brainwagon

As anyone who has followed my blog for any period of time knows, my interests straddle a lot of different disciplines and hobbies, and often find interesting bits of overlap where I find I can do cool stuff. Two of my favorite hobbies are tinkering with microcontrollers and with the low powered end of amateur […]

Last year, Mark H (who blogs at Eastbay RC got me into the world of building RC airplanes. While my early attempts were limited in their overall successfulness (I demonstrated that I was awfully good at snapping props) I have been keeping up in my interest, and slowly acquiring more tools and hardware. Recently, I’ve […]

Or not. I find a lot of editorializing about amateur radio to be, well, curiously off the mark. For instance try checking out Dan, KB6NU’s well meaning article about why you should upgrade to a General. I mean, that’s what the title is: Why you should upgrade to a General. The reason I find this […]

It is with a sense of deep sadness that I heard of the passing of Ray Harryhausen this morning. If I were to pick two things which influenced me as a kid growing up in the 1960s, it would have been the Apollo Space Program and the films of Ray Harryhausen, although at no time […]

Even casual readers of this blog know that I’ve enjoyed playing around with the Arduino and the Atmel AVR chips. I really like them, and have used them for a variety of personal projects, as well as using them for a variety of educational projects for a local high school where I mentor students. But […]

Previously, I have read about a wireless Morse thermometer designed by Steve Weber, KD1JV. I played around with the basic idea in a YouTube video I made. It basically powers a little Colpitts oscillator from an IO pin on an Arduino. Weber’s circuit did much the same, just using a small 8 pin AVR and […]

I’ve been busy lately, and have done almost nothing radio related. But John was kind enough to point out to me that Bill, N2CQR of Soldersmoke fame had posted a mention of me, and I surfed over to his blog to have a peek. His post that apparently uses my code to send Morse which […]

Tap… tap… tap… Is this thing still on? Apologies to my loyal readers (reader?) for the lack of recent updates. A combination of work pressure, family visits, general lassitude and other distractions have caused the writing muse to flee, and every time I sit down to write something down, I have just felt physically tired […]

Okay, our Replicator 2 went back online this week, and I decided to give printing my Arduino bumper another try. Since the last time, I have revised the program and code a couple of times. I was concerned that the various bits of solder protruding from the bottom of the board would need extra relief […]

Earlier this week, I tried to print out the first version of my Arduino bumper. Sadly, our Replicator 2 had a malfunction mid print, and it’s still offline (a problem with the temp sensor) but that doesn’t mean I’ve been entirely stationary. I mentioned on twitter that I was having trouble using the minkowski operator […]

Last week, I got a chance to experiment with a Replicator 2, and printed some brackets for my robot project. I designed them using OpenSCAD, which is kind of a scripting language for solid shapes. It can export in STL format, which I then used MakerWare to drive the Replicator 2. The picture at the […]

A few days ago, I heard that Jayson Tautic (@tautic), manufacturer and purveyor of a interesting electronic prototyping goodies, had put up an interesting offering: a small PIR (passive infra red) motion detector. I’m always up for a new sensor to play with, so I ordered a pair for fun, and they arrived on Friday. […]

The other day, I was walking around in Fry’s Electronics, and noticed that they had HP HD-2200 webcams on sale for a mere $6. I thought to myself: hey, even if the camera is crappy (and it is) that is simply too cheap to pass up, and grabbed one. Last night, I decided to try […]

I’m having lots of fun with my Raspberry Pi, and I’ve decided to launch one of my crazy spare-time projects: inspired by this article detailing the construction of RUDEBOT, a kind of mobile tablet robot, I decided to build a robot of my own. But, anything worth doing is worth changing and adapting, so I […]

The other day, I was at Harbor Freight, and picked up an inexpensive set of digital calipers. While goofing around, I decided to try to reproduce an object using OpenSCAD. I had just received a pair of motors from Pololu. They look like this: I sat in the editor, and set to work measuring. I […]