You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands”
You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands”… Previously: Your time vs Jason’s time… Happy Friday, what are making this weekend?
Education
Maker Education is such a valuable role. These stories will bring you the latest information and tales of maker educators who area spreading the maker mindset. Help others learn how to make things or how to think like a maker at makerspaces, schools, universities, and local communities. The importance of maker education can not be understated. We appreciate our educators.
New in the Maker Shed: 4-Bit Microcomputer Kit
Features a 20-key keypad, a single 7-segment LED, and 7 individual LEDs, and comes with 7 bits of software built in: an organ (basic tone generator), sound hit game, whack-a-mole, tennis, timer, music player, and Morse code generator. It’s a fun, retro kit, just begging to be hacked!
Intern’s Corner: My robot of mass destruction
Every other week, MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next. By Eric Chu, engineering intern Let’s admit it. We’ve all had thoughts of building our own robot of mass destruction. Well, I was able to do just that for […]
Chutney jar PCB etch
I had two circuit boards nagging me to be etched this morning. Without a photo developing tray, it seemed some modifications in technique were in order. Into the recycling bin I went looking for a smallish, wide mouthed glass jar. Yesterday’s sandwich polished off a tasty mango chutney, and the jar was just about right. A little bit of cleaning, and it was ready for business.
The leftover etchant from yesterday’s vinyl pcb resist experiment was in a plastic bottle and still had some potency left in it. The tea water was still hot on the stove, so it was ready to provide some double boiler action. I poured some hot water into a steel pan, put the ferric chloride into the jar and dropped in the first board.
Christina and Forest at Maker Faire Rhode Island
At Maker Faire Rhode Island, I saw Christina waiting near the AS220 Fab Lab for her son Forest. She was holding some of the replacement parts that he had made for his MakerBot.
Vinyl cut PCB resist
Recently, we are working in class on a variation of the Rock and Roll Speakers from Fashioning Technology. Rather than using perfboard for the circuit, we’ll be burning our own circuit board. The chips are through hole LM386’s, but I don’t think it is realistic to have the students drill 8 aligned holes on the circuit board. There is an excellent primer on printed circuit board etching in MAKE, Volume 02. After thinking this through a bit, I came up with an idea to turn the through-hole component into a smd component. The technique is a bit like the design of the Broadcast Your Podcast FM transmitter circuit, which just has you solder the components together in pools of solder on chips of board.
When the chips finally arrived from Electronic Goldmine, I looked up the datasheet for the LM386 to get the measurements. In Open Office Draw, I drew out a design that would match up with the pins. With the help of Pat, who is doing an independent study on CNC tools this year, I sent the file to the machine with the vinyl cutter. He cut the file, then we weeded it to see if it matched the chip. The file matched the pin locations of the chip, so we made a few more iterations to get the process down and the layout right. When we got it right, we cut three copies of the file for boardmaking.
‘Logicomix’ – A Comic Book About Logic, Math and Madness
Book Review – ‘Logicomix’ – A Comic Book About Logic, Math and Madness – Review @ NYTimes.com… Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth […]
