I heard a really fascinating episode of one of my favorite podcasts recently (99% Invisible). It was about hacking IKEA furniture. They interviewed the curator of a website devoted to the niche art form.
Category Archives: Projects
Inaugural Maker Faire
Well, I’ve officially joined the DIY electronics community. Last week, I attended my first Maker Faire. It was my city’s first ever, and I was determined to take one of my projects as a booth participant. Nothing like a deadline to get my hind quarters into gear and (kind of) finish a project!
The state of the Arduino ecosystem
*** The following is a “bitter old engineer” rant. You’ve been warned. At this ripe old age, I have come to value most the quality of a toolchain. I’ll go a step further and say that the coherency and consistency of the umbrella that toolchain inhabits is a most prized quality. And what spurred this revelation? …
Dell OptiPlex motherboard repair
My office was liquidating a bunch of old computer equipment. In the heap, my eye was caught by a Dell box. “Hmm, what’s wrong with that computer?” And so began my next big obsession.
Failure analysis on the HoMedics Lullaby Soundspa
We have one of these little do-dads for our kid: HoMedics SS-3000 Soundspa Lullaby. It’s a nifty little product, makes different simulated white noise sounds and projects these images from a spinning disk apparatus. Like I said, nifty. But also fragile, and prone to breakage. The company, HoMedics, replaced our first one because its little motor …
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IKEA kitchen light mod, part 2
A while ago, I modified my daughter’s little kid kitchen. In that project, I found my design self teetering on that edge between two goals: get-it-done on the one side, do-it-right on the other. I had chosen the former and even my 2 year old (at the time) could see that this was a critical …
AC multi-way light switch
My garage has a single light switch in it for its overhead fluorescent lights. This light switch is not conveniently located; it is situated beyond our freezer, such that one has to walk into the darkened garage in order to turn the switch on. So I made an electronic 3-way switch. “Why?”, you ask. Indeed. …
Surround Sound Debug
For some reason, this keeps happening to me. I must be doing it wrong. But I’ve either been too stubborn or too distracted to find the better way to do it. I’ve installed surround sound wiring into my abodes at least five times (twice in my bachelor days at two different apartments , and thrice …
Parody Circuits
I ran across this most excellent xkcd comic the other day: It’s just so funny on so many levels, if you’re a EE. Let’s just go clockwise around the page, starting at the top left. I love that the battery voltage is a square root. Just so obscure and mathematically nerdy. Gluing open the switch? …
Pro bono blog development
As my wife can attest, I’ve been lost in the world of code again. It‘s happened before. This time, I was working on a big project for an NPO for which I do part-time admin work. The project involved updating their WordPress theme. I had not selected the previous theme they were using; it was …