MAKE @ Parsons

Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. I was searching through food section of Instructables for a new breakfast idea, and saw this recipe, which is not really a recipe. What is wrong with this Instructables? First of all, photos of the food are awful. If you want someone to follow your recipe( regardless of the taste), it should look good. Doesn’t it? In addition, instructions are not very specific. For example, step 2 tells you to put “faux” sausage in the skillet. What is “faux” sausage? How does it  sound appetizing? The Step 4 tells you to mix up eggs with water to make eggs fluffy, but doesn’t tell you how much of water is used. Well…. I think I rather stay with my yogurt breakfast.



One Skillet Breakfast – More DIY How To Projects

I simply desolder the speaker which is attached drawdio and I connect my old iPhone headphones to drawdio by soldering.

So, there it is “Stereo Drawdio”

hey everyone,

for my first project and first mod i chose the mintyboost v2.0 kit, a portable ipod/iphone charger that runs off of 2 AA bateries.

the instructions i followed were off of ladyada.com and were really good.

after checking the parts list on the site i found out my kit was flawed,

i had 4 resistors

<<—-

when i really needed was 2 resistors and 2 capacitors

like these——->>

luckily the school has this cool closet thing with things

like that in it, so i googled around and found out that

these disc shaped capacitors were the same value (0.1uF)

So  problem almost solved,

From here i followed the ladyada instructions to the part where u solder the second bypass capacitor until i realized the capacitors i borrowed from the school were wayyy bigger

so i had to think of a way to make the 2nd one fit

under the 8 pin socket

like shown here on the ladyada site

<<—-

what i ended up doing was leading the capacitor over the side of the board

being very careful not to let the separate leads touch (i actually put a thin piece of rubber between them) and then u can put the 8 pin socket right over the leads, it might not be completely flat but if  it goes deep enough into the board to be able to solder u should be fine.  Heres my final result-

I tried again to get my MintyBoost to work and didn’t have any luck.  I checked the soldering and no wires were touching.  I searched the Forums for help.  There were lots of people with hot chips, but no one seemed to know how to solve the problem.  I posted as well, but didn’t get any responses.

I have been researching mid-century animation for my thesis and came across Flebus.

It was released in 1957 and you can find out all about it here.

I made an instructional video on how to create interesting textures using watercolours and After Effects. <play me>

This is Benny.



We get along for the most part but he has a bad habit of  falling asleep in my glasses case.



















Benny is pretty claustrophobic so he naturally makes a fuss when you pull pranks and close the glasses case on him while he’s sleeping.

How it works:





1) I lined the top rim of the glasses case with a piece of galvanized wire

1.5) I tucked the ends of the wire between the soft and hard lining of the case

2) I took two smaller pieces of wire and wrapped each around the copper tape

3) I folded the other ends of these wire pieces across the bottom rim of the glasses case so now the circuit completes when the case is closed.

*I decided to put the TV-B-Gone kit into a glove so that I can successfully turn all the TV off at local bars I will be walking by in the neighborhood. This is the kit when it was assembled.

* I took de-soldered LED light, Infrared lights, battery case, and the switch to mount on a glove.

*The first task was inserting infrared lights into the glove.

*Make sure if all the infrared lights are in and lined up correctly with the kit.

*Now insert the switch on the thumb and solder it.

*Cut a hole on the glove so that LED can be shown on the top of the glove.

*Attach a piece of velcro on the glove and the battery case so that the battery case is mounted securely.

*This is the completed version.

After a long battle with all the components, I finally had a chance to put together my mintyboost kit. I thought the instructions were quite clear and easy to follow, although, I haven’t been able to make it work properly. I went back and tried to adjust and re-solder the components exactly like it was shown in the instructions. Yet for some reason, it’s still not functioning like it should.

I went on and checked if everything was soldered cleanly- to try and discard any possibility of my “surgeon” pulse having to do anything with this conflict- and to my astonishment, it didn’t. Turns out, all the components were placed in properly and the soldering was not that bad. Judge for yourselves!

I’m still working on the problem. My only consolation, is that the only other person in class who did this assignment, has the same conflict I do.

I’m sure we’ll be able to figure it out.

It was wintery in the city today, so I decided to curl up on the couch with a blanket and a good book.

But oh, what a conundrum. How can I read the book while I remain snuggly in my blanket.

After multiple failures, it hit me! I’d make a snuggy out of my beloved Navajo blanket…

I followed this HOT instructable, but if you have half a brain you can probably wing it with the same effect.

I began by cutting off about 2 yards of fabric to form  the base of the garment.

Then i cut two 24″ widths of fabric (cutting across the bolt as above) for the sleeves. Now for the fun / stressful sewing part. But who could ask for a better sewing set up on a snowy day???

Yes, I am as ridiculous in real life as I am online.

I folded the two “arms” in half lengthwise making SURE that the fabric was inside out. I sewed a straight seam and then turned them inside-out to prepare them to be sewn onto the body.

I then folded the body fabric in half lengthwise (hotdog style) and measured 12″ down from the top. I laid the arms on top of the body and cut a slit in the body fabric long enough to accommodate the arm holes. I then pinned the arms to the inside of the garment. This is important because you don’t want your seams to show from the front. After struggling with the fabric a bit, I sewed the arms into the garment, trimmed off the excess fabric from the sleeves et voila! C’est magnifique!

My chest will no longer suffer from being chilly while i read or watch tv Again!!!

I requested a TV-B-Gone kit, however Adafruit had run out! So Becky kindly procured for me a Game of Life kit. If you don’t know what Conway’s Game of Life is, check this out :: it’s one of the best known examples of cellular automation; It is a “zero-player game“, that begins with a state, and obeying a specific set of rules, creates animations of cells living and dying. Here’s a Processing sketch – click around, and see what happens as green (alive) cells are born and die. (i believe ‘p’=pause, ‘c’=clear, and up/down=speed).

Adafruit’s kit is a 4×4 LED matrix that comes with an ATmega48 programmed to play Life on it’s own. Each time the circuit is turned on or reset, a random “scene” is played out – meaning randomly 1 – 6 LEDs will turn on, and the game plays itself out until either all cells die, or an oscillating (repeating) pattern occurs. At this point her circuit resets itself with about a 3 – 5 second delay of darkness. Adafruit’s kit is unique in that you can actually connect several 4×4s together, and they will automatically communicate with each other, creating much larger fields for animations to happen. Here is what 4 kits, daisy chained together looks like when it’s finished (from Adafruit’s site):

4 of Adafruits Game of Life kits connected together

With just one kit, you can imagine that each Game of Life does not last very long — on average I would say 1 – 3 seconds and all LEDs are dead, stagnated, or an oscillating pattern happens. In the case of complete death, it will take about 5 or 7 seconds, and the game will restart. In the case of a repeating pattern, hopefully it is a cool one because you are going to be seeing just that until you turn the unit off or hit the restart button.

I think two things really informed my final idea – the fact that the animations are so quick, and the concept of Life being cycle and repeating. What better measurement of life is there, than a beating heart? Those who know me, are familiar with my affinity for biometrics. I have worked with ekg, eeg, gsr, and the like, and am very fond of the idea of taking data from the body and externalizing it in real time. I saw the opportunity and grabbed it by the balls. There is an ekg (electrocardiogram) circuit I had been eager to try out myself that uses a simple IR and emitter and detector circuit to get heart data. I won’t go on about this, suffice it to say it ’sees’ through your skin to measure bloodflow using IR light. You can see a really simple version of the circuit working here. I tried this circuit out and found it to be a very weak signal, and found schematics for incorporating an OpAmp to boost the signal.

My final idea: embed Life into the chest area of a hoodie and let the wearer’s heart beat control the frequency of resets. Since the animations expire so quickly, my hope is that the users’ ekg will be seen in how often the game is restarted. Ideally it would control the speed of the animations, however I currently don’t have the hardware to reprogram this particular AVR chip – Adafruit of course posted all code and schematics which came in very handy. I decided since the LEDs will be embedded, there is no need to use her bulky PCB. I used perf board to recreate her circuit much smaller, with room for my EKG circuit.

This is ambitious. I have not finished. I do have Life running on the hoodie, but I have not finished soldering in the EKG circuit. Hopefully by this weekend. I also decided to use red LEDs, not green as the kit comes with. Thought it represented the heart, blood, life, nicer. I used conductive thread (thanks Becky!) to wire all LEDs from their source (which will be a pocket in the back of the hoodie) all the way to where they live in the chest of the hoodie.

As far as her walk through, it is a very simple kit – there are only 16 LEDs, 16 resistors, and one small capacitor for power. The instructions are clear, easy to follow, and straightforward. You can see by looking at the PCB, there are very few unique components, just a lot of them.

You can see my progress so far in this flickr set. I will edit this post when I have completed the project. I’m also waiting to finish before i submit to any blogs. Hopefully my dreadful sewing abilities (hey i’m a beginner!) don’t turn too many people off. Considering the romantic aspects of your heart, and cellular automation (haha yeah right), this is my valentine’s gift for someone special… I used a mickey mouse hoodie that was on sale at K-Mart for $5 !!! all hoodies are dirt cheap now, i guess winter is “over”. More soon…

HOODIE COMPLETE!