This is what my study looks like
I was playing around with my Fuji Finepix s9600
Gift Vouchers
Lets make this absolutely clear:
I have money which anyone can use anywhere you like, anytime you like. But as a gift to you, I force you to use that money in only one store and give you a time limit on how long you can wait until you spend any or all of the money I give you. Oh, and if I’m particularly generous this time of year, I might give you a voucher which is non-transferable, so only you can use it.
If you purchase gift vouchers for family or friends, you are an idiot. You’re taking something of intrinsic value, and then limiting the use of it for no reason at all, and somehow we are expected to thank you for this?
Just had to get this off my chest. This time of year, alot of people do really stupid things like give me monopoly money i cant use. Do the environment, and your recipient a favour, never buy gift vouchers. they’re beyond stupid.
Thankfully my family understand my position quite well at this point for the mostpart.
* one exception is gift cards for things that are experiences, like cinema or restraunts; because the gift then becomes the experience more than the actual monetary value. so its worth it. but still where situations that the card is just retarded money, please people, wake up!
Robotic Muscles
A post at [hackaday] intrigued me, so heres a bunch of videos/links related to artificially replicating muscles for robots:
Everything is OK Alarm (PICS)
In this design I stripped a USB cable and added it to a project box for power; I also use a buzzer thats essentially useless for this design because of the power requirements, but I had it lying around and its a proof of concept.
Everything is OK Alarm
If your visiting this blog, chances are you’re a geek, which implies you’re fairly knowledgable of the Simpsons, which also implies you know precisely what I mean when I describe an ‘Everything is OK Alarm‘. This is what I call the ‘Geek Tangent’, the mathematical formula for determining geek-relativity. Uh, yeah, anyways….
I decided to make my own ‘Everything is OK Alarm’; well actually I wanted to make my own Annoy-A-Tron but thats a bit too complex for my meagre electronics/circuitry skills right now, so instead of random times and various pitches I went for the simpler solution of a fixed delay and fixed sound using a 555 timer, a couple resistors, a capacitor and a 9v battery.
So heres a circuit diagram of what I built (I’ll post photos later)
I make no promises that this particular circuit will work for you, as I drew this long after building the actual device, and used this simulator during the whole design. Its probably 100% accurate however, I just dont promise it to be so.
It should also be noted that the values chosen for the resistors/capacitor was down to what I had on hand, not what would be best practice.
EasyPic 5 ProtoBoard
more experimenting….
LED Matrix - Basic Math
I’ve done some basic math on that Diffuse LED Pixel Wall concept design I posted three days ago, and it goes pretty much like this:
- Each Module consists of 25 ’segments’ which act as pixels
- The Display would be 5 by 4 modules in size, 20 modules in total.
- Total Resolution would be 125 by 100
- Number of LEDs required per module is 200
- Total number of LED’s required for entire display is 4,000
Costing this thing out, its approximately 24c per high brightness LED (Radionics), for a total of €960 for just the LED’s. Not taking into account defects, burnouts etc (lets say 10%) or cost of woodworking, paint etc.
Picking a random number out of the air, for this concept to become a reality, someone would need to pony up approximately 1500-2000 Euro for a 12,500 pixel monochrome display that stands 8 foot by 10 foot. Cost per module (cpm) then would be 100 Euro at the uppermost.
Looking for sponsors if anyone out there has deep pockets……..
Oh and by the way, a slightly updated graphic:
Spoofscript