AaronEiche.com

I’ve always been very taken with Halloween setups. The orchestration, the excitement, and creativity all lead to a fun expression of the holiday. Halloween has taken it’s place among this generation as the time to do really really cool stuff. Every Halloween for the last 5 or 10 years, I’ve wanted to do something creative. A costume, a theme, anything interesting. Money and time always seemed to get in my way. This year I said “to heck with it” and at 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, I decided to make an animatronic display.

Continue reading ‘Last Minute Halloween’ »

I have been working at this for months. A couple of years ago, I found out about the RepRap project. The idea behind the reprap (if you haven’t talked to me recently) is to create 3-dimensional objects on a computer, and produce them in reality by “printing” them. Today, I printed my first object.

Continue reading ‘My First Printed Plastic Part’ »

(This tutorial has gotten really popular recently, and I’m very pleased that so many people are interested. I learned all of this stuff while working on my first PCB. If you’re interested, I’ve started to sell the most recent version of my Arduino ProtoShield. If you’re making a shield, have fun and good luck!. If not, I hope you find something useful here  -Aaron)

So you’re pretty fond of your Arduino. You make blinking lights, and beeping noises. You’ve made a robot that was pretty cool. Or maybe you didn’t. Who cares, You’re ready for the next step. You want to extend it. Although you can just plug in wires, there’s something very appealing about making a shield. Instead of a rats-nest of wires piled about and plugged into your prototyping breadboard, you can have a nice clean shield with labeled connections and a smaller footprint. So here I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to make a schematic and PCB layout, and get a beautiful shield that will plug into the top of your Arduino.

Continue reading ‘A Beginner’s guide to making an Arduino Shield PCB’ »

That is to say, my first PCB that I actually designed. I recently began attending a bi-weekly electronics hobbiest group call Dorkbot PDX. It’s basically an opportunity for nerds to show off their random electronics projects to people who might actually be interested.

Continue reading ‘My very first PCB’ »

So you just finished your first PCB in Eagle. Good job. Me too actually, and after a few days I came across something very cool. Eagle3D. Eagle3D takes your Eagle .brd file and renders it as a 3D image, so you get to see the board in a photorealstic way. (I think I’ve been saving up photorealistic to use in a post-1995 context. I really don’t think I’ve seen it used to describe anything since the box of Myst). So you download Eagle3D, you download POVray, you copy your include files over there, generate your .pov file, and you launch POVray in anticipation… and then it crashes.

Continue reading ‘Eagle3D on a Mac when POVray won’t work…’ »

Well, I tried, and everybody I know tried. None of us made it. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think any of us are going to die. If you haven’t heard about SparkFun Electronics’ Free Day, it may be that you just don’t care. If you didn’t care, it seemed to me for a moment that you were the only one.

Continue reading ‘SparkFun Free Day Fallout.’ »