Special Project

To quote Chris Knight - "It's yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility."

Rather than pull my hair out (because I kinda like having it) I'm taking a very short break from the book to try my hand at an electronics project that is easy to follow and understand from what I've learned from Make: Electronics... here's the story:

My 3 year old son has discovered... MONSTERS! We've tried to assure him they're not under the bed or in the closet, but he has these moments where he's certain they're around the corner... we've tried to assure them there's no such thing... but he's 3! He probably DOES see them with that imagination of his... so...

I've decided to empower him. No longer will monsters be allowed in our house! As long as he has his trusty Monster-B-Gone with him, all is well.

The Monster-B-Gone is my simple little project involving 6 LEDs moving like the traditional cylon or KITT the super car. Back and forth... back and forth. With the push of a button, my son can banish monsters because, as we all know... monsters HATE the color green! One push of the button and they're off and running! I've already started talking to him about the hows and whys of the animosity between monsters and the color green. I think he's buying it... this should work for a bit and give me time to work on the next solution.

I've based my circuit on the Cylon Pumpkin... if you want to build the same circuit, I've consolidated the author's circuit drawings into a single PDF file you can download here. As you can see from the video, it works fine. I'll be transferring everything to a small project box with a momentary button on the top or side so the batteries aren't being constantly drained. More later as I get the soldering moving forward...

I promise I'm NOT done with the book or the projects... just need to think about something other than Experiment 29 for now...