My pal Phil Sittner sent a link to this picture of a rock band made out of electronic components. You have to love the title: L.E.D. Zeppelin.
Apparently that picture inspired this mom to make her own art:
All this creativity is near and dear to my heart, since my dear departed analog pal Jim Williams was also a lover of electronic art. One nice feature of Jim’s art was that it often functioned as a real working circuit as well as being a free-form sculpture.
So if you have an artistic bent, think about soldering up some items from your junk box to make something beautiful and fascinating.
A Maker by the name of MarkusB recently created a color-changing chameleon robot for his daughter to help illustrate the concept of camouflage.
“My daughter and me continued to study our animal encyclopedia. We found the chameleon,” MarkusB wrote in a blog post describing the project. “I tried to explain [to] her that some species adjust their colors for camouflage in accordance with the vision, but she did not understand, so I built a simple robot chameleon during her afternoon nap.”
The fairly simple circuit includes an Arduino Uno (ATmega328), a TCS3200 color sensor with breakout board, a ping pong ball, resistors and an RGB LED.
The entire build cost a grand total of $10 (excluding the Arduino) and took only two hours to complete. For the next iteration of the robot chameleon, MarkusB will be adding a temperature sensor as a well as a capacitive sensor for touch.
“My daughter is very excited about the little robot chameleon and played a long time with it,” he added. ”She now understands that some chameleons adjust their colors for camouflage in accordance with [their surroundings] and she learned some names of colors in different languages (German and English).
Atmel | Bits & Pieces 