Here’s Nick experimenting with butane for a “flaming sword” I want to make. Yeah, I know. I console myself with the knowledge that there are even stupider people than Nick and myself, and they tend to publish on YouTube.
Category Archives: hobby
POV boards arrive!
Posted by admin
on November 13, 2010
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My boards are back!
First parts back from BatchPCB
The last few months have been pretty slow at work so I’ve had time to get back to some of my interests. I wish I had more time for those things but that is its own blog post. For now, I’ve got to squeeze these activities in wherever I can.
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Halloween!
Posted by admin
on November 2, 2010
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MBED rocks!
Posted by admin
on February 2, 2010
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After a night out celebrating a friend’s recent departure from work for Costa Rica and surf heaven, I stumbled back to MindTribe to play with my MBED, “a tool for Rapid Prototyping with Microcontrollers”. It’s actually a wonderful little device and I got this “persistence of vision” trick working pretty quickly. I taped the MBED, a Hall Effect sensor, and a column of LEDs to my bike wheel and spun the whole mess, using the MBED to turn the LEDs on at the right time to spell the little “J” you see in the video.
The “J” is painted a column at a time, but the column of light is traveling around the wheel, and because it happens so quickly, your eye smears all the light flashes together so it appears as if the “J” is being painted in its entirety at a single moment in time. This is persistence of vision.
You can buy much fancier setups from adafruit but I’m pleased with how this has turned out. The fact that I was able to bang this out in just a few hours after a few drinks is testament to the excellent development tools from the MBED team. I’ll keep working on it and see if I can come up with anything worth another blog post!
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