Featured Adafruit Community Project: Light Up Pencil Case

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 60,878 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

SHOW AND TELL from last week

SHOW AND TELL – Electronics and more! 9/7/13 (video).

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

jon sanford shared: “The formula for a Voltage Divider are in most books on Electronic Fundamentals. What I am doing here is getting a more experiential feel for how a variable resistor proportionately changes the ratio of each side of the slider (the middle of the three terminals). As simple and fundamental as this is, setting it up so you can see it & I can try to explain what happens when I rotate the dial was harder than I expected. Questions are welcome” (read more)

Mark Reimer shared: “Completed my #ZigBee sensor mote today. My goal was to make a small and inexpensive sensor mote so I decided to omit a micro-controller and use the XBee’s analog inputs. The XBee radio communicates with my RPi ZigBee Internet Gateway to post the sensor vales to the Internet. Since I don’t have a 3D printer (yet) and haven’t found a local hacker space with one, I used an Altoids tin for the case. Works great! This sensor mote has so many uses, but it will probably end up in my liquor cabinet so I’ll get a notification on my mobile phone any time someone goes poking around in there.” (read more)

Mano Biletsky shared: “Now 5:12 am… Just finished a two hour print on my prusa. It is a spool for a magnetic coil. It has the perfect measurements for a Bedini engine. Although the pictures are a bit dark, the print cane out nicely. One piece came off the glass while printing so I broke the piece. Melted the edges and pushed it together. Now straight again. The spool has a locking mechanism so that when the magnetic wire is on the spool the 2 pieces can’t be separated.” (read more)

Tom Sayles shared a time-lapse build video: “Soldering up a wave shield.” Yay! (read more)

Mike Barela shared: “The +Adafruit Industries #Trinket driving two servos (horizontal and vertical) with a laser to show the scanning (the full video will show it scanning up and down also). Less than 2K of flash used of the 5310 bytes available, plenty more room to do more.” (read more)

chris fice shared: “These hobby stoves I have made from salvaged gas bottles found discarded. I use one in the work-shop to keep it warm through the cold and wet seasons. Logs, coal, or anthracite mostly. Cooked on it, boil the old whistle kettle,even used it to melt down old lead scraps for fishing weights.” (read more)

Jason Nichols shared: “This is an LED lamp I made with capacitive touch control for brightness and mode. It uses an Arduino micro, neo pixel strip, and 5 pad capacitive touch sensor. The tube is Acrylite Satin Ice and the base is two layers of laser cut acrylic.” (read more)

Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

Jeremy Blythe shared: “In this tutorial, I’m going to harness the awesomeness of Raspberry Pi to build a moisture sensor for a plant pot. You will be able to monitor the sensor locally on the LCD or remotely, via ControlMyPi.com, and receive daily emails if the moisture drops below a specified level.” (read more)

ModemJunki shared a unique project in the Adafruit forums: “My first Arduino is for heating … my posterior”: “The goal for the build was to keep the project as compact as possible while leaving room for future expansion as I learned. Now that I know more I can think of many alternatives, for example to create my my own board from scratch with a socket for the Arduino and put it all in a mint tin, or simply mounting the unit I have on a board and building around it. But using a shield did save me some grief — at one point, I zapped one of my boards with direct 12v power. Had I soldered it in place I would have had to rework a lot of pins.” (read more)

Pavel Shved shared how he keeps up to date on San Francisco’s weather and bus schedules at home, in SF Muni style: “San Francisco “Muni” public transportation vehicles, like those of many other modern big cities, are equipped with real-time GPS trackers, and publish location data on the internet. My smartphone has QuickMuni app installed, so I could easily be checking it. I would pick up my phone, unlock it, wait for all the lags Adnroid greets me with, wait while the app downloads the upcoming train times, and repeat this every five minutes. This would be implausible. If only I had something like a wall clock so that it constantly displays upcoming train time predictions…” (read more)

Adam Riso shared his Piggy Bank project for his daughter on the Adafruit Forums!
: “The way it works is that you deposit coins and after a pre-defined time out it will “tally” the deposit. A receipt can be printed after the deposit is made by pressing the button. A switch activates the electrochromic film to “see into” the piggy bank where the money is. Of course there are various buttons to play kid-friendly songs (and I added a key-switch to disable the music if it gets over used.) Thanks for help from the forum members!”
(read more)

Members of the NYCResistor crew shared photos of the Disorient Burning Man camp this year: “This is what HALF A KILOMETER of NeoPixels looks like.” (read more)

RimstarOrg shared his “Hand Cranked 555 Timer Chip Music Player”: “This is a music player I made for my entry for the 2013 Ottawa Mini-Maker Faire. It’s based on the popular 555 timer chip. My main design criteria was that it had to be far more robust than my previous music player that used pencil marks for the resistors. Those pencil marks wore away from the paper moving over them and taking away the pencil lead. It was an overwhelming success, basically going through 14 hours of almost constant play at the Maker Faire, not to mention being cranked vigorously by countless kids (though I did have to repair the crank early on.)” (read more)

Artist and hacker Kyle McDonald shared: “…In response to the Liberator, I borrowed an idea from “One coffee cup a day” by producing several absurd variations on the original file. Ideally, they should make people feel like there’s nothing sacred or singular about “that 3d printed gun file” but that it’s something that can be remixed, appropriated, redirected, repurposed. That it’s not just “floating around out there”, or in the hands of a few people, that’s it’s not something to be feared, but treated critically, carefully, humorously, seriously….” (read more)

Community Corner! Sharing and celebrating the creative community: Show and tell, Ask an Engineer, mailbag, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers. Sharing, learning and celebrating making!