brainwagon

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 […]

I’m having lots of fun with my Raspberry Pi, and I’ve decided to launch one of my crazy spare-time projects: inspired by this article detailing the construction of RUDEBOT, a kind of mobile tablet robot, I decided to build a robot of my own. But, anything worth doing is worth changing and adapting, so I […]

The other day, I was at Harbor Freight, and picked up an inexpensive set of digital calipers. While goofing around, I decided to try to reproduce an object using OpenSCAD. I had just received a pair of motors from Pololu. They look like this: I sat in the editor, and set to work measuring. I […]

It seems like I might have access to a 3D printer, so I thought it might be fun to see what I could design. I thought using OpenSCAD, a scripting based 3D modelling software that can generate models in STL, a fairly simple but flexible format that can be printed by lots of printers. I […]

I wanted to know. I read up on the Mayan calendar. It was easy to code up in Python: [sourcecode lang=”python”] #!/usr/bin/env python # This code is completely untested, it doesn’t do anything relative # to timezones or the like. It does appear to broadly function. # # 1 k’in == 1 day # 1 […]

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 […]

Without further ado… if you want code to implement this: You can download this this zip file. Do with it what you will.

I was struck by the lunatic programming muse again today. While reading my twitter feed, I encountered a description of SmoothLife, a generalization of Conway’s classic Game of Life. Instead of being implemented on a grid of discrete binary values, SmoothLife is implemented over a continuous, real valued field. What’s kind of neat is that […]

Earlier today, I tweeted: Okay, all major parts assembled.Now I just need the innards from Hobby King… twitter.com/brainwagon/sta… — Mark VandeWettering (@brainwagon) September 17, 2012 But I figured you guys might like some additional details. As I mentioned before, I decided to build a clone of the Axon, a nice light FPV platform designed by […]

Mark H. over at Eastbay RC and I finally got together to test out my first attempt at scratch building a radio controlled aircraft: an F-22 inspired “foamie”, which an aircraft constructed entirely from EPP foam, hot glue, a couple of short carbon fiber rods to stiffen, and hot glue. Did I mention the hot […]

I received my second email inquiry yesterday (yes, two whole emails) asking me why I hadn’t been posting to brainwagon lately. It’s gratifying that both of my readers would each send me a note asking if things were all right, so I thought rather than addressing you each separately, I could double my efficiency by […]

Okay, I haven’t made a lot of headway, but I did at least print out the pattern for my F-22 and cut the pieces for it. It’s literally the very first time I’ve done this, so the pieces aren’t perfect, but they aren’t bad. Witness: I basically made the patterns by printing out the pieces, […]

Sometime last week, I got my Etherkit OpenBeacon kit in the mail. Like many of my projects, it was probably destined to sit on the shelf for some time, but in a fit of personal productivity (for a loose definition of productivity) this week I cleared a few hours of my time and got it […]

At the Maker Faire, I splurged for a little bit of computing hardware called the Beaglebone. It’s an $89 ARM based computer that runs at 700Mhz, and includes a MicroSD card slot and Ethernet, as well as a USB connector. I wasn’t sure what I was going to use it for, but I frankly can’t […]

A few days ago, I mentioned that one of my servers had died. I spent some time thinking about how I would replace it. I like having a 24/7 hooked up to the Internet to serve as a file drop and a place where I can use SSH to connect to other devices on my […]