Posted March 11, 2014 by Chris

"The mood that the ‘Magic Crystal Mood Ball’ gives to the user is based on measuring his temperature and changing the color of the RGB LED to the its respective color. As in a mood ring, I set different colors for different temperatures. The temperatures coincides with mood state that the person is in."

Posted March 10, 2014 by Chris

"Driving a shift register using an AVR chip’s built-in hardware is really quite easy. Most of their offerings have an SPI module, or Serial Peripheral Interface. A shift register is exactly that, a peripheral device that communicates via a serial line. All we need to do is hook up our connections and use a few pieces of simple code. Join me after the break to see how that’s done."

Posted March 9, 2014 by Chris

"This January my daughter decided that she wanted to join in her brother’s cub pack’s Pinewood derby with a replica of Doctor Who’s TARDIS on wheels. Her design was pretty straightforward – balsa wood trim, poster paint, paper cutouts for the windows and sign, and her construction was quickly nearing completion…."

Posted March 8, 2014 by Chris

"For a long time, I was looking for a solution to the size of my stk500. Its big, fragile, and requires external power and a large USB to serial cable. It seemed like the solution was one of these, a tiny (haha) programmer based around an attiny45/48. Since I had the parts left over from The Secret Knowledge (more on this later) that would let me implement v-usb, and some attiny45 in my room, I decided to give it a shot. Along the way there were a few roadblocks:"

Posted February 12, 2014 by Chris

"The USnooBie is a microcontroller kit that does not require any sort of AVR programmer or USB-to-serial converters to load and run compiled code. It’s hardware design allows the user to develop low cost USB devices with Atmel’s AVR ATmega microcontrollers. It can also be used to develop projects which are not USB devices. It is even compatible with Arduino."

Posted February 6, 2014 by Chris

"A polar plotter is a plotter with a rotating, extendable arm. Its characteristics differ greatly from those of a traditional plotter, which in most areas have a superior design. You could say the polar plotter is more portable or something, but mainly I made this one because it was more of a challenge."

Posted February 5, 2014 by Chris

"So I had an idea…’3D RGB LED Pixel Cubes…’ *sweeping hand wave for effect*… I think that combination of words pretty much sums it, yeah? The basic idea is to take a traditional 2D pixel and turn it into a 3D form. I haven’t really seen this very basic concept… but haven’t Googled it to death…"

Posted January 28, 2014 by Chris

"There are many methods capacitive sensors can be produced. A simple one way to form an on-off output is by using two layers and a spacer in between. Through a voltage to conductive objects causes positive and negative charges to collect on each object."

Posted January 26, 2014 by Chris

"An Arduino board can communicate with the Raspberry Pi via a serial over USB connection. This creates a virtual serial interface, which it uses like a normal interface, reading and writing to the serial device file."

Posted January 24, 2014 by Chris

"So I decided it was time to build a kegerator…More importantly, because I’m a nerd and I’ve never worked with an Arduino I decided it would be fun to play with one. I ended up with an Arduino controlling an LCD for each of the 3 taps I installed, displaying what beer is on tap and how much beer is left in the keg."