brainwagon

This morning I’m still drinking coffee and waking up, but I was pointed at “the ESP8266 wiki”, which appears to be this Wiki page. Bookmarked mostly so I can quickly find it again. But it has some good information. If I haven’t teased you enough with this experimentation, consider these features of the ESP8266: It’s […]

Got a chance to play around a bit more with the ESP8266 tonight. I dug out a nice little dual output power supply board that I had got from tautic.com with the hope that it would eliminate some of the erratic behavior that I had observed before. Sadly, that didn’t seem to solve my problem. […]

A couple more quick snaps from my hummingbird camera. I’m going to try to work on some improvements over the weekend, but shockingly we are gonna get some rain, so I may concentrate on getting it waterproofed and ready for life outdoors.

In the telescope making world, we call the first time that a telescope is used to look at the sky “first light”. I’ve decided to call the first time I load some code onto a new development board “first electrons”. A few weeks ago, when I did a video that illustrated some of the bucket […]

When I got home today, it appeared that I had a few more images from my hummingbird cam. Luckily, I got several nice frames of him her (probably), so I put them together into an animated GIF. Nifty. When I get a chance to do more stuff on it this weekend, I hope to get […]

Commenter Andy wanted a version of my classic code that could generate a tone instead of just blinking an LED. I mentioned that I had done this before, but frankly couldn’t find the source code, so I modified my existing program to implement the simplest possible tone: a simple square wave. Rather than using a […]

One thing I didn’t realize when I setup the Raspberry Pi camera to monitor my humming bird feeder was that it has a bright red led which turns on when the camera is enabled. In most cases, this light isn’t a big deal, but I am pointing it out the window, so the reflection of […]

I like to see hummingbirds. They seem completely incredible to me, like little hyper Swiss Watches, buzzing around the garden. I’ve seen a few of them in our yard, but I’ve been meaning to encourage them showing up more, so I recently installed a feeder. While the syrup level has gone down, I have never […]

Early in 2012, I posted a small version of Tiny BASIC that I had adapted to run on the Arduino. It is based upon code which was written by Mike Field, and based upon an earlier version of TinyBasic for the 68000 written by Gordon Brandly, which owes its roots to Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, […]

I intended to play around with some of the NRF24L01 radio modules I have around, but my brain didn’t feel up to it after a day of debugging. So, instead i dusted off a Parallax PING))) sensor that I’ve had around for a long time. I thought it might be fun to see if I […]

Without a lot more explanation, I did a bit more work on my implementation of Conway’s life, reducing the overhead so I can implement the full 128×64 bit resolution of the OLED display. I also hardcoded an initial pattern: the classic Gosper glider gun. It runs at about 1.625 frames/second, so a new glider is […]

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 […]

I’m pretty old school when it comes to development. To me, writing code is something I like to do with vi (the editor that I learned three decades ago) and compile with Makefiles, especially for code that I do myself. In general, I prefer to do my development on either Linux or Mac OS too, […]

In what quite possibly might be the most boring video ever produced, I recorded myself changing the LCD panel out of my Chromebook. It’s 17 minutes of riveting youtube goodness. Skip down to the bottom if you want to watch. But here’s the story if you’d rather just read a paragraph. My wife bought me […]