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If you want a slightly different look for your Halloween pumpkin or skull, you can pretty quickly whip something up with a few servos and an Arduino. Here’s a set of Scary Shifty Servo Eyeballs, for instance: As you can probably tell it’s a pretty simple arrangement (click for bigger): The Crystal Monster is an art piece created by Beverly Tang and Tod E. Kurt (me). It’s on display in the Continental Gallery on 4th & Spring St in downtown Los Angeles. The shape and structure of the Crystal Monster are Beverly’s design. I created the lighting and the electronics. It’s made from over 400 sheets of laser-cut acrylic, more that 240 feet of LED tape (>2200 RGB LEDs!), and around 500 steel rods and other steel hardware. It’s approximately 12 feet long and 10 feet wide and hovers 10 feet above your head. It’s got an Arduino brain and 18 BlinkM MaxMs (one per segment) to let it flutter color patterns up and down its length.
A little movie showing it in action: Go to Beverly’s site for high-quality photos of the Crystal Monster. Check out her other work, she’s an amazing artist. Some of my photos (click on any to go to the Flickr set):
It was first installed at the Ball-Nogues studio in Downtown Los Angeles as part of their participation in Downtown L.A. Art Walk, and lived there for a few months. Then it moved to its mostly-permanent location at the Continental Gallery at 4th & Spring in Downtown Los Angeles. It’s right on the corner, so you can really see it just from walking by on the street.
The electronics consist of 18 BlinkM MaxMs driven by a single Arduino, all powered by an ATX power supply. The Arduino has an IR remote control receiver so the Monster’s behavior can be controlled from afar.
Or: A good use for old Arduino boards Like me, you may have a few old Arduino boards or ATmega8 chips (in the boards) laying around from when you were first playing with Arduino. Those chips can still be really useful as the heart of a tiny “Minimal Arduino” setup. A normal Arduino board contains support components that make it easy to use. If you want a smaller footprint, you can get one of the many Arduino work-alike boards. But if you want a really small footprint, and reuse your old parts, you can make an Arduino board using just five components:
I’ve been working with a super minimal Arduino setup recently. After seeing Alex’s awesome Arduino/ATmega breadboard header, where he notes there’s no room on the PCB for pin labeling, I wondered if it would be possible to make a small sticker that goes on the ATmega chip, labeling the pin names. Here’s my first attempt: And in use: This was created by printing on a full-page sticker then laser cutting it to shape. I could have also just cut out the sticker with scissors, or used regular printer paper and double-sided tape. Some files if you want to try this out yourself: I’ve been exploring various types of gearmotors. DC motors by themselves spin too fast and have low torque. Gearmotors are motors with a gearbox that slows down the high speed of the motor and produces higher torque. Most gearmotors are pretty expensive though. I want a really cheap, almost throw-away, source of gearmotors. It turns out cheap servos can be made into continuous rotation gearmotors. Modding servos for continuous rotation is not a new hack. You can find many examples of it. You can even buy a nice continuous servo made by Parallax. But I wanted a micro servo version. I’ve been getting cheap servo motors from Hobby City, and they have several super-tiny servos for less than $4. The ones I use here are the Hextronic HXT500 available for $3.49 each. Here’s how to modify one of those servos to make it into a tiny little gearmotor.
Woohoo, my little Wiichuck adpter for experimenting with the Wii nuchuck made it on TV, thanks to my buddy John Park and Make: TV. See the Makezine blog post with the segment, or watch it here:
The Sketching in Hardware ’08 conference was held at RISD in Providence, Rhode Island this year. Both RISD and Providence were very welcoming and I think we had a lot of fun. Once again, Mike pulls off an awesome conference. For my talk, since I didn’t have one big thing I’ve been working on this last year, I decided to shotgun blast a bunch of different topics out there, arranged roughly on the topics: The PDF of my talk with notes: And some screencaps of a few of the slides: |
Crash Space is a Los Angeles-based hackerspace. Come visit! Become a member! Learn Arduino or how to solder!
BlinkM is a smart LED. Imagine an LED with a tiny computer inside, one that can be any color and have a life of its own. You can buy them now from one of our global distributors.
 A device studio that lives at the intersections of ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, industrial design, and materials science. |
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