brainwagon

I haven’t got a lot of details about my solar project available, but Project Curacao has all the details of a much more impressive version of the basic idea to serve as inspiration. Basically, the guys at SwitchDoc decided to mount a small solar setup with some lithium polymer batteries, a Raspberry Pi and an […]

Okay, I got it working. See! But I had a number of really annoying problems, none of which really had to do with the hardware: I installed it on a Pi3 I had lying around that previously had been running my 3D printer using Octopi. I tried to do an “apt-get update” and “apt-get upgrade” […]

For some reason, I’ve always been attracted to E ink displays. They combine a number of interesting features like low power (none when not being refreshed), high contrast and a wide viewing angle. But they only recently have begun to get cheap enough to play with. The other day I was surfing around and discovered […]

Yes, my fascination with cheap computing devices continues. I’ve got two bits on order at the moment. First is the Pine A64 from Kickstarter. This one won’t be showing up for a while, but seems to be a pretty nice piece of kit. You can think of it as a competitor for the Raspberry Pi, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Last week I was playing around with using “motion-mmal” to capture pictures of hummingbirds feeding at my feeder. That was fun, but if I wanted to get high resolution pictures, I could not get very high frame rates (maybe 2-5 fps at best). I thought that perhaps by writing my own capture application in C, […]

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 […]

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 […]

One of my recent posts highlighted the big pile of development boards that I have lying around. This week, I actually added to that pile in a couple of ways: I found a pair of Beagle Bone Blacks that I had misplaced, a couple of Propeller boards, and most significantly, I ordered an ODROID-C1 from […]

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, […]

I’ve long suspected that my cat Scrappy had teleportation powers: Okay, okay, I know he doesn’t really. But it was kind of funny.