If your idea of a haunted house has motherboards along with your monsters, then meet Joel Murphy. This Parsons instructor and 3rd Ward teacher is taking his regular robotics class one spooky step further with: Intro to Circuits & Electronics: Halloween Edition.
Read on to hear Joel talk about his love for LEDs, his upcoming appearance at Maker Faire (9/25-9/26), and how anyone can add a little bit of fun, whimsy, and spook potential by adding circuitry into their everyday lives.
Plus, we're giving away 2 Maker Faire tix and a $25 gift certificate (total value = $75) to the person who tells us their "Dream 3rd Ward Class". Click here for more details and to submit.
Intro to Circuits & Electronics: Halloween Edition starts September 29th - enroll today!
Joel Murphy: I'm teaching Intro to Circuits & Electronics: Halloween Edition, which involves creating really cool electronics projects for your haunted house or to scare your friends and family. We use resistors and capacitors, LEDs; all analog components, nothing digital.
3rd Ward: Could you go into that more?
JM: For the Halloween Edition, we're going to be building stand-alone circuits, and it's going to focus on sensors and triggering events, whether it's opening a door or creating a surprise. At the end of the Robotics Edition, we use all the circuits we built to create a robot.
3W: Are people that take your course hobbyists?
JM: They were artists who wanted to broaden their skill set; curious-minded folk who wanted to learn. 3rd Ward has classes in all kinds of skills, so if someone wanted to put electronics in a table, they would be able to do that. I had a woman who tricked out her motorcycle with LEDs.
3W: Have you been doing this your whole life?
JM: I've made kinetic sculpture for a long time, crazy coffee maker fountains and sculptures [out of] toasters and chainsaws. For a number of years, I just used gravity and wind. Then, I started putting motors in. I had a residency upstate and I spent half of my time teaching myself microchip control. This was like five years ago, so Arduino was just starting out.
[Recently], I've been teaching and I have a small business. I still get satisfaction in building things, but not necessarily my own work. I also recently opened an online store selling electronics kits and breakout boards. It's called Rachel's Electronics. And I'm going to have a booth at the Maker Faire in September.
3W: What’s the Maker Faire about?
JW: I'm going to show the stuff that I'm making, and a hands-on section of my booth, where I'll have step-by-step instructions for building circuits on a breadboard and sensor circuits. I like focusing on education, which is one of the reasons I like teaching at 3rd Ward. There's a revolution happening right now in electronics hardware. With Arduino and other popular microcontrollers becoming so accessible, people are able to do really amazing stuff. The more people who know about electronics and feel comfortable with it, the better off we all are.
3W: What's involved with Rachel's Electronics?
JW: Rachel's Electronics specializes in hard-to-find and novel devices for use with microcontrollers. The chips are touch-sensing, so you can design what you see on the MTA "Buy-A-Metrocard" screen. One of the kits I sell is a soldering kit, which is used to create an optical mouse. I also have two that are breakout boards of microcontrollers. With a chip so tiny, you can't access any of the pins on it. A breakout board makes the pins more accessible.
3W: Can you give me an example of a project you've done lately?
JW: Recently, I worked for Corban Walker and he wanted to make rectangles of aluminum channel with LEDs. That was really a challenge, to design the circuit to make them work. It had to look crisp, like it was touched by the hand of God. [In the end, it was] pretty stunning, actually.
I worked with Phoebe Washburn a few years ago on a giant conveyor belt moving grass around in a loop. That was a lot of industrial motors, controlled by low-voltage electronics. Some switches and sensors [turned] on water sources. That was really fun because it was really complicated and I had to learn while I was doing it.
Sign up now for Intro to Circuits & Electronics: Halloween Edition! If you want to catch Joel’s booth at Maker Faire (9/25-9/26), don’t miss our contest for two free tickets.
Sep 27, 2010
After putting on such twisted events as Nightmare Haunted House, dancer, puppeteer, set designer and 3rd Ward Unlimited Member Aaron Haskell is now creating and directing his own feature-length project. 
