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Magnets and Geometry

A bunch of us are in the middle of a short fad of fascination with magnets. I recently purchased about a thousand gold-plated spherical 6mm N35 neodymium-iron-boron magnets from Edwin Science . These are strong enough that swallowing two of them would probably require surgery . But I am not dumb enough to eat them, being far more interested in building things out of them, and thus I give you some photos of the nifty things I did when I got them, and some tips on how to assemble them. I regret not having the artistic skills or patience to illustrate all of the information I want to share here, but hopefully those interested can follow along. The first building block is a loop of magnets, with the poles aligned circumferentially (that is, a string of aligned magnets joined end to end). In the photos below, anywhere you see two parallel rows of magnets arranged in a square configuration, that indicates the adjacent rows are aligned in opposite directions, and almost always part of

Mystery Unboxing

We recently received our second order of Surprise Boxes and Display Assortments from Electronic Goldmine , and again we made a group activity out of unboxing and sorting the parts. Afterward I combined all the sorted containers from previous unboxings, both Freeside's and my own , and started categorizing things. The take this time was similar to last time. We got a lot of VFDs from the display assortments, which we can't use right now due to lack of a good cheap easy-to-reproduce 30-40V AC power supply, but those will be much fun later. We went with the "Super" (medium size) surprise boxes this time, to get more densely packed smaller components and less larger sparse items like the security hardware and R/C cars for last time. The choice parts this time included some high voltage relays, two-prong AC outlets, a bunch more 96x64 LCDs, a few dozen dual RJ45 jacks, some 10-segment LED bar graphs, and a lot of nice trim and dual-log pots. The bulk of the order w

Hack-a-Thon Nov. 21, 2009

I know I'm late getting around to posting these pics from the Hack-a-Thon that freeside participated in on Nov. 21, 2009, but got some pics from the projects I worked on. Here are some pics from the social side of the Hack-A-Thon: This is a quick project I did to make a hook system for my dogs food/water bowl so she didn't tip it over while in her crate. And this is some pics from my model rocket engine project. More details can be found at: www.shadow404.com/125

A project of light proportions

Taopunk was spotted last night working on a very intresting project. Can you non-freeside members figure out what it is??? Hmmm... Click on the picture to see a larger image. First guest to figure it out will win a Freeside T-shirt and sticker.