LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

This tutorial is a combination of the  DIY unicorn hoodie  tutorial I found on Pinterest and Adafruit's light up unicorn 3D print tutorial. I used some supplies from Adafruit's candle bows  that we made a few years back instead of buying new materials. You can buy the sewing conductive kit separately on Adafruit without the bows.  I won't go through every excruciating detail but here are some tips that they don't mention and a few workarounds that worked for me based on my supplies.  Supplies needed from both tutorials:  Hoodie (dress in my case) Yarn 3D printed Unicorn Horn with LED base 3D printer with clear PLA filament (I didn't use flexible as the tutorial calls for and it was fine) 1 LED (11mm tall X 7.91 mm wide) Conductive Thread Needle (small enough the fit through the battery holder brass side holes. In the Adafruit kit, I used the smallest needle on the right) Battery Holder Regular Thread Felt (not necessary bu...

Think of all the kits in your collection that may have been thrown away because the parts could not be replaced! I recently designed a replacement xylophone mallet for a circulating children's kit. Thanks to the digital caliper I was able to measure the dimensions from the old one on the right (was it chewed!? these mysteries bother me) and added some upgrades like a handle using premade shapes in Tinkercad  to the new one on the left. Since printing in PLA isn't as strong as the typical ABS plastic, I made a thicker bottom. This printed in 2 hours and took me 15 minutes to create in Tinkercad. Just another example of staff using the 3D printer in their daily lives! Speaking of which, Halloween is coming up so this year's costume was inspired by an Adafruit tutorial on lighting up a unicorn horn.    The library staff has decided to be storybook characters this year so it was right up my alley. The free horn, including a bottom to fit an LED and sew-able clips, t...

I can't take credit for this one. I subscribe to the Newton Free Library events calendar because they have lots of great examples of STEM programming and this one particularly struck me. This October they are virtually "carving" pumpkins in Tinkercad . Thanks John Walsh! The skills learned in Tinkercad for this project are holes, grouping, using multiple workplanes and rotating shapes. TIP: Make sure to leave plenty of room between the eyes and the mouth or it won't have enough solidity to print properly. I left 11mm distance between the end of the eyes and the beginning of the mouth.  Step 1: I imported a pumpkin shape from the web and added a sphere from the pre-made shapes on the left sidebar of Tinkercad. Step 2: I added a new workplane on the front center of the sphere (now orange grid appears). I used the roof for eyes and the round roof for the mouth out of the pre-made shapes. The shapes needed to be sized and rotated. Then grouped it all togeth...

Arduino Halloween from Duxbury Free Library on Vimeo . It wasn't easy but we were able to accomplish our 2 Halloween projects: an LED pumpkin and a talking motion sensor skull.  I'll go over each and things that we learned (aka what they sometimes to forget to tell you in the directions). Special thanks to Kevin Osborn for coming down to provide his expertise for the skull.  Also worth noting, Lynda.com also has great tutorials for beginner Arduino. This subscription is offered free of charge in our library and also if you are a librarian through the MBLC. We started with the hardest one first, THE TALKING SKULL (Advanced) *If you are just starting out I suggest doing the entire SIK CODE GUIDE book (comes with the Sparkfun Inventor's Kit) and if you're not ready to throw it out the window then try the Pumpkin* Items required: PIR Motion Sensor    $9.95 Sparkfun Inventors Kit   $99.95 Sparkfun MP3 Shield   $39.95 microsd card and micro SD ...

Working with the Arduino microprocessor platform is challenging. It teaches many lessons to teens and adults alike that are worth listening to.  Precision matters. Reading the fine print and following directions pays off. Learning how things work and how to diagnose an error takes time and can be boring anf frustrating. It helps to collaborate and ask others what they think. We're learning to take the code and run with it. If the piezo buzzer is playing Monster Mash, what else can it play? How do we change its tune? If the LCD screen says, "Hello world," how can we change that to say a different message? How do we adjust the code to do what we want it to do? Adding sound and sensory shields to our Arduinos is a big step and we are still working out the details and complications of them. But we are not stopping at the introductory stages. We are pushing ourselves to learn more about how things work and why. We are constantly surprised by how patient our teens are and h...

We had a great time in the children's room this week making Halloween decorations for our Tinkering Thursday class for grades 4 & 5 using littleBits.  Besides the littleBits, this program cost $7 in Halloween decorations at the local dollar store.  We are fortunate to have littleBits deluxe kits as well as base kits to mix and match.   The most important thing to have extra is:   *blue power bits and batteries (since a 9V battery can only power so many bits at once and you can't add extra power circuits onto your original).   *orange wire bits (to extend their led lights or buzzers off of the circuit bases). I began the one hour class by opening the kits and having kids experiment with all the bits available, towards the 20 minute mark I showed them all the decorations they had to work with and they began thinking about how they could design circuits that went with it.This is where the orange wire bits came in handy .   One thing I w...

In the YA & Children's department, we are gearing up for Halloween using Arduino and littleBits. How cool would it be to do homemade Halloween interactive props? Every year we say that we want to do a Haunted House and this is our first step in the right direction. littleBits just released some Halloween inspired projects: creepy picture frames , pumpkins, & EL wire wearables using the Deluxe kits. We will be using these as a baseline for ideas in our Tinkering Thursday Halloween projects on October 16th. My hope is that they could be put on display until Halloween (if they aren't too scary). As an advanced project for the middle school DIY Club, we are going to be using the Sparkfun Arduino Inventors Kit to go through the manual for 2 weeks practicing breadboard circuitry and preset Arduino programming. They have a great easy to understand manual with detailed pictures for beginners. From there, we have researched Halloween based projects for further explorati...