the Trace button. At first I tried Detailed Illustration on this one, but when I completed the next step, importing to Tinkercad, I saw that the preset did something very different than I expected, so I retraced it with the Lettering preset and that worked much better.

Click Save as, and choose SVG.

Now in Tinkercad use the section in the upper right to import the SVG file into a new design. It will come in bigger than you want it, so scale it down, holding shift while you drag a corner to keep the aspect ratio.

The height will have decreased as well so raise it back up to about 6mm. Then add a 2mm layer to tie it together. 

And now some results! I can't wait to see them glazed.