About | Lily. EL Ladder » DigitalMisery.com. Background I knew I was going to be a Mad Scientist for Halloween this year and I wanted a cool prop for my laboratory (aka garage work bench). As an electrical engineer, I was always fascinated by the electric “Jacob’s Ladder” displays (or, more accurately, high voltage traveling arc). It really is the definitive mad scientist accessory, even though it really serves no (mad) scientific purpose other than demonstrating how high voltage can ionize air and jump large gaps. However, the rapidly rising white hot plasma and its buzzing and crackling sound cannot be beat.
Idea I really wanted to make one but the above reasons kept steering me away. Bildr-My project involves creating an electronic art simulation of a Jacob’s Ladder/High-Voltage Climbing Arc for a Halloween Mad Scientist display. Adam with the bildr.org team loved the idea and had me submit the list of components (see below) I would need to build the project. Design Build Next I needed to attach wires to each strand. Demonstration. Interfacing arduino+waveshield+standalone dmx box. Dear Jon, Thx for your last message, it got me progressing quite a bit on my project's general architecture. As for right now, i have a question you might be able to answer, concerning interfacing my 4 Sharp IR analog range sensors (the 2YOA21 flavor).
I would like the sensors, when they detect someone approaching less than a meter away, to send the Arduino a start signal for both the Waveshield and the Enttec dmx interface. So, i materialized the on/off state with two leds, the red one being lit when irVal is above 80cm, the green one when it gets under 80cm. I first tried with one sensor. I found different pieces of code i managed, God knows how, to assemble in a functional way.
I was pretty proud, actually, especially since the —small— parts of code i modded generated no syntax error at all and compiled just fine from the start. Here's the first piece of code. [edit]/* read_gp2d12_range Function that reads a value from GP2D12 infrared distance sensor and returns a value in centimeters. Sensitive to Pleasure_video documentation (122.7 MB) Making Music with a Microcontroller. Using a piezoelectric buzzer element, we can turn voltage into pressure waves, or sound. This project demonstrates code which can play any desired tone, and plays a song while showing each syllable on the LCD screen. You can download the source code. (Start with one of the projects included with the kit, and modify the Makefile to reference this file.)
Take a look at more videos and microcontroller projects! Robotic Xylophone. With the holiday season approaching, we are always looking for a way to add a little Christmas spirit to our office. This year, we thought it would be awesome to have a musical instrument that we could control with a NerdKits microcontroller kit, and have it play holiday music. Keeping true with the NerdKits spirit, we decided to build a xylophone, build the whole thing from scratch, and teach about solenoids and shift registers along the way!
Our homemade xylophone was a great way to put our milling machine to use cutting the bars for each note, and using the lathe for the solenoid forms and steel slugs. We made our xylophone from aluminum bars -- all 6061 aluminum alloy rectangular bars, with a 1.5" x 0.375" cross-section. We made the base from a 1/8" thick sheet of acrylic (a transparent plastic). Each bar is supported at two points, with 3" long #6-32 machine screws passing up from below the acrylic base. We added four magnets to the top of each slug.