Our dead little Duemilanove has been immortalized in solid bronze! This was a pretty intense project that took a little over 3 weeks from start to finish. The end products turned out better than I had hope for! Huge thanks to Aaron Juarros for making this happen.
Our small first-run of ten is off to the 2012 Museum Computer Network conference in Seattle. One will be donated to the silent auction (to benefit MCN scholarships), and the rest will be given to a few lucky friends.
While not specifically Leonardo related, our fried Duemilanove is definitely worthy of a blog post…
I have enlisted the help of Aaron Juarros - local sculpter, metal master, and studiomate of mine – to create the ultimate trophy / shrine to destroyed Arduinos everywhere: a bronze microcontroller belt buckle.
Today we began what looks to be about a three week process that will yield about 20 buckles. The plan is to have these ready before we head off to MCN Seattle in November. What follows is the first few steps toward casting the Duemilanove model:
A fried Duemilanove and Uno sit in front of the plastic mixture that will be used to create our buckle mould.
The first step was to pour a plastic mould of the Arduino. We chose to begin with the Duemilanove. It had more raised bits, which we both thought looked cool. In prepping for the plastic mould, Aaron added about 1cm of clay to the bottom of the board to give it some depth.
Aaron Juarros explains that we will add about 1cm of clay to the bottom of the Arduino to give the finished buckle a bit more depth.
Aaron adds clay strips to the bottom of the board.
Aaron adds clay strips to the bottom of the board.
Once we had a good base built up around the bottom, Aaron started building an enclosure around the entire board. This is where the plastic would be poured.
Check out Hello Leo on Bare Conductive’s site: www.bareconductive.com
Hello Leo has been featured on Bare Conductive’s site! Check it out here: Hello Leo on Bare Conductive. Bare is the awesome product that helped get our Ouija Keyboard concept up off the ground.
We did a little more work on our Ouija Keyboard this week. Check out our progress in the video below.
The next phase was to make the keyboard more robust. We added several more letters, some numbers, and a space bar. Currently, the keyboard can type: Y,E,S,N,O,L,I,M,A,R,0,1,3, and SPACE. We maxed out all of the digital pins on our Arduino Leonardo, but recently discovered that analog pins can be used as digital as well!
Stay tuned as we add more letters to the amazing Ouija Keyboard!
The Ouija Keyboard in action. Powered by spirits and an Arduino Leonardo, the Ouija Keyboard was screen printed using Bare Conductive Ink.
Our first project using the Arduino Leonardo was the Ouija Keyboard. We were given an assignment to construct an unconventional keyboard that would utilize the Arduino Leonardo and its keyboard library. The prototype ouija keyboard was constructed in about a week and was programmed with the ability to type 5 characters: Y, E, S, N, O.
When planning the project we considered a few different ways of electrifying the ouija. We chose to screen print the board using a very cool product called Bare Conductive Ink. As the name implies, Bare is a water based ink capable of conducting electricity. We poked around online and found very little documentation on screen printing with the ink. The one site we did find recommended printing with a 130 line screen at small scale.
Luckily, Mariano shares a studio with a very talented screen printer who offered to help us print the 10″X15″ board using a higher resolution 156 line screen. The video below shows some prep work prior to printing the board:
The next phase was to make the keyboard more robust. We added several more letters, some numbers, and a space bar. Currently, the keyboard can type: Y,E,S,N,O,L,I,M,A,R,0,1,3, and SPACE. We maxed out all of the digital pins on our Arduino Leonardo, but recently discovered that analog pins can be used as digital as well!
Stay tuned as we add more letters to the amazing Ouija Keyboard!
