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.
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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.
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.
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 […]
A call for submitting organizations that promote hands-on learning.
Last night PT and I got to check out the Math Midway (soon to become the Math Museum), including the square trike PT already posted. Check out their website and mine and PT’s photos on Flickr. That other lovely lass in the pictures is Alicia Gibb from Bug Labs. The Math Midway is in NYC […]
The relatively straightforward swing-hinged dissection of an equilateral triangle to a square in this video is called “Dudeney’s dissection” and has been known since 1902. For a gallery of hinged dissections, check out Tse-hsuan Yang’s page at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University.
I love They Might Be Giants. I love designing objects in 3D on the computer. I love turning those designs into real objects. I love this song and video!