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Skills Earned by SuperAwesomeSylvia
SuperAwesomeSylvia
I'm a maker! I make videos, kits, electronics, soft circuits, chemistry, mythbusting science and anything else I can.
Check out my site for episodes, updates and everything else!
Drawdio!
The
Drawdio is a great way to combine music with drawing! This beginner kit basically turns your drawing tool of choice into a musical device. Using the conductive nature of the graphite in your pencil, the drawdio changes pitch as the graphite touches different things. Holding your pencil different ways and drawing on different surfaces create a never ending variety of whistles, bleeps and bloops. Once you get good enough with it, you can even play songs!
You can earn this badge by not only constructing the drawdio, but also showing off how much you enjoy it. Can you play a song? Show us!
A Special Note from Ladyada & the Adafruit Team
The only thing more awesome than a young person getting excited about making something is a young person
with a theme song getting excited about making something! Meet Sylvia, the enthusiastic host of
Sylvia's Super Awesome Maker Show . In her premier episode, she shares her build of the
Adafruit Drawdio kit .
The Drawdio is a fun little project that turns your pencil into a musical device! Sylvia breaks down the construction in clear and easy to understand steps and shows video of her building it as she goes. Her soldering is pretty great and she even added some helpful tips to the video!
We can tell that not only did she enjoy building it, but judging by the video, she also had a lot of fun figuring out how it reacts to all kinds of different materials. She goes around trying different things to make different noises and even manages to play ode to joy!
Did we mention she has an awesome theme song? The music for the credits easily competes in terms of awesomeness.
Project Images & Videos
VIDEO
Project Links
You set your ideas "free!" with Open-source hardware! Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware's
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With microcontroller brains, servo muscles, and wire veins, robots can take a plethora of forms. Some are shaped like cars; equipped with wheels, lights, and sensors. Some are shaped like people; with arms and legs. Some are shaped like spiders! No
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The internet is widely comprised of a hodge-podge of different standards and languages.
HTML5 is the latest HTML standard and aims to unify and simplify many things, hopefully making the internet run
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The great and wondrous
Mitch Altman made a very astute observation. Televisions have a hypnotic effect on those around them. Often killing conversation completely, a television can, at times,
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The wise old gurus always say that electronics run on "magic blue smoke". What they say must be true because, if you've ever released this smoke by over-powering a component, you've seen that it just doesn't work any more!
Of course we know that
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Arguably one of the most important parts of any project are the little blinking lights. Sometimes they're telling us important information about the system, sometimes they're lighting the way in the dark, and sometimes they are there just for some
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Solder is the glue that holds our beloved projects together. Well, in some cases it is actually glue, or possibly duct tape. Solder is extremely important though, we can all agree. One of the first things any aspiring maker should learn is how to
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Have you used a super intense beam of light to burn right through a material lately? Using a laser cutter is a valuable skill in building enclosures, sculptures, robot frames, and tons of other projects. Whether you're using the smallest weakest
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3D printing is taking the world by storm! What used to be a dream of a distant future where we could simply push a button and have a machine make an object for us, is now reality. 3D printers like
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Microcontrollers are the brains inside your project. Hook up sensors, lights, and even communicate with computers and the internet by writing a bit of code to run on a microcontroller. Whether it's AVR (Arduino), ARM, PIC, Propeller, or something
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Oscilloscopes allow you to see what's going on in a circuit by visualizing changing signals over time. This piece of test equipment can come in handy for more advanced projects or for learning about differently shaped waves (sine, square, saw-tooth,
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Every system is comprised of parts. To be able to repair, modify, or improve any system, you have to be able to understand how the parts work together. When you're deconstructing something that is already made in order to better understand it, it's
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Ok, we don't actually recommend literally diving into a dumpster. There might be sharp and pointy things in there! Of course, there might also be some great material or tools in there too! People throw away perfectly good tools, building material,
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Every trade has its tools. In electronics, we have the soldering iron and the multimeter. If you go into any beginner or experienced engineer's workshop, you'll find these two things. This badge, is in honor of the multimeter, our "eyes and ears"
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You already know we're fans of sharing information. In the world of operating systems, the one that is most open, most hackable, and most diverse has to be Linux. There are tons of variations, from consumer level distributions to job specific
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What is more awesome than a machine that makes lightning? Not much. To prove this point, just look at the Tesla coil. Invented by Nikola Tesla in 1891, the Tesla coil literally does nothing but make awesome lightning bolts. Over 100 years later,
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"Hello, world!" This is the first thing every budding programmer learns to say when learning a new language. Print "hello!" to your terminal window using C, a website using PHP, or even blink an LED on your Arduino to earn this beginner's
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Space: the final frontier. Once the exclusive domain of groups like NASA and Roscosmos, space is now being explored by tinkerers at home. Sure, they're not building space ships and orbiting the moon, but they're going as high as 120,000 feet. It may
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At first glance, the metric system can seem confusing. After a couple basic lessons, the only thing you'll be confused about is why we aren't using the metric system for everything!
In metric, everything converts to different sizes by adding and
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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs can be quite difficult. Not only are you trying to figure out how to make something autonomous , you're trying to keep it in the air at the same time! We've seen these UAVs take many forms, from giant gliders with
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In 1827, George Ohm published his studies in resistance of electronic circuits. From this, the "magic triangle" pictured in the Ohm's Law badge was created. With this "magic triangle", someone can figure out some of the most important aspects of an
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When Microsoft showed off the Kinect, our eyes got big and our hearts fluttered. The possibilities started flooding into our brains. We could use it to build robots that were spatially aware! We could build neat interfaces to programs so we could
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The
Drawdio is a great way to combine music with drawing! This beginner kit basically turns your drawing tool of choice into a musical device. Using the conductive nature of the graphite in your
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Welding! It's the process of joining separate pieces of metal together to make one using heat. There's torch welding with oxygen and acetylene, and there are several different kinds of electrical welding like arc (aka stick), MIG, and TIG. Once
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Even a small static shock carries a high enough voltage to damage integrated circuits, and electrostatic induction can cause damaging electrostatic fields within a component. Antistatic devices have been developed to help prevent the build up of
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Celebrate Lady Ada Lovelace, one of the world’s first computer programmers. While we won't reserve this badge for just ladies, earners of the Ada Lovelace badge have shown excellence and dedication in technology projects with perseverance through
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Hack your wetware with DIY DNA experiments! You've done something amazing in the world of biohacking-- maybe you made and shared a low-cost DNA sequencer, or constructed your first genome, and it earned you this badge.
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Make bleepy glitchy noise from all sorts of things with circuit bending! Related to reverse engineering, circuit bending is when you explore a circuit to see what fun things you can make it do. Try bridging resistors in kids' toys to make sounds the
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Catapults (and trebuchets) fling things through the air! These siege weapons from the middle ages were used to attack castle and city walls. Nowadays you can have a lot of fun building a small (by middle ages standards) version in your own backyard
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Bikes are a great way to get around, and unlike cars or even motorcycles, they're so easy to repair that even beginners can confidently change a tube, tighten a bolt, or fix a chain with a quick YouTube search. Oh, you made one (or more) of those
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You learned how to make and use QR codes! The badge itself is a QR code too. They're 2D barcodes: QR codes store data that's readable by an optical device (like most cell phone cameras). QR (or quick-read) codes can store a lot more information than
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Use a high-pressure jet of water to cut through almost anything, including thick plate steel and even stone! When it's too thick for a laser-cutter, you might turn to the good ol' waterjet. Please let this warning sign-inspired badge remind you that
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While dangerous ionizing radiation from nuclear incidents can cause cancerous DNA changes, did you know that radiation also includes heat, radio waves, and even visible light (all non-ionizing)?
Make your own geiger counter or share an awesome
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This skill badge is a self-fulfilling one! Normally you would get the badge after the project is done, but in this case, the badge can be part of the project. Harness the power of the sun to charge your circuits and share your bright ideas to earn
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The greatest part of making, sharing and selling open source hardware is what happens after it gets out in the world We are constantly surprised by the things people do with open-source products and projects. Makers email pictures of hardware
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