I needed a PIR sensor for a halloween project and not having a Maplin near by I decided to modify an £8.99 Security Floodlight from Argos. One thing you should note is that the default ‘switch-on’ time is around 1 minute. I didn’t need to change this for my application, but it may be an issue if you only need a short high-pulse when something is detected.
Ever Noticed that ‘Garlic’ and ‘Dalek’ sound the same? I have!. One is a close relation to an onion and official deodoriser of the French, the other is grotesque mutated organism integrated with a tank-like mechanical casing made of “dalekenium”. All these similarities (yes, all of them) got me thinking, maybe we could somehow fuse xenophobic killer mutants-in-a-box with dough and create…wait for it… Dalek Bread. Lets begin. Continue reading
BEAM robots are great. For those of you who don’t know what it is, check out the BEAM Wikipedia entry for a quick run down.
For a start, most BEAM robots can be assembled out of mostly junk parts. Even if you have to buy new parts, there is usually a very low component count for each robot, making each project cheap.
For this project I wanted to make a small flower that responded to light in some way, using only components that I already had to hand. This is what I came up with:
Components used were as follows:
When the flower is exposed to light the solar panel is charging the storage capacitor. As the light level drops off, the drop in charging current triggers the circuit and the energy stored in the capacitor is dumped into the pager motor, spinning the flower. In practice this means that when the sun is out the flower is charging, then as it is covered by clouds the charging current drops and the flower spins very rapidly.
Below is the schematic for the flower. It is based on the ‘Type 3 Solar Engine‘ design by Wilf Rigter. I didn’t have the same transistor to hand, but as with most things in the BEAM world, parts can be substituted for ones of a similar type with little effect on the final performance.
The components were free-formed using the ‘rat’s nest’ construction method. This doesn’t result in the cleanest finish (not in my hands anyway) but it does allow for a small form
A glue gun was used to secure the components and the bottom of an old PP3 type 9V battery was used as a support to keep the flower standing up
The flower was made out of an old beer can. Layers of petals were cut out in descending size and then stacked and hot-glued together.
This version was more of a quick prototype that a work of art, as you can tell.
I found that the wheel of a small toy car was a perfect fit onto the axle of the pager motor. This provided a nice flat surface to glue the flower too.
Here’s a video of the flower in action
I’d been toying with the idea of a rock tumbler for some 18 months, but was finding it difficult to justify the outlay. To cut a long story short, my mum got me one for xmas and for the last 4 days its been churning away in my shed.
So far the results are looking promising, this batch is going back in for another 4 days with 80 grit. After that it gets tumbled for a week at progressivly finer grits before at least a week of polishing.
For more about rock tumbling, an excellent guide can be found here.
Using my little CNC machine I knocked up this little star to go on the top of our Christmas tree. It was cut from a piece of 2mm x 40mm aluminium stock using a 2 flute 1mm end mill. The pic above shows it still held in place in the stock by 2 small tabs I added to the outline toolpath.
Here’s the star popped out and given a bit of a polish.
Finally, it’s in place on the top of our tree.
Parts List
Step One – convince the NLSO (Non Lego significant other)
I’d wanted to make a Lego mosaic for some time, but lacked suitable Inspiration. Nine months later and inspiration hit in the form of my new born daughter, Ffion Carys.
When Ffion was about 4 months old, I started the mosaic. It took a while to convince Lou (my fiancée) that this was a good idea and worth the money. She was up for a mosaic, but only a small one, I wanted a big one (don’t we all?). Anyway the 2 images to the right convinced her, one is a single Lego baseboard (48*48) the other is 4 baseboards (96*96).
I found a suitable picture of Ffion that my brother had taken when she was about 3 months old, a bit of tweaking was needed, just to straighten it up a bit.
I reduced the image to 90 *90 pixels (giving me a 3 pixel border) and reduced the colours to a close approximation of the Lego bricks I was planning on using ( Black, Drk Grey, Light Grey and white).
So far so good, once I had the image at the right size and colour, I used a program called Bricksaic to generate the plans. Bricksaic does a lot more than just generate the plans. It can do all the parts I did in photoshop, but I preferred to have the extra control over the image.
The Plans also gave me a piece count. About 8000. ouch!
This is the point at which I made a mistake, I generated the plans without the border on, so all my plans were shifted 6 studs up and left. I wouldn’t find this out till some time later when I had the parts and the plans printed. Continue reading