Halloween '09 come and gone...

Wow,talk about a different year! After all the work I put into the porcupine, creating the show with a talking skull, a 2-axis skull, 4 singing pumpkins, and an almost 30 minute background track complete with thunder and lightning, the PC I'd set up to run it all up and died on me. Disappointing? Yea, but not the end of the world. The talking skull I'd set up just used a simple "toy motor" circuit to drive the jaw, so I was able to re-purpose it by hooking it to an old iPod & looping a bunch of jokes I found online over and over. It turned out to be a big hit! At least it was to the 20 Trick Or Treaters we had...

On a bright note, the LED spots worked great!





I'd still like to give the porcupine a job this year. Christmas maybe?

Mr. Sticks

now that's a big cauldron

Saw this on my way home from work tonite. Not sure what it's made, but dang it's cool!

the porcupine

OK, here it is. 5 inputs, 16 switched outputs, & 3, 5, & 12 volt power taps. I'm not going to give a step by step how-to because for as wild as it looks, it's really pretty simple.






The TTL signal from the parallel port pins travel through the small gauge wire to the circuit board, through the 1k resistor, and to the base pin of the transistor. The emitter of the transistor is connected to ground. The collector of the transistor connects to one side of the relay coil, & the other side of the coil connects to +12 volts. There's a diode across the coil of the relay, with the stripe toward the side connected to +12 volts. When VSA activates the pin the transistor allows current to pass from the collector to the emitter, completing the circuit and triggering the relay.



The inputs for MonkeyBasic's Helmsman, pins 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, & ground, are brought out to the barrier strip on one end of the enclosure. The other end of the enclosure has ground and power pins fed by a PC power supply, connected through a hacked PC power supply extension.

That's pretty much it. Now all I have to do is design my yard display & decide what to control. Shouldn't be a problem - I've got two whole weeks...

power again

OK, so I modified a PC power supply to power my yard display. Plan was to use it with the parallel port relay controller I'm building (and yes, I really am building it.) So anyway, I modified it & it worked. Then, I decided to use it to show my wife how the LED spotlights would look lighting up a tombstone. Like a dummy, I just twisted the wires together & left them uninsulated. Of course, I was careless and shorted the 12V lead to the case of the power supply & let the magic smoke out of it. I was kinda bummed, but lesson learned.

Anyway, I was perusing the interwebs the other day & came across a pretty neat idea. Why cut up a perfectly good power supply when all the wires you need terminate in the main connector? Why not build a breakout box with a switch and taps for the all the voltages? Tell me, why not? I've lost the link to the page I found the idea on, so I'll show how I built mine.



here's what I started with. A small project box from Radio Shack, 3 red binding posts, 1 black binding post, 4 ring terminals, the switch from my dearly departed hacked power supply, and an ATX power supply extension cable.



I started by drilling 4 holes evenly spaced on the bottom of the project box



Then I cut the male end off the extension cable and drilled a hole in the end of the project box just big enough for the wires to pass through.



Next I put the binding posts in.



I drilled a hole for the switch in the side of the box, making sure to position it so the terminals would clear the binding posts.



Things got a little less simple here. The wire colors on the ATX extension weren't the same as the standard colors on the power supply (couldn't find one online that was), so I plugged it into a power supply so I could match up the colors.



Then, it was just a matter of connecting the switch lead & a ground to the switch, and the ground, 3.3V, 5v, and 12V leads to the binding posts. I ran the extra leads into the box just to keep things neat.





It works!

This should be handy. I'll use it for bench power as well as power for my yard display.

better

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