Tag: diy

Building A Basic Dynamo

Overview

This is just a basic little dynamo which uses a tiny 6V DC motor I scavenged from an old CD drive. I have grander plans for the motor in the future, but I thought it would be cool to use it to turn on an LED with it!

The basic idea is pretty straight forward. If you take a motor, which has a permanent magnet in it, and turn the magnet on your own you will change the magnetic flux in the coil and as such start generating some current and, you will start to get a potential difference building up across the terminals of the motor. If I knew the RPM rating of the motor then I could figure out how fast to turn it to get a full 6 Volts. At the moment all I know is that I need to spin it pretty fast and the peak value my multimeter reads is 2.5 V, which is enough to power an LED.

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Nomis: A Simon Clone for the ATTiny85

Overview

Nomis is a Simon-like memory game for the ATTiny85, which uses the ATTiny85. The game logic in the ATTiny85 was implemented using AVR C and takes up 983 bytes in program memory and 6 bytes in data memory. The implementation size comes in under 1kB, but could most certainly be smaller. The pin usage, however, is very conservative and the games electronics take up a total of 4 of the 6 available pins. The 4 LEDs are controlled on 3 pins using Charlieplexing model (which could easily be extended to 6 LEDs). On the other hand the 4 pushbutton switches are feed into an ADC input through an R2R ladder configuration. I am very happy with the limited pin usage of this project.

The gameplay of Nomis is the same basic scheme as Simon. Which is to say once you initiate a game with it the game logic generates a random move, which lights up one of the 4 LEDs. Then Nomis waits for you to copy it. Each consecutive move is stored in an array and the string of moves must be copied exactly by the player. The game has no real ending conditions; however, the maximum number of moves is 100, but even then that limit was arbitrarily set by me. With a sufficiently large slice of memory and an extremely skilled (or cheat prone) individual the game could last forever. That said, the goal of the game is to best your previous score, which you keep track of by yourself.

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Color Organ Prototype 1

I am putting together a color organ! Currently I do not have my schematics written up and I plan on making an in depth writeup when I get closer to being done. However, I did record a video of its current status!. I also have a photo dump on flickr.

The plan for the final project is to have the three filters (which need to be cleaned up), running into an RGB LED and controlling the different colors. I was thinking about shooting the produced light through a piece of sanded acrylic and try to get a nice effect that way.

DIY Conductive Paint Attempt 1: Proof of Concept

I attempted to make conductive paint, for the BUILDS room. The end goal is to have conductive paint, which can be painted into the murals being put up in BUILDS and as such we can make the room interactive using capacitive touch sensors. Just to note this is not the final product this was just a test run. So far the best result I have is 1k?

Conductive Paint is a conductive material made up of a conductive powder suspended in a binding fluid. When dried the conductive powders will be close enough together that the material itself becomes conductive. There are different kinds of Conductive Paints, but the easiest and cheapest to produce utilizes graphite powder. Carbon Graphite is a surprisingly good conductor and is both easy to come by (as it is often used as a lubricant) and relatively easy to work with and mix into other materials. Most of my resources for this first attempt came from this awesome Instructables created by mikey77.

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