Friday Fun: Poundland Edition
It'ssssss Pounderland!
So today I popped into my local Poundland to look for stuff which I can hack into a time machine project for tomorrow.
I found a few bits and pieces.
- Solar powered LED bulbs
- Slug barrier tape
- Mice
- Tripod for phone camera
- KITT the car from Knight Rider (my dad likes it)
Solar Powered Bulbs
Hack in progress, this is powered from standard power supply
I use these in my garden to produce coloured light dotted around the garden. But the LEDs are sparse inside. They use "micro LEDs" that are wired up using a lacquered copper wire, which is tricky to solder. I had a spare pack of these LEDs (also from Poundland) so I wired them in place of the original LEDs. Sure the Solar power supply is a 1.2V NiMH battery via a 5252F IC. (By the way, great blog post on this here.) which transforms it to 3V. But it can do much better than that...so I gave it a constant 3V from a spare Pi Zero W.
Much brighter but not permanent, merely me playing around
Slug Barrier Tape
Copper tape is VERY handy to have in the hack box! It can be used to create arts and crafts circuits using low power devices such as the Raspberry Pi / Arduino / micro:bit / codebug / Makey Makey...etc.
So 2 metres by 2.5cm for a pound is quite a bargain, and you can carefully solder to it. Sadly the tape is only conductive on one side, the adhesive is an insulator. You can buy low EMI copper tape that has conductive adhesive...but not for a £1.
Mice
I needed a couple of spare mice for my hack sessions in Leeds tomorrow. These mice are decent. I don't mind them getting broken.
So that's a little slice of Pounderland fun!