Reboot Life in a heartbeat

This hoodie senses your heartbeat and uses it to control Life. Conway’s Game of Life, popular in all kinds of electronics projects, uses a grid of cells coupled with a set of rules to mimic the life and death of simple organisms. This iteration displays the game over your own heart, then taps into your heart rate, resetting … Read the rest

Peggy-zilla

peggyzilla (Custom)

For some, a peggy 2.0 is pretty cool, but simply not impressive enough. [MonsieurBon] felt this way and simply built a larger LED rig for his peggy2.0.  It still uses the brains of the peggy, but the LED array is a custom built cabinet, using ping pong balls as diffusers. Another interesting modification is that they added a midi … Read the rest

LED Life and Charlieplexing


Yesterday, we featured [Andrew]‘s orientation aware camera. We want to highlight another one of his projects: LED Life. It’s a 6×5 LED matrix playing Conway’s Game of Life. He used the low power MSP430 like our e-paper clock. The best part of the writeup is his explanation of how Charlieplexing works. Microcontroller GPIO pins generally have three … Read the rest

SMD soldering practice kit


Here’s an interesting kit put together just to help you work on your SMD soldering skills. It’s got 49 SMD LEDs on the front with a programming header and switch jumper. The back has an ATtiny26L and a coin cell. At only 3V, power management is essential; all of the example programs are only addressing one LED at a … Read the rest

Build a lifeform for io9


Whether you consider yourself a bona fide mad scientist or you simply think your horrifying mutant creations are misunderstood, you’ll want to enter io9′s Build a Lifeform contest.

The contest doesn’t require any actual primordial soup, just a concept of a synthetic lifeform you think would be useful or interesting. There are two categories with different prizes for each … Read the rest

12 channel LiFe battery management system


With fuel prices rising, EVs are becoming more an more stylish. This bit of floor tile wrapped hardware is actually a 12 channel battery management system designed to handle Lithium Iron battery packs. It’s designed to take power from a standard lead acid charger and supply the batteries with their maximum charge current. The cost and complexity of the BMS … Read the rest