Jim Wink's Make Blog

I had to do this. Partially because I could, but also partially because I needed a quick project. I hadn't done many projects recently (well, summer, duh) and I needed to do something easy with some real impact. Even if I wasn't sure who in the neighborhood would get the joke. I live in the 'burbs - a lot of non-geeks out here. I decided to do some real soldering on this one. I wanted to create a unit I could keep for later if I wanted to use it. I started with a pile o f red LED's I had liberated from a set of Christmas lights. Many of these LED's came pre-equipped with their own resistor. I'm not entirely sure why, though I've noticed during my forays with the RGB LEDs that the red typically wanted lower voltage. I settled on 12 because its what I could comfortably fit in a Radio Shack proto-board. The LEDs with the resistor seemed okay with the 5 volts the Arduino put out without having issues, but the remaining non-resistored ones were rather bright oth

The origins of the idea, we think, were with our daughter Evy. She wanted to be Princess Leia this year for Halloween. She has fairly long hair & we thought we could probably do the iconic hair buns fairly easily. The outfit that goes with it would be, hopefully, simple (for Jeanette) to make. From there we figured it'd be an easy jump to get Sean outfitted as Luke. I'm not sure where the idea came from that we, their parents, should dress up as... well, their parents. We think Evy eventually decided that this would a cool thing for her parents to do. Jeanette spent many a late night at her serger sewing machine, first with their costumes and then (probably more hours) working on ours. The result was just fantastic. I only got to wear mine twice, but I think Evy got to wear hers to 5 different events. Jeanette and Sean, both in costume, joined Evy on Friday for Evy's school party. We then all wore our outfits to a 40th birthday party of a friend of mine from college. We