Author Archives: Pipkins, Royce

Working on singing pumpkins

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Pipkins, Royce

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In a recent visit to the makerspace, I was able to assemble a couple of shields targeted at my Singing Pumkins project where an Arduino drives animatronic pumkins in time to music.

The shield with the large heat sink is a 20W car amplifier that will take the output from the wave shield and send it to some speakers. The larger shield is a riff on Laday Ada’s 12 Channel PWM controller. The difference is that this one is in a shield format and includes a DC to DC converter that will bring the 12V of the car battery down to the 6V maximum of the PWM chip.

I only just had enough time to assemble the boards, not test. But, hopefully,  I’ll have everything thing working correctly.

Tabletop Day

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Pipkins, Royce

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Tabletop Day is today! We’ll be open to the public from 1PM to 7PM for some great gaming action. Come on down and check it out!

Pumpkin Pavilion Project Update 2

Posted on September 16, 2012 by Pipkins, Royce

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Still working on the pumpkin project. The stores have pumpkins in stock now. I grabbed a couple and hooked one up to the servo. Looks good!

Pumpkin Pavilion Project Prototype

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Pipkins, Royce

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Milwaukee Makerspace is going to participate in this years Bay View Pumpkin Pavilion! In this video we show a quick and dirty mockup of some of the components that would go into an animatronic scarecrow.

RN-42 Carrier V2

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Pipkins, Royce

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Some time back I posted about my RN-42 Carrier Board. The RN-42 is an inexpensive surface mount bluetooth modem. I made a board that converts it to through-hold and exposes a number of the features of the RN-42 that other carrier boards do not.

There was a small error in the original boards: the status LEDs were connected to ground when in was the intent of the RN-42 designers that I connect the LEDs to Vdd. In response to some inquiries about the board, I’ve made a revision of the board that addresses this problem. Here are the updated Gerbers, NC Drill and original Diptrace design files.