brainwagon

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 […]

I’ve got a weak spot for cheap, programmable hardware. In my junk drawer I’ve got a collection of Arduinos, Parallax Propellor boards, a couple of STM32 based ARM boards, and several Beagle Bone Blacks and Raspberry Pis. Today, another entry arrived: the WRTnode. I’ve only had it out of the box for a few hours, […]

The last five or so years has been a remarkable period in computing. About five years ago, I began to fear that computing would be increasingly pre-packaged: that laptops and tablets would totally take over the market and the ability to find computers which were well suited for programming and experimentation would more and more […]

From tiny acorns, giant oak trees grow. Likewise, seemingly trivial events and items can affect our lives. As a kid, I had been interested in computers for a while. I think it must have postdated the appearance of the Altair 8800, which debuted in Popular Electronics in 1974 (I would have been ten or so […]

Need to get some weather information? The website forecast.io has a nice web based service you can use up to one thousand times a day for free. I was thinking of using it for an automated sprinkler application, but just to test it, I wrote this simple chunk of python to try it out. To […]

Here are two more photos I took at last night’s camera workshop. I wanted to take something slightly more beautiful than a selfie, so I chose the Luxo statue outside the Steve Jobs building at Pixar, and some white flowers from the garden. Both were taken rather late in the day, under partly cloudy skies […]

Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a little bit of time making fixed wing aircraft from Dollar Tree foam. The results have been interesting and fun, but I’ve found that the need to find relatively large areas to fly means that it’s harder to go fly than I would like. On the other […]

Off and on I’ve been pondering some changes to my computer checkers program called Milhouse. Most of these changes have relatively little to do with checkers per se, but are just changes to the algorithms that are common to nearly all game-tree search programs. Since computer chess has always been more popular than computer checkers, […]

I read an interesting article the other day. I’ll skip to the end to show you the result. Check out this pair of binary images: Not too fascinating, huh? If you print both images out on transparency though, and stack them together, you’ll get this… Hopefully that worked (with my limited CSS skills, I don’t […]

Gasp, I know. It’s been some time since I posted here. A combination of life and work events have conspired to sap me of my usual exuberant energy for the nerdy, geeky pointless topics that I usually like to post about here. But nerdy, geeky, pointless endeavors do continue (even if at a reduced pace) […]

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 […]