brainwagon

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was not enormously satisfied with the accuracy of the DS1307 clock module that I got from China. It was hard to argue with the less than three dollar price tag, but I was hoping that the accuracy might achieve 20ppm (less than two seconds of drift per […]

My tinkering with using the Adafruit GPS as a time base has yielded some results. I’m still getting a few spurious interrupts when I feed my buffered PPS signal into the interrupt pin on the Arduino, but they are relatively few and far between (and quite regular in appearance). A few short notes, followed by […]

I picked up an Adafruit GPS module while at the Maker Faire. It’s a cool little module. I had a couple of old GPS modules: a Parallax PMB 648 and a Garmin 89, but this one is pretty nifty: It is small. It is breadboard friendly. It has a one pulse per second (1PPS) output […]

I mentioned in my Maker Faire wrap up post that I had spoken with Ben Krasnow, the science guru behind the Applied Science Youtube channel. If you haven’t watched his videos, by all means, go over there and give it a whirl. Between playing with chemicals, low temperatures, rockets, X rays, and electron microscope, it’s […]

Just a head’s up that I’ll be at the San Mateo Maker Faire this Saturday, May 16th. If anyone if exhibiting or attending, either drop a comment here, or email me, or just send a tweet message to @brainwagon (you do follow me, right?) and we can try to get together and say hi. I […]

A couple of people on my twitter feed yesterday (aside: I tweet using @brainwagon, and passed 5000 tweets yesterday) had questions about how this light field camera worked, how fast the sensor was, how long it takes to acquire the image, etc… While this is the first Lytro camera I’ve ever had the time to […]

I think Bill and Pete have been having way too much fun with the radio projects centered around the Arduino and the SI5351, so I decided to join them and ordered one of Adafruit’s SI5351 boards (I still have the kit from Jason’s Kickstarter which will almost certainly be better once I get up the […]

Yesterday I experienced some frustration with the SainSmart I2C LCD Module that I bought to help Pete and Bill uncover the problems that they’ve been having. If you go and read, you’ll find that I had a lot of difficulty finding the right combination of code that can be used with this module. Eventually, I […]

I am a big fan of Bill Meara N2CQR and Pete Juliano N6QW, hosts of the really great Soldersmoke Podcast. Together, they chat about homebrewing ham radio equipment, and what they’ve learned in their lessons along the way. Their “tribal knowledge” is of terrific help to someone like me who keeps making small forays into […]

This little gadget arrived via Amazon Prime today: a three axis gyroscope/accelerometer that can be programmed via the I2C bus. I didn’t really have any reason to get one, other than simple curiosity, although I suspect that possibly mounting one on my (as yet unfinished) robot platform might be able to determine motion parameters of […]

While digging around looking for an LCD module I thought I had stashed somewhere, I encountered a bag with some of 8mm individually addressable RGB LEDs that I had never done anything with. For fun, I thought I’d wire a few of them up on my breadboard and see if I could get them to […]

Tonight’s tinkering was inspired by the script by spikedrba that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. I took down the hummingbird camera for a little maintenance, and while it was down decided to do some bench testing with new ideas inspired by what I read. Sadly, I didn’t have anything as photogenic as hummingbirds to stare […]

My goal in experimenting with the Raspberry Pi camera was to try to make an efficient and effective camera which can detect motion. Previous incarnations of the camera script merely looked at the differences in pixel values between adjacent frames, thresholded them at some value, and then counted the number of pixels which exceeded this […]

My weekend experiments lead me eventually toward flashing nodemcu, a Lua based firmware that runs on the ESP8266. Having a simple programming language (albeit one I’m not super fluent in) is very cool, and enables a whole bunch of nifty experiments. While reading up, I encountered the acronym MQTT again. From Wikipedia: MQTT (formerly Message […]

I know, I know, it’s probably getting a little repetitive and boring. But I’m still getting a kick out of my motion capturing hummingbird camera. Improvements are coming.