Scully & Muldar
Word for the day: ARDUINO
No…it’s not a new cheese. It’s not the latest designer brand of cool shoes either. Arduino rolls nicely off the tongue as if it could be something sleek, svelte and expensive. Right? Actually, it’s none of those. But it is super-cool.
Sparkfun.com describes it this way: “Arduino is an open-source platform used for building electronics projects. Arduino is both the physical programmable circuit board (often referred to as a microcontroller) AND it’s also the software, or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that runs on your computer and is used to write and upload computer code to the physical microcontroller board. (Read more about Arduino here.)
I’m starting with a ground level, basic explanation for promising Geek Girls like me who didn’t know any of this before…but desperately want to know.
Don’t glaze over on me just because I’m getting a little technical. Let’s all agree that technical is exactly the point. It’s also awesome! But the non-tech version is simply this: Sparkfun (and other companies like them) sell hobby-type microcontroller boards with various chips and purposes installed on them and then give you the software or programming to make the boards do interesting things.
These microcontroller boards sell for around $10, sometimes less when a sale is on. And they are capable of all kind of fun things. Go to Sparkfun.com and browse the LEARN, BLOG and SUPPORT tabs. You’ll be amazed at what you can make with a few inexpensive parts, a computer, some inexpensive tools and a little bit of time. Here are a couple of projects that I personally want to try.
A WiFi connected stuffed animal.
A Smart Mirror that displays the weather
Cloud Lighting that mimics the weather outside
Back to Scully. His blinking eyeball is the Hallowing from Adafruit.com and this board has installed on it a screen with the eyeball script (scripts = program), it also has a motion detector (Scully’s all white other eyeball) and support for a speaker as well as other things.
Since I’m a beginner, getting the eyeball to work and installing it into a plastic skull from the dollar store felt like a major accomplishment. Muldar the spider also came from the dollar store and I bought the glass cloche at Ikea. There were some considerations and a few wrinkles to figure out. For example, the motion detector requires a different power source from the Hallowing AND it doesn’t detect motion through the glass of the cloche. But all the info to accomplish and trouble shoot this project was readily available on the Adafruit site and it was so much fun to create a super-cool Halloween with just a handful of supplies and my laptop.
This is Scully and Muldar guarding the entry way.
I’ll be back next month with a NEW electronics project.
