Category: Projects
A collection of my projects, from the electrical and electronic to the software and home improvement.
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Chicken coop door circuit
So I’ve been updating my chicken coop lately. See here for one such recent upgrade: The latest upgrade is a two-fer design… Door State Indication I want to be able to tell, from a distance, that the door is either open or closed. This is both a convenience to the chicken ranchers and a safety…
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On solving Cross Sums
As you may remember, I’ve become obsessed with the Dell Magazines puzzle collections: This book of mine has many types of puzzles, most of which are word-based (without being dreadful crosswords, which I suck at) or logic-based (which I love, given my career). One such puzzle of theirs that I’d never heard of before is…
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Upgraded coop lighting
I finally got around to upgrading the lighting in my chicken coop.
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Coding Abstractions
Abstractions are everywhere. Loops are abstractions. Functions are abstractions. Programming languages themselves are abstractions over machine code, which itself is an abstraction over transistors flickering off and on really fast. It’s abstractions all the way down. Josh Comeau
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Digital volume knob fix
The volume knob in my wife’s Toyota Highlander behaved weirdly. As you turned it up or down, the volume setting would jump up or down, sometimes in the wrong direction and by an unpredictable amount. It didn’t give a linear output as you would expect. What to do? Why, take it apart of course!
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Cordifying battery things
In my house, we have a ton of “batteried” devices. Having small children, in this modern age, one tends to collect a lot of toys, tools, crafts, and associated appliances that require an array of batteries. Triple- and double-As are in high demand, though 9V and even the C cells are occasionally used. Don’t even get…
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Master vanity renovation
I replaced the old, nasty vanity and sink in our master bedroom with a new (to us) double sink. It took me forever to do, since I’m not so great at texturing and plumbing, but my wife was understanding with the slow progress. 🙂
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Day 30+: a postlude
(Copyright Vectorbelly Webcomics) While the rest of the world is preparing for super sportsing, I’m taking the opportunity to tinker. This post is a continuation of the GaSiProMo challenge I took part in a while ago. Today’s update brings in the next stage of that project with my OsRAM LED display: better packaging. The goal here is to…
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Day 30: final day
I’ve got most of the bugs ironed out in my display interface, but not all have been squashed in the driver portion. In other words, the method in which I can input text into the OsRAM is working nicely (I’m using a serial port console), but the nuts and bolts of how strings are sent to…
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Day 15: display testing
So I have my display working sort of. It’s definitely showing good old ASCII characters. Here’s a quick video of it in action: You can see my code at GitHub. I’m quickly realizing that I will need a more sophisticated text parser to make this thing usable. ‘Cuz sending a character at a time for…