Tux or Treat!

31 Oct 2011

Boo!

I hope everyone out there is enjoying a frightfully fun Halloween. I always try to sweeten the open source value proposition in the office:

The LED pumpkin is a Vellemen kit:

http://www.vellemanusa.com/products/view/?country=us&lang=enu&id=351279

It provides for some easy through-hole soldering fun. A couple transistors switch the LED brightness between a few levels to give a rough candle flickering effect. However, it is really not that realistic compared to those LED candles you can get everywhere nowadays. Rather than using RC time constants, it would be nice to throw a low-end microcontroller in there to give a nice, psuedo-random flicker via PWM. I think I'll have to try modding it next year. Anyways, for $12, I'd recommend the kit for beginners:

http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/cgi-bin/commerce.exe?preadd=action&key=MK145

However, I really liked Velleman's Animated Ghost kit (above):

http://www.vellemanusa.com/products/view/?id=522176

It senses noise with a built-in mic and then does random activities like play sound effects, glow its LED eyes or spin around using its small motor. It's about $10 more than the pumpkin:

http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/cgi-bin/commerce.exe?preadd=action&key=MK166

(image source: http://s1137.photobucket.com/albums/n506/IdeaPDish/)

A more advanced kit which will provide more of challenge is Ramsey's Tri-Field Meter (above):

http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/cgi-bin/commerce.exe?preadd=action&key=TFM3C

You can detect supernatural phenomenon in electrical, magnetic and RF fields. It definitely provided plenty of fun at our hackerspace party (Pumping Station: One in Chicago).

(image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/felix42/453311029/)

It's always nice to have something to listen to while soldering. I love engineering and open source related podcast, so the Zombie Tech podcast is spot on for today:

http://www.zombietech.tv/

It's engineers versus zombies with interviews of Joe Grand (Prototype This!), Dave Jones (eevblog), Chris Gammell (The Amp Hour), Jeremy Blum (element14's own Arduino expert) and more! The premise of a zombie apocalypse provides the platform to discuss sustainable technology and open source engineering.