brainwagon

Today, Carmen decided that she wanted to give Arduino programming a try. She’s an experienced programmer, but had never tried any of this small embedded stuff, and knows relatively little about electronics, but with a little direction from me, she got the Arduino development environment installed, and we did a bit of playing around. I […]

Okay, I did wake up for the lunar eclipse this morning. At 5:30 my alarm went off. I pulled on some clothes, wandered out to the front yard, and sure enough, the moon was already being devoured by the Earth’s shadow. I went back inside, and got my old pair of tripod-mounted aircraft spotting binoculars, […]

This morning I woke up around 5:30AM to catch the lunar eclipse. It was pretty nice: totality began around 6:05AM and the moon became incredibly dark and red. But 30 minute later, it had progressed low enough that it entered the offshore clouds that signaled the arrival of the morning fog. So, I came back, […]

More important help for the budding young electronics designer: https://twitter.com/#!/EMSL/status/144546376624250880 Note: this also works in computer graphics quite well. Just specify a negative intensity for the light value.

I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything significant tonight, but I wanted to test a few things about this strand of Christmas lights using a multimeter and some simple math. Recap: there are two strands of LEDs, each wired in parallel. One strand consists of 4 red and 4 yellow LEDS. The […]

Yep, there is an upcoming total lunar eclipse this Saturday, on the morning of Dec 10. It will be the last total lunar eclipse visible from San Francisco until April of 2014, so I think I’ll be trying to get up and see if I can view it and take some snapshots. From San Francisco, […]

I’ve been a fascinated observer of indoor model airplanes for years, so this little RC controlled blimp strikes me as one of the most awesome things I’ve seen in a while. It’s just a 10g payload, suspended by an ordinary 14″ balloon filled with helium. Very cool. MAKE | How-To: “Sub Micro” R/C Blimp

I was in a hurry yesterday, and didn’t draw the LED connections in my schematic for the $.99 Christmas lights properly. Mike pointed it out to me on twitter, so I thought I’d post a corrected version of the schematic. I’ve also updated the schematic in the original post, so no one will be led […]

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to listen to old time radio shows quite a bit. During the Christmas season, KEX 1190 in Portland would play episodes of radio serial The Cinnamon Bear. The program was originally suppose to air six days a week starting just after Thanksgiving and culminating on […]

I was over at the CVS repository today, and saw that they had some small strings of fifteen LED Christmas lights on sale for a paltry $.99 (if you used your CVS discount card). That was simply too much to resist, so I got a couple of strings, and thought that I would use them […]

As the holiday approaches, it seems like making some kind of blinkenlights project would allow some fun hacking, but also be within the spirit of the holiday. I encountered the idea of “CheerLights” during my morning surfing. The basic idea is to create a global network of colored Christmas lights, all of which change color […]

We have a bunch of photography enthusiasts where I work, and on Friday it is common for people to exchange their photographs and photography-related stories on a local email alias. Today, someone posted a link to this rather tragic video, which reminded me of a story. Go ahead, watch the video. how to lose $2400 […]

I didn’t get a lot of electronics hacking done, but I found myself again playing with capacitive sensing. I found this interesting article on the EE Times website: The art of capacitive touch sensing It also pointed me at the following pretty cool Youtube! vid by the folks at Nerdkits: My experimentation thus far has […]

I was driving around various Silicon Valley electronics and surplus stores (like HSC and Anchor Electronics) and decided to stop in at Microcenter. I remembered that they supposedly were beginning to stock items from Sparkfun and the Maker Shed. And, indeed they do! I found a Serial LCD module from Sparkfun that I thought might […]

You might be experiencing slow response to my website this morning. I think it is merely the perils of using inexpensive shared hosting, but I’ve filed a support ticket and hope that it will get resolved shortly. I appreciate your attention, and hope you will persevere in reading, even if the site seems a bit […]