Here is a minimal, first version of Duinolab. It has an Arduino, 4 buttons, 6 LEDs, and 2 potentiometers. Each peripheral is connected to an I/O pin on the Arduino, but can be turned on or off (via I2C). When off, it is electrically neutral, and the user can use that pin for something else. The Arduino pins are broken out to the central breadboard, which is easily removable/swappable to allow the same Duinolab to be used for multiple projects. The hardware design is at http://duinolab.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/hardware/ The software is still in progress, but will include an Arduino library and sample code. I'll talk more about that when I finish it. The front panel design is clearly not quite there yet... but that will come with the next version, where I will engineer the circuit boards so that the connectors and chips are on the bottom, and the controls/LEDs/whatever can be mounted on top. In addition to a nicer faceplate, also to come in the next version: - Reset buton and power switch (with cool cover) - LiPo battery and charger/boost converter - Graphical LCD with 4 menu buttons (eventually to be replaced with this) - Speaker, microphone, and photoresistor - True rainbow LEDs (need purple/violet!)
So I tend to be a bit disorganized. Usually I live with this fact. But things got to a breaking point last week. I hadn't done much experimenting with electronics for several months because I'd been doing the polyhedral models stuff. But I was going to be doing some stuff with the guys at Makerspace Urbana, on the Great Global Hackerspace challenge. And I needed to find some parts to use for a hacking session. I wanted my Arduino, my MakerBot extruder controller (old school 2.2), some switches and knobs and a little joystick I got from SparkFun. I also wanted a protoboard and my neat prototyping wires (everybody should have these because they are awesome). But I couldn't find everything. I couldn't even find most of the things. I spent 30 minutes going through all of my electronics crap, and I only found parts of it here and there. It was 3 days before I was able to track down everything (including stuff that was in a bag under the drill press in the garage... I said I was disorganized). Enough is enough. I don't want to have to spend time sorting and organizing and searching when I just want to hack some quick project together on the Arduino. So I came up with the idea of the duinolab. The concept is a small document case that closes up (like this), fits in your laptop bag, and has all the stuff that you would want to mess with an Arduino-based electronics project, in one easy-to-store, easy-to-transport, easy-to-use package ...
Today was my last enrichment activity with the kids from my daughter's school (6th graders). For our last project we put together a stellated dodecahedron with the property that for any face you look at, the star is the same color (I'm not explaining that well - look at the pictures to see what I mean). Each of the kids got their own "kit", and three of the six had the figure complete or almost complete in just one class period (43 minutes), with the rest about half way done. The models are made up of twelve different "spikes", each of which is its own piece of paper. One of the problems with making paper models of stellated polyhedra is it is a lot harder to make the concave joints with flexible paper, especially as you get to the last few parts of the model. You just can't get your fingers in the right place to put tabs in place or to hold things together to properly glue them. And it gets really hard to fit tweezers in to help, since everything is already closed up. So I made models with holes in the faces. This turns out to make it a lot easier to put them together, as you can get tweezers in the right place without any difficulty. And I think they look pretty cool too :-) ...
I've developed an Inkscape extension to render the polyhedra nets I've been making the last few months. It can make nets for the platonic, archimedean, and archimedean dual solids. There are several options for tabs including tab and slot, no tabs (for showing rather that assembling), and a couple of options for tabs that can be glued. The nets are pre-colored so that you can use color mapping to get dotted fold lines along with the cut-out outline, as described here. The code is here, where I keep all my fablab-related stuff. The relevant files are: polyhedra_other.inx polyhedra_platonic.inx polyhedra_archimedean.inx polyhedra_archimedeandual.inx polyhedrondata.py polyhedra.py You can either install this for all users on your system (fine if it is a personal desktop or laptop) by copying all 6 of the above files into the inkscape/share/extensions directory where inkscape is installed. Alternately, on Linux, you can copy them into your home directory, in $HOME/.config/inkscape/extensions. Once it is installed, you need to restart Inkscape (if it was running). Then you should have a submenu called "Polyhedra" under the Inkscape "Extensions" menu. There are several submenus because of the number of solids - it was overwhelming when there were 33 choices in the drop-down menu.
Perhaps it is time for an intervention? But seriously, Réka and I are having a blast making these things. The really colorful ones in the back are due to an idea by my friend Bruce. We were talking about how it was fun to make the polyhedra, but if you wanted to make one that you didn't have a net for, you had to spend some time making up the net. Now, I've made that easier by writing an Inkscape extension that renders nets (not ready for release, but soon...). But what if you want to make something unusual, like a house for your lego figure? So, his idea was to make individual panels. We worked out the connector shape (basically a tab and slot next to each other), and voilá! There it was! I went and bought some colored cardstock, and cut them out on my Silhouette SD machine. Here are some pictures that show a bit better what the panels look like: Right now there are only files for the Silhouette (in the newer "studio" format, not GSD), which isn't very helpful. I'm going to make up some Inkscape ones tonight ...
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