A new (minor) personal first: connecting and driving a display, from Arduino. Thanks to Adafruit for the tutorial (Monochrome OLED Breakouts) and open-source libraries I’m using to drive this little 128×64 OLED display. Note: I am a repeat Adafruit customer but purchased these particular displays from a Taobao merchant for a fraction of the Adafruit […]
Category: Mucking About With Things
One recent weekday night, I sat down assembled the miniature Strandbeest shown above from a kit which I’d purchased a week or two earlier. Here’s a YouTube video about the same (or a very similar) kit. From what I can gather by browsing the official Strandbeest site and webstore, this beest appears to be an […]
Last week, I wanted to test-drive one of the 24-LED WS2812 5050 RGB LED rings I’d bought a ways back. Getting it working, controlled by an Arduino board running the Adafruit NeoPixel library, was easy peasy. Except for the soldering step. For reasons that weren’t apparent to me while I was wielding my soldering iron, […]
Above: what 6500 1/4-Watt, 1%-tolerance metal film resistors (50 each of 150 different resistance values, ranging from 1 Ω to 10 MΩ) look like if you buy them from Taobao. That cling-film/plastic-wrap-wound bundle was roughly the size of an adult’s forearm, from elbow to wrist. Total cost: $USD 10. For reference, Sparkfun’s Resistor Kit (COM-10969, […]
Clicking through some of the photos I took of some of the micro-terrains of a sunflower, I found one that featured something that very closely resembled a creepy staring eye: Instead of being disappointed that there wasn’t a tiny human face beneath the mass of immature sunflower florets looking upwards toward the lens of my […]
First, for the sake of comparison, here’s what the edge of one of the green bracts ringing the back of the sunflower’s head looked like through my 60x-100x-magnification clip-on microscope: Now here are two bract-edge photos taken with my 200x-500x USB scope (it’s a Measurement eScope DP-M07) at 500x magnification: I didn’t get around to […]
An inexpensive 60x-100x-magnification clip-on microscope like the one shown above can be a shed load of a lot of fun. Last Friday, I spent one of the shortest hours of my life (because TFWYHV) exploring a sunflower, one which I’d just lopped off its stalk, from a bunch that had brightened our home for the […]
If you give the MP3 file embedded above a play, you’ll hear me noodling around with my slightly modified version of the “toy organ” DC circuit featured on page 105 of Forrest Mims Engineer’s Notebook [ISBN 9781878707031]. Using alligator clips, I attached each of the three different types of small 8Ω speaker (left to right: […]
… and they came wrapped in sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers? Above: My four itty bitty LM3909Ns came sandwiched between two rectangular bits of pink (possibly anti-static) foam, wound inside a chrysalis of plastic wrap (UK: cling film) which was, in turn, lovingly cocooned within a mass of sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers. And they’re older than you, assuming […]
Some Taobao merchants sell PTFE-coated wire and other sell little spools, but I couldn’t find any offering spools of PTFE-coated wire, so I got some of each and did the spooling myself. I neglected to include any known-size objects for scale but I the center-hole of one of those spools is just large enough to […]
First I acquired (read: bought cheap) some packs of velcro-backed felt letters. Then I got some large-ish scraps of thick black felt. On a completely unrelated project, I tried using a hot-glue glue gun for the first time in my life. It clogged. Boo hoo. I still needed a glue gun, so I ordered some […]