Jim Wink's Make Blog

Here's another one I did a while back & never got around to posting here. Further back, like years (don't remember how many - Evy was small) I got a rather nice RC car kit from my dad. It was a Tamiya "Baja Champ" - the whole deal, dissassembled, two servos, drive motor, trigger controller and such. He also got me a charger for the main power source. It was cool. So I quickly put the thing together and discovered something interesting - and relevant to this post, I assure you. There were spare parts. Extra cogs, some plastic bits, but also a completely spare servo. I got the thing done and it ran fine, but I was still scratching my head over the spare servo. The answer came later. One of my wife's cousins and family were over for a visit and it turned out her husband had built some of these kits before. He said that the extra servo was kind of a hold over from before there was electronic speed control for the motor. The servo actually was the throttle, or what...

For Valentine's day I decided to create a heart shaped LED display. I had been trying to learn Charlieplexing for a while, but the concept was, for some reason, a difficult one for me. There is an Instructable on the open heart kit , but the photos of the wiring didn't make any sense to me. There was also a schematic (somewhere) along with it, but that wasn't helping me for some reason. I also wanted to make it a surprise for my wife. Its easy to research the idea with her watching, but once I started my trial and error with a heart shape she'd probably wonder. All this coupled with the fact that Valentine's day was fast approaching, I decided to order a kit. The kit was created by Jimmie Rodgers. I am fairly impressed with it. He doesn't actually sell the kits off of his site. Instead he went with the Maker shed site here . One a side note I wasn't impressed with the size of box they sent. Adafruit and Sparkfun both sent my stuff in a small box which ...