brainwagon

I’ve been interested in optics for many years, ever since I started building my own telescopes at age 11 and began writing ray-tracing software in my early twenties.  But one thing that I haven’t experimented with too much is polarization, probably because my self-educated view of light is mostly in the form of little billiard […]

Okay, I began this weekend with every intention of doing a video about my solar energy project. But in true usual “brainwagon” fashion, my attempt collapsed into a seemingly infinite regress of projects and subprojects, and the eventual goal of producing a video pushed beyond the horizon of the weekend. But still, I thought I’d […]

If you follow @HackAWeek (Dean Segovis) on Twitter, you may have seen this tweet announcing a new series of videos, shockingly including my name and twitter handle. This Saturday I’ll be posting the first in a series of videos on #HackAWeekTV for Nerd Thunder! #nerdthunder #hackaweek Watch for videos from @jeriellsworth @bekathwia @dmlandrum @joegrand @BenKrasnow […]

This is just a short set of updates for my weekend projects, meant to keep me in the habit. I’ll write up a more complete version of these projects going forward. First of all, a new acquisition. My Anet A8 3D printer has proven to be, well, not the most reliable of gadgets. I still […]

I haven’t posted an update here recently, but I am (mostly) living up to my New Year’s resolution to spend at least 30 minutes a day working on a project. This has taken the form of some stupid but necessary chores (like fixing the broken pull cord on my lawnmower) but has mostly taken the […]

Several days ago, I cobbled together a short bit of code to make an NTP enabled clock out of an ESP32/OLED module. I had previously used an ESP8266 and a separate module to make a little demo that predicted the location of the ISS. I thought that the ESP32 would make a better development platform, […]

I’ve been kind of interested in a type of “livecoding” where changes to a code base are immediately reflected in a running program. I’ve seen Inigo Quilez (author of the famed shadertoy.com) do this with a scaffold that he wrote using OpenGL. Literally as he types new shader code, the changed shader is loaded and […]

As in most things, whether you achieve success has a lot to do with what connections you have. And this is true of my somewhat unreliable Anet A8 3D printer more than most. My printer had been down for a month while I worked on getting a new hot end installed properly. It wasn’t so […]

I’m tired this morning, because at 2:39AM I was awoken by a magnitude 4.5 earthquake centered in Berkeley. It was over before I gained full consciousness, but it was a pretty sharp series of jolts that rattled the house pretty good. No damage.

This post is the kind of round about post you get first thing in the morning.   I’ll get to the title question at the end. This morning, I was interested in doing a tiny bit of tinkering. I had found one of these 4 digit 7 segment LED displays while digging around for something […]

First of all, if anyone is still swinging by this blog, yes, I’m still alive. While I haven’t exactly been prolific in my leisure activities, they haven’t stopped entirely. I worked on some simple embedded development for the hackaday.io 1K code challenge, which you can see on my hackaday.io page, and which hopefully I’ll write […]

On Sunday, I started a new project which on the face of it, seems like an enormous waste of time, but if you’ve been reading my blog for any period of time, you know that wasting time is pretty much the bread and butter of my online presence, so here we go. I’ve started work […]

Last year, I bodged together a motion detecting camera to photograph hummingbirds at my hummingbird feeder. But it was always a temporary hack. We had some difficulty with the ants that discovered the feeder, and we discontinued the experiment. I had a post that I could hang some feeders from, and decided to fill a […]

I just recently found out about the /r/showerthoughts subreddit, where people vote on pithy sayings. I thought this might be a fun thing to have to replace the aging and relatively static “fortune” file that I use. I used the Python “PRAW” library to fetch the top entry for the day, and then optionally pass […]