It's a pumpkin! It's a Jack-o-lantern! It's an electronics project! It's... a Cylon!
Cylons are great. They're evil, menacing, and shiny. They have glowing red lights, computer-monotone voices, and they aim as precisely as imperial stormtroopers.
For halloween this year, we made Cylon Jack-o-lanterns in both large and small versions. The design consists of two parts, a pumpkin-carving part and an electronics part. The big idea, of course, is to make the Cylon's red eye scan back and forth.
How well does it work? Take a look! (Youtube)
This week's Weekend Projects Podcast at Make Magazine is about making a programmable LED pumkin. Our Cylon is made with a very different approach. It runs on a 9V battery and uses two cheap integrated circuits (a 555 and 4017) that together control six LEDs (or six groups of LEDs). Circuits like this are quick, easy, and cheap to build. It's also fun merely from the standpoint of making something that people might expect to require a microcontroller. For this particular circuit, it turns out to be cheaper and faster to do it without one. If you're handy with a soldering iron, you can build this circuit for less than ten dollars, in less than two hours, without any programming at all.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
You know, you CAN take these things too far. Its just a PUMPKIN for crying out loud. A piece of vegetation that gets thrown away Nov 1.
"everytime a person is born the Earth weighs just a little more."--DMJ on StarTrek.com
"You see now you are using your thinking and that is not a good thing!" DMJay on StarTrek.com
"Watching Sarli argue with Vympel, Stas, Schatten and the others is as bizarre as the idea of the 40-year-old Virgin telling Hugh Hefner that Hef knows nothing about pussy, and that he is the expert."--Elfdart
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- PeZook