Easter Egg Hunt Rules, 2014.

Posted: April 21, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Coding, Explorations, Getting A Clue, That Totally Worked | Tags: , , , , , , | 5 Comments

We love doing Easter egg hunts.  But as the girls get faster, smarter, and more wily, merely finding the eggs is no longer challenge enough.  I’ve gotta slow ’em down somehow, and this is how I do it: each girl gets an empty basket (I use traditional Jack-O-Lantern baskets), and sheet of instructions helping her know which eggs are for her, and which are for her step-sister.  Each year, the instructions require more careful reading and invoke increasingly complicated rules.

New this year: the contents of two of the eggs altered the interpretation of rules, retroactively. This fact itself was part of the published rules… this time.

 

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The best part was watching the girls excitedly pounce as they found the first eggs, and then stall completely as they had to stop and puzzle out exactly who’s egg it actually was that they’d just found.

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-Mark

 

 

P.S. Here are the previous year’s Egg Hunt Rules (2013):

Easter2013

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Fire2012: an open source fire simulation for Arduino and LEDs

Posted: April 4, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Art, Coding, Creations, DIY, Explorations, How-to, That Totally Worked | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

I’ve built and programmed a couple of different ‘fire’ simulations for Arduino and LEDs, and I’ve had numerous requests over the years to share the source code.  I’ve always been happy to share my work; the holdup has been that before I share my code for the world to peer at, I like to clean it up a little.  I like to give the code a clean shave and scrub under its fingernails before it steps out onto the wide open Internet where it might have an audience with Her Royal Majesty, The Queen of England.  It could happen.

Anyway, I finally cleaned up the code for one of my simplest and most legible ‘fire’ simulations, and I give it to you, your Majesty, and everyone else, too. Here’s a video of the code in action on a 30-pixel strip of WS2812B LEDs (or maybe WS2811) and an Arduino.  Source code link is below the video.

Full source code is here: http://pastebin.com/xYEpxqgq  The simulation itself is only about 25 or 30 lines of code.  It uses our (open source) FastLED library to drive the LEDs.

Discussion about the code and how to port it and use it are here on the FastLED discussion group on G+ https://plus.google.com/112916219338292742137/posts/BZhXE4cqEN4

Enjoy!

-Mark