ENOUGH!

Too many posts with no pictures! I OWE IT TO THE WORLD to share images of my stupid projects!

So here's one for you...

THE INVISI-RAY

On Tuesday, we at All Hands Active got our shiny new bylaws ratified (provisionally), then elected our Board of Directors, of which I'm one! To celebrate, I grabbed an old Energizer headlamp I'd been using as a bike light until it started corroding, and swapped out the white LEDs for IR ones. (This is the next step on my journey toward becoming a cyborg with augmented senses.)

Science Materials!

I found four of them in this box, three of which worked, which was just swell. They look pretty much the same as white LEDs...

yeah they look basically the same

The difference is that it's a lot harder to tell whether IR ones are on or off. I tested them with some button batteries and Roxanne's infrared eye. (Roxanne is a wheeled tower housing a CPU, a pair of speakers, a keyboard, a handheld mouse, an LCD monitor, a regular webcam, and an IR one. She stays logged into AHA's IRC channel and - when set up - takes a picture of the space every 30 seconds. She is our assistant and protector; she has a glorious future yet to come.)

This light is invisible to the unaided human eye.

I took out the three screws on the back of the case and set them aside. The back popped off very easily, and while the soldering iron warmed up, I took a spare LED and tested the white LEDs' connections to see which way they were hooked up, with the lamp switch on.

LED, as you probably know, stands for "Light-Emitting Diode". A diode is a component that allows current to pass through it one way, but not the other. So I had to hook up the LEDs in the right direction, or else they simply wouldn't turn on. With new LEDs, the positive leg is almost always cut longer than the negative one, but on a circuit board the leads have usually been cut close to the board. As it turned out, this headlamp had the white LEDs hooked up with the positive legs to the outside.

My IR LEDs were conveniently sized the same as the old white ones, so with some careful bending, they fit right back in the proper holes. (The middle one there shines red when the switch is moved in the opposite direction - like darkroom lamps, very convenient when one is standing in the dark for extended periods.)

The transformation complete, I put the housing back together and tested it. Here's what it looks like, switched off:

And switched on:

And switched on, through an IR camera:

Maahhhvelous! I got a bunch of purple-hued portraits of AHA! people (yay for locking people in dark bathrooms!), then documented the Zombie Walk a few days later. Results are here! A few samples:

Jacob Huge Beard displays the usual desaturation of black dyes.

Epic zombie dude's makeup is largely transparent, revealing the white base mask underneath.

Pokey's Gary Wilson lipstick is also invisible.

An advantage to shooting with invisible light: you can shine it right in people's eyes (for limited periods of time, of course).

Once more, the rest of the photos are available for browsin' on the Facebooks.

Photons swirling in the night

DO IT

Materials:
1 LED juggling ball
1 rope dart
1 camera with adjustable shutter speed
1 hefty dose of Excellent People

So, a while ago I made a set of glow balls for juggling in the dark... alas, they did not work well, as the constant jarring and poor connections caused them to flash on and off, and the LEDs were hard to look at when they flashed into my eyes. But as with any "failed" project, they can be repurposed! (This is why I am a packrat.)

Each consists of, from the inside out: a 9V battery, white fabric dipped in glow paint, three LEDs, and several layers of cellophane for light diffusion. The stiff fabric holds its shape well, so the battery can easily be switched out. The LEDs are hooked up in parallel, like so:
The long leg of each LED is its positive side (oriented toward the battery's positive terminal, or the red wire on a 9V connector pad). This basic circuit is wrapped around the ball, and the wire ends are duct taped to the battery. The positive end is disconnected when the ball is not in use.

For this project, I took one ball and wrapped it in a wire cage (separated from the LED wires) to attach it to the rope dart. That is attached to a keychain with a swivel, so it can rotate freely, and then hooked to the dart chain with a screw link.

The wire cage presses the battery terminals against the wires, helping the lights stay constantly lit. The smoother motion of the rope dart (as compared to random impacts, with juggling) also aids in this respect.

Rope dart assembly. There's a metal crimp thingy and loop separator thingy, whose precise names I've now forgotten, but which help to keep the 1/4" nylon rope secure and unfrayed. The rope ends in a chain, which is standard and will be very useful when I make a fire head for this thing! *anticipatory hand-rubbing and cackling*

The original head was made with 12 dead AA batteries duct taped to an eye hook, with a stopper and nut on the other end of the hook to keep the batteries from flying off. That was very, very painful when it hit me in the shin/head/back/other shin, so I took 6 batteries off and now it only hurts quite a lot. The glow head will probably stay on for a while, as it's lighter and softer, and not at all likely to cause concussions. Delightful!

On the first night of experimentation, my droog Eric took most of the photos, so mighty props to him. Here you can see the rope wrapping around my neck, which is my favorite move with the rope dart... a full one looks like this:

UFO TYME

And then, of course, you can draw... for most of these, we have the camera set to take 10-second exposures.

Eric makes a really awesome thing while trying to draw a triangle and label the sides.

My mom, Lori, realizes that one can flip the image in post-production... thus, writing backwards is not strictly required. The red LED is a little throwie I made using two little batteries and a metal bar that connects the battery terminals when pressed... so it can actually be turned on and off if you want space between your letters (fancy that!). The swirls are me running around her with the rope dart.

Then we did some portraits...

Lori

my main droog Naomi

me

And then Dokta Funk picked up the rope dart and blew our minds with his ambient illumination.

And that was that.