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Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Making the World a Better Place, One Evil Mad Scientist at a Time

Last week we released an Arduino environment library for the Meggy Jr RGB. The code is an open source project here, and the downloadable package comes several example programs, ranging from very simple to moderately complex. (One of the examples is a new game called Froggy Jr, where you help your a little round green frog cross the street and then a river.)

Today, to make it all a bit more useful, we are releasing the Meggy Jr RGB Programing guide, which you can download Here (600 kB PDF file).

Programming Meggy Jr RGB: How to Get Started

Download Arduino 0012 (or newer) and install.
Download latest Meggy Jr RGB Arduino Library from here. To install, unzip the library to a sub-directory of the hardware/libraries sub-directory of the Arduino application directory. Then launch the Arduino environment; you should see the library in the Sketch>Import Library menu.
Make sure that menu option Tools>Board>Arduino Diecimila is selected.
Load an example program from your menu: File>Sketchbook>Examples>Library-MeggyJr>MeggyJr_MeggyBrite
Verify (compile) the program by pressing the Ver

Now that's an Apple Pie!November 27

With a little help from a square springform pan, you too can have an Apple apple pie for dessert!

We're certainly not the first to put an Apple logo on a pie, but we think this implementation raises the bar a bit. Unlike a regular pie, you need to start with the top piece since you need to use the pan as a cookie cutter before you line it with dough. Roll out your dough for the top, and press springform frame onto it to get the right shape.

Put the dough on a piece of waxed paper for cutting.

Using a lattice across the shape keeps it from deforming too much as it bakes. You can cut out the logo with a hobby knife or a carefully formed cookie cutter. We went alpha-geek on it and put it in the 45 watt carbon-dioxide laser.

Binary BirthdayNovember 19

I am this many.

Have you ever heard of the unary number system, i.e., base-1 numerals? That's the formal designation of tally marks-- a means of representing a number symbolically by using symbols, where the number represented is equal to the number of symbols. While easy to grasp, it's also a rather inefficient system, so we don't find too many uses of them in modern life. One of the places that we do (almost) always use the unary system is on birthday cakes, where a birthday cake has one candle per year. This is fine for small numbers, but positioning, lighting and blowing out candles becomes impractical past a certain point.

Here's a better way: A binary birthday candle. It consists of a single candle with seven wicks, where the wicks that are lit represent the birthday individual's age in binary. This single candle design works flawlessly to represent any age from 1 to 127, never requiring anyone below the age of 127 to blow out more than a mere six candles at a time.

You can make this fused single candle yourself:

Meggy Jr RGBNovember 12

Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It's based around a fully addressable 8x8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play. The kit is driven by an ATmega168 microcontroller, and you can write your own games or otherwise control it through the Arduino development environment. Meggy Jr is fast, programmable, open source and hackable. And fun.

A unique feature of Meggy Jr RGB is that it is designed to be mounted inside a "handle set" -- a wooden or plastic case that's safer and more pleasant to hold than a bare circuit board. You can make, mod and customize your own handle sets to suit your taste-- These are like faceplates in that you can switch whenev

Business card AVR breakout boards: Version 1.1November 8

We've just released a new version of our super-handy business card sized target board for programming 28-pin AVR microcontrollers like the ATmega168 and ATmega328. These are just the thing for programming these chips through an ISP programmer like the USBtinyISP.

We use these for a lot of our simple microcontroller projects; Tennis For Two and the Lissajous POV come to mind. The new version has basically the same design but adds some extra prototyping area and makes the holes big enough to accept a ZIF socket:

Like theoriginal version of this target board, this circuit board is a fully open source hardware design. For much more information-- including the detailed design files-- please see the update that we've added to the end of our original article about this project.