"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better"
These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component on/off and fade between colors. The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. 3 digital output pins are required to send data down.
The strip is made of flexible PCB material, and comes with a waterproof sheathing.
You can cut this stuff pretty easily with wire cutters, there are cut-lines every 2.5″/6.2cm (2 LEDs each). Solder to the 0.1″ copper pads and you’re good to go. Of course, you can also connect strips together to make them longer, just watch how much current you need! We have a 5V/2A supply that should be able to drive 1 or more meters (depending on use)
They come in 5 meter reels with a 0.1″ molexy connector on the end, and are sold by the meter! If you buy 5m at a time, you’ll get full reels. If you buy less than 5m, you’ll get a single strip, but it will be a cut piece from a reel which may or may not have a connector on it.
Technical specs:
19mm (0.75″) wide, 4.5mm (0.18″) thick with casing on, 62.5mm (2.45″) long per segment
32 LEDs per meter
Removable IP65 waterproof casing
Maximum 5V @ 120mA draw per 2.5″ strip segment (all LEDs on full brightness)
2 common-anode RGB LEDs per segment, individually controllable
LED wavelengths: 630nm/530nm/475nm
HL1606 LED controller chip with ‘SPI’-like protocol
Ed Nauman had a problem. When he worked in his garage machine shop, the noise levels were often so loud he couldn’t hear the doorbell. He resolved the situation by creating a microcontroller-operated, pneumatically actuated doorbell, or a “Really Loud Doorbell.” He calls it RLD for short. He started with a heavy chunk of steel that would resonate as well as withstand the punishment from a pneumatic ram. It’s the beginning of a heavy metal doorbell!
Minneapolis was named the country’s number one city for biking last year by Bicycling magazine, but the city’s bike community isn’t resting on its laurels. Looking to make Minneapolis even more welcoming to cyclists, local entrepreneurs recently opened the city’s first self-service bicycle repair kiosk, to serve the flat tubes and busted gears of the thousands of cyclists who travel Minneapolis’s bike paths each week.
The kiosk, called Bike Fixtation, offers basic bike tools, a repair stand, and a vending machine full of useful goodies, including tubes, lights, patch kits, and snacks. For their first station, founders Alex Anderson and Chad Debaker chose a location along the city’s bicycle superhighway, the Midtown Greenway. The crowning achievement of the city’s pro-biking initiative, the Greenway is a cyclist’s dream with 5.5 miles of bike-only trails reclaimed from an outmoded railroad corridor. The repair center will be open 18 hours a day, 365 days a year, and a second location is already in the works.
Social Bicycles released their revamped design for their bike sharing platform. It is a “GPS-enabled bike that you can find and unlock using your mobile phone.” What we like about it is that it enables companies, organizations and institutions of any size to easily create and manage their own bike share program. We think it also provides a great user experience.
The GPS locator and lock are powered by a battery system which is in turn powered by a dynamo and our 2 Watt solar panel. i.e. if the bike isn’t in motion for several days, the battery is going to stay powered up and transmitting its location.
Medium 6V 2W Solar panel 2.0 Watt. These panels come to us from Voltaic Systems, makers of fine solar-powered bags and packs. These are waterproof, scratch resistant, and UV resistant. They use a high efficiency monocrystalline cell. They output 6V at 330 mA via 3.5mm x 1.3mm DC jack connector. The substrate is an aluminum / plastic composite, specifically designed to be strong and lightweight. They can easily stand up to typical outdoor use including being dropped and leaned on. They’re very high quality and suggested for projects that will be exposed to the outdoors.
New! These now comes with 4 plastic mounting screws which makes it easy to attach the panel, even to fabric!
I just finished building a frame for some resurrected LED panels from a decommissioned super computer. The computer was a CM-5 by Thinking Machines. It has been used at the College of Oceanography and Atmospheric Science at Oregon State for a fairly long while. A few weeks ago, its time came, and we surplussed it. I was able to get the light panels and built a frame for them at my house. This post describes a little about the process and includes some trivia about the CM-5 and the panels themselves.The CM-5 in name alone probably doesn’t resonate with many people, but hopefully you can recognize it in the background of this photo from Jurassic Park…
This video of a cymbal vibrating in slo-mo has been making the rounds for the past few days. It reminded me of an article I read once which discussed synthesizing the sound that cymbals make. After some searching, I found that article. It’s by Gordon Reid, whose “Synth Secrets” column in Sound on Sound is required reading for anyone who would seek to make their own special kind of noise.
Gordon’s article goes into the basics of how a cymbal vibrates, but doesn’t actually tackle any equations. As he says, that would go beyond the scope of his article. So I found some equations for you too (PDF). Even if you don’t know anything about differential equations, you might want to check that PDF out, because it has some neat photos of the vibration modes of various things you hit with a stick.
NEW PRODUCT – Mini Remote Control. This little remote control would be handy for controlling a robot or other project from across the room. It has 21 buttons and a layout we thought was handy: directional buttons and number entry buttons. The remote uses the NEC encoding type and sends data codes 0 thru 26 (it skips #3, #7, #11, #15, #19 and #23) to address #0. You can use this to control something that is expecting NEC codes or you can pair this with our IR remote receiver sensor.
NEW PRODUCT – Super-bright 5mm IR LED (25 pack) – 940nm. Infrared LEDs are used for remote controls (they’re the little LED in the part you point at your TV) and ‘night-vision’ cameras, and these little blue guys are high powered ones! They are 940nm wavelength, which is what nearly all devices listen to. They’re 20 degree beamwidth, and work great for any kind of remote control application. This is a pack of 25!
Introducing a few sample pages from my new Augmented Reality (AR) Pop-up Book, “Who’s Afraid of Bugs?” with video and images below. I’d like to present the first AR Pop-up Book for mobile devices using image recognition (a.k.a. regular images to trigger augmented content, as opposed to the black and white square glyphs that are common in AR). Integrating image recognition in the design, the book can hence be enjoyed alone as a regular pop-up book, or supplemented with augmented digital content when viewed through a mobile device equipped with a camera, such as an iPad 2 or iPhone 4.
When hackers from penetration testing firm Netragard were hired to pierce the firewall of a customer, they knew they had their work cut out. The client specifically ruled out the use of social networks, telephones, and other social-engineering vectors, and gaining unauthorized physical access to computers was also off limits.
Deprived of the low-hanging fruit attackers typically rely on to get a toe-hold onto their target, Netragard CTO Adriel Desautels borrowed a technique straight out of a plot from Mission Impossible: He modified a popular, off-the-shelf computer mouse to include a flash drive and a powerful microcontroller that ran custom attack code that compromised whatever computer connected to it.
For the attack to work, the booby-trapped USB Logitech mouse had to look and behave precisely the same as a normal device. But it also needed to include secret capabilities that allowed the mouse to do things no user would ever dream possible.
The Teensy microcontroller programmed by the Netragard hackers was programmed to wait 60 seconds after being plugged in to a computer and then enter commands into its keyboard that executed malware stored on the custom-built flash drive snuck into the guts of the Logitech mouse. To squelch warnings from McAfee antivirus, which was protecting the customer’s PCs, the microcontroller contained undocumented exploit code that subverted the program’s dialogue boxes to evade detection.
Memrise is the fastest and most enjoyable way to learn words in any language. We’ve taken the very best science of learning and combined it with engaging, playful design to make word-learning fun, fast and exceedingly effective.
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