brainwagon

I received a couple of email and twitter queries about various aspects of the code, so I thought I would add a followup to yesterday’s post. First of all, I received a query as to whether it was “open source”. Frankly, the code is so minimal and so obvious I didn’t even consider it worthy […]

I had a few minutes, so I thought I’d try making a graphics demo that runs on the tiny little 0.96″ OLED display I mentioned last week. One of the first programs I ever wrote was an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, having learned about it from Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific […]

As my recent video showed, I have a lot of development boards. I also have a fair number of little boards that are useful to plugin to these development boards to accomplish various tasks. Yesterday, I received a little OLED board that I thought I’d try hooking up and let you know about my experience. […]

This morning, the Tweeti-verse (I can’t believe I just used that word) informed me that Thomas, LA3PNA had constructed a VHF beacon using the Si5351, and I was tagged as somehow helping: VHF beacon with the Si5351. code: https://t.co/OkgZXKFSKc , video: http://t.co/hbZl9F76Aj based on code from @brainwagon @NT7S — Thomas S Knutsen (@la3pna) March 9, […]

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 […]

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 […]

In my previous article pondering sensors for my garden, I shamefully neglected a viable and interesting choice, the JeeNode

We’ve started a garden at our house in a pair of raised beds. I’ve been pondering about possibly creating a set of sensors to monitor the dryness of the soil in the beds as well as in the container that I have a dwarf Meyer lemon tree going in. I was trying to figure out […]

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. […]

Last year, I spent a little bit of time to create a set of blinking Christmas lights that I could mount in a hat. It was powered by an ATtiny13 and mounted in an Altoids tin. While setting up my Christmas tree last weekend, I found them, and they still work. In case you missed […]

Just a quickie Arduino project that I ran across this morning: Sudoku on the Arduino. It’s pretty cute, since it uses the Arduino tvout library to generate video, meaning that you can display and play on your TV set. Neat! The only real description of the project is inside the zip file which you can […]