Hi all! We've distilled this year's solar cell summer-solstice tests into a nice, pretty set of PDF files. Want to know the power curves of our solarcells? Check it out here!
What is this? A Christmas Tornado? A Santa Storm? Yes... or simply even just a pleasant centerpiece (with a wee bit of catnip) to taunt the kitty with. Our staff has been putting on their elf hats, browsing the isles and creating some festive technobling-in-a-jar with by adding some LEDs to a Chritmas standby: The Holiday Jar.
The essentials of this project are primarily found at your local craft and dollar-store, or even out of the dredges of your holiday decorating box. The core decorations in the jar can any number of festive doodahs but we settled on some white/gold garland, and a Christmas tree ornament. A 16oz jar houses the mix, along with a warm white LED string added for the pleasant glow.
To keep the installation tidy, we're using our 2-coin cell battery holder, a 3-meter long warm white LED string, and 2 x CR2032 coin cells, with some clear heatshrink to keep the connections clean. But at this low voltage, even tape or hot-glue will suffice.
For this project, we will only need the essentials for a basic soldering job. This consists of a soldering iron, solder, wire cutters, and wire strippers. If you don't have heatshrink, you may also need some tape or hot glue.
Let's start with preparing the electronics and soldering them together.
The end result:
Now it's time to prep our jar and insert the LED string.
Now that our decorations are in place and our LED's have been added, it's time to attach our battery pack to the underside of the jar lid. To do this we've used double sided sticky tape, but you could just as easily use hot glue or tape.
Now that everything has been assembled you should have a cool and crafty holiday gift to present to your friends and family for the season of gift giving!
Hi all! We've distilled this year's solar cell summer-solstice tests into a nice, pretty set of PDF files. Want to know the power curves of our solarcells? Check it out here!
This mini-sumo design by Jeremy Bloyd-Peshkin features our wheels, and one of our favourite building materials, Sintra. We can't laser-cut sintra (PVC=bad stuff when burned), but milling it works well, as this builder shows. The asymmetric motor layout works, as proven by this contest-winning design (scroll to the bottom of the page).
We don't know about you, but we're ushering in the New Year with a BANG. That's the sound our metaphorical sledgehammer of rage made while we beat the snot out of our internal server this week, after it refused to come into 2012 in an operational status. Fortunately, our crack IT squad has patched up […]
Fun fact: The Friday before Easter used to be just like any other day of the week. But then they ('they' who? THE GREAT THEY, THAT'S WHO) decided that no, this Friday should be set apart from all the other Fridays of the year. So they tried attaching different names. First was Bad Friday, which […]
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Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.