Monthly Archives: October 2011

Scary Robot Pumpkin Invasion

electronics, hacking

I left work a little early (around 4pm) to finish up the Cylon pumpkin.  The carving went pretty well, but it was starting to get dark by the time I put the electronics in.

If you want to do this project, please don’t do as I did with scratch building, and just buy the kit. When I put the electronics in the pumpkin, they didn’t work. I pushed my fingers around on the back of the board and I could get it to work sometime.

Back upstairs, I x-acto’ed between traces where there was already corrosion (I didn’t clean the flux very well) and resoldered a few things. Whew! Got it working 1 minute before the first trick or treater came!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrUGX8nCOvk[/youtube]

And here’s the whole display. I hope you enjoyed it!

Desperate Halloween Project: The Cylon Pumpkin aka Larson Scanner

electronics, hacking

We’ve been so busy this season, there’s been little time for extra things. I used to go all out for Halloween, but this year we decided we couldn’t do much more than help the kids with their costumes. Well, this bothered me, and I decided to at least try to do a cool jack-o-lantern.

I’ve mentioned my love affair with EvilMadScientist.com before. They have a ton of quirky, always fun projects. (I’m still trying to convince Joyce we need an eggbot!)

They have a very nice, inexpensive kit to do a “Larson Scanner” which is  a row of LED’s that scan back in forth, like in the Glenn Larson TV shows Knight Rider, and Battlestar Galactica. They also love Halloween, and published a list of their Halloween related projects. The first Cylon Pumpkin they did, was a simple slit in the pumpkin to show off the scanner, but more recently they did this awesome carving:

The project linked to this picture uses an older circuit, not the EMSL kit...

Now I haven’t carved mine yet, and I wasn’t thinking ahead. It would have been much easier to just order their kit ($13) but I had most of the parts lying around, and I stayed up late laying it out and soldering it (badly) to a proto-board. My local electronics store doesn’t have a very good selection of proto-boards, but they had a cheap (<$3) proto-board laid out like a solderless breadboard.

I’m sure this is old hat to most folks, but I realized that I could squeeze the IC in, not in the middle where it’s supposed to go, but toward one side by cutting the traces between the rows of pins for the socket.

I didn’t want wires on the front, so I tacked them from the back, and that was hard, and a little messy, as it’s very cramped especially in the middle of the attiny micro.

Once again, this whole project wouldn’t have been possible without my adafruit usbtiny ISP programmer. I used an Evil Mad Scientist minimal target board to program the chip.

EMSL’s code is a thing of beauty and a lot can be learned by studying it. Hopefully I’ll be back after tomorrow night with pictures of the finished Cylon-O-Lantern.

Soul-B-Gone: A super camera remote

electronics, hacking, kit reviews

I’ve had a lot of fun with my TV-B-Gone, which I bought direct from Mitch Altman (the inventor) at Maker-Faire RI a couple of years ago. I particularly like turning off the plague of flatscreens at work, and every one I can see through the glass doors in my building!

I have a Nikon D90, and the little IR remote which has been very useful, but is pretty weak. It’s flakey past 5 feet, and you really have to point it right at the front of the camera. I thought, gosh, the TV-B-Gone is AWESOME, and open source, so I set about to make it into a super Nikon remote.

Here’s the 1.2 kit from Adafruit. It’s more powerful because it uses a better design of cascading transistors.

The actual hack took less than a half hour. I found someone else had done the reverse engineering of the timing on the web (http://www.alanmacek.com/nikon/)

The 1.1 software was super easy to translate the timings to. I recently bought a version 1.2 kit (the current version) and ported the software which involved mostly changing the polarity of on/off, and using a single pin instead of two.

The biggest part of this project was assembling all the bits to program. I built a usbtiny (Love it…) and used an extra TV-B-Gone pcb as a minimal target board.

The thing is Awesome! I haven’t tested how far it goes, but it hasn’t failed me yet, and it bounces around any room I’ve tried it in to be far less directional.

Thank you Mitch and Limor! Your code was great, and it was such a thrill to make something I wanted!

You can download the firmware from github. Now the only problem is switching the chips. The 1.2 version frees up a pin to use as region select, so it is possible to use it as a switch to select between camera remote and tv-b-gone.