Edge-lit Holiday Cards

December 10, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

edgelit

Got 30 minutes for a holiday project and don’t want to get wrangled into some sort of decoupage disaster? Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories can show you just how easy it is to do edge lighting effects. Pictured above are three holiday cards constructed using scored plastic. You can use many different types of clear plastic for this, not just acrylic. The lighting is just an LED on a coincell. Black tape is used to prevent light leaking from the edges. The red and green version above is two stacked layers. This looks like something fun to scale up for a larger project or just to kill some time.

Gift Card Electronics

November 11, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 28 Comments

Gift-giving season is upon us, and it’s time for people to start panicking about what to give to their friends and families. Gift cards have gained in popularity over the years, as companies count on people to forget to use them. But how about gift cards that do more than store a token amount of cash? Best Buy is now selling a gift card that doubles as a speaker. It has a mini headphone jack that’ll plug into any audio player. You only need to spend fifteen dollars to get it. Target’s gone all out, with a gift card that is also a 1.2 MP digital camera. It comes with a USB cord and driver disk, and there’s even one with a 64MB USB flash drive. We’re very interested to see if these will take off, and what people will do with them once the cards are used up.

[via Gizmodo]

LED Menorahs

November 9, 2008 by Eliot 5 Comments

We’re barely past Halloween and people are already working on their next LED based holiday decorations. For Hanukkah, Gizmodo pointed out the PCB menorah pictured above. It uses a set of DIP switches to control which LEDs are lit. A couple years ago, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories put together a tutorial for building a more minimal LED menorah. Each of the nine LEDs are soldered directly to the legs of an ATtiny2313 microcontroller. Every time you power up the device an additional LED is lit. [Ori] liked the project and decided to take a slightly different approach. He used an LM3914 DIP18 LED bar driver. A potentiometer controls how many of the LEDs are illuminated.

Columbus Day: What Are You Working On?

October 13, 2008 by Eliot 50 Comments

Wow, Caribbean Conquest Day is such a dull holiday. If it’s a holiday at all: we’re at work today and you probably are too. We decided to post what we’re working on in hopes of breaking out of our holiday slump. Pictured above are two IR illuminator boards we assembled this weekend. We bought the kits from BG Micro. We’re planning on testing their camera blocking ability once we come up with a ~13V portable power source.

That’s what we’re doing. What have you been working on lately?

(If anyone can find a source for the welding goggles in the picture, we’d love to hear it.)