brainwagon

I have an odd obsession with small, relatively cheap hardware development boards. Over the last few years, I’ve acquired a bunch of them, from Arduino to Raspberry Pi to BeagleBone Black. I thought it might be nice to just do a short video showing what I have around. So I did. Here’s a little 25 […]

Last night, the absent-far-too-often urge to fire up the soldering iron and make something hit me, so I warmed up the Weller and did this: Soldered one of @EMSL ISP shield kits together tonight, and burned a bootloader on 328. #babysteps pic.twitter.com/0vXo2Wewie — Mark VandeWettering (@brainwagon) February 24, 2015 I bought this kit quite a […]

I’ve got a weak spot for cheap, programmable hardware. In my junk drawer I’ve got a collection of Arduinos, Parallax Propellor boards, a couple of STM32 based ARM boards, and several Beagle Bone Blacks and Raspberry Pis. Today, another entry arrived: the WRTnode. I’ve only had it out of the box for a few hours, […]

Every since I was a young lad, I’ve been fascinated by miniatures and model building. Like many of my obsessions, I did more reading than actual constructing. In particular, I remember reading several books about building “ships in a bottle”, and for some reason, this particular interest has cycled around and is again at the […]

One of the more interesting online communities that has sprung up in recent years is Pinterest. It serves as a kind of Internet inspiration board: people clip pictures of projects that interest or inspire them, and post them as a sort of pin board that can be shared. I recently found several boards on ships […]

Advent is the season observed in many Christian traditions that is a time of expectant waiting and preparation for Christmas. When I was young, we’d have an Advent calendar, which counted down the days to Christmas, and would gift us with a little chocolate or candy each day. While I am no longer religious, the […]

I didn’t get up early enough. But here’s the video of the launch. Is it just me, or is this rocket tossing off a lot of debris? Anyone else notice this?

Earlier this week, I snapped a couple of iPhone photos of the partial solar eclipse with my iPhone, through coworker Eric’s mighty spiffy little Questar, equipped with a filter. Despite the glare, I was shocked at how much detail was actually available, especially for sunspot group 2192, which has been busy kicking off solar flares […]

My hardware hacking friends have been all a-twitter (and all a-pick-your-favorite-social-platform) about recent actions by FTDI. In case one of my three or so regulars haven’t heard about this dust-up, here’s a brief synopsis. FTDI makes a series of chips which translate between USB and either RS232 serial or TTL level serial signals. These chips […]

Snapped with my iPhone, held to the eyepiece of a Questar equipped with a solar filter…

Okay, it’s mostly just a lark: sending your name aboard the first test flight of the Orion space vehicle (scheduled for Dec 4.) but it’s kind of fun.

Without further explanation: [sourcecode lang=”python”] #!/usr/bin/python from random import choice # ,, , # ‘ || || A Shakespearean insult generator # \\ \\/\\ _-_, \\ \\ || =||= # || || || ||_. || || || || # || || || ~ || || || || || # \\ \\ \\ ,-_- \\/\\ \\ […]

Thomas’ talk about the Minima at Pacificon has got me thinking about building one of my own. I actually have quite a few of the necessary parts in my junk box, but lacked a few things, so I made a quick list and sent a quick order off to Tayda. Tayda has really good prices […]

Pacificon is the local yearly hamfest, which took place at the Santa Clara Marriot this weekend. I couldn’t go for the entire weekend, but I decided that spending at least part of my Saturday amongst my fellow hams would be good fun, so I set my alarm to an annoyingly early time (for the weekend) […]

The Internet is awesome. For instance, this morning I found a link to this amazing Nixie Tube clock, which uses neon bulbs (no transistors or ICs) as the logical elements (clocks are really just fancy counters). I think I might have seen that neon bulbs could be used as logical elements (Alan Yates? Did you […]