301 Moved Permanently

Posted December 23, 2013 by Chris

"We have a very nice Christmas-tree stand: it’s a tall, heavy, cast-iron chunk that does a wonderful job of holding our tree up. The problem is that it’s difficult to determine how much water is in the stand, or whether the tree is getting any water at all. Occasionally our tree will drop all its needles, or spontaneously combust, at which point it becomes obvious that the tree needed more water; but it’d be nice to have some earlier indicator."

Posted December 22, 2013 by Chris

"I have the Arduino Motor Shield working, the Ultrasonic module is pinging around, Christmas brought some small DC toy motors, and a bag of plastic gears is on my desk. All the good ingredients for a small robot: the Freedom Robot!"

Posted December 21, 2013 by Chris

"We have been working on a system to count the number of cups of tea and coffee made on each floor of Imagination’s offices. The #activitea project was started to better understand and illustrate hot beverage consumption at Imagination’s London offices; and to test a process that could serve many other data capture uses."

Posted December 20, 2013 by Chris

"A stepper motor turns the ultrasonic range finder 360 degrees and back. After each step the range finder is activated and the distance is measured. When two measurements have been made the PIC sends the data to the PC using an asynchronous interrupt transfer"

Posted December 19, 2013 by Chris

"The most straightforward approach to this would be to take apart an existing remote and fire its button with a microcontroller. However, that didn’t sound like much of a challenge, so instead the goal became to train the micro to output the signals itself."

Posted December 17, 2013 by Chris

"I was poking around in the JeeLabs RF12 library recently and noticed that it now supports the ATtiny microcontrollers – it’s what the new JeeNode Micro uses, which got me thinking about even smaller, simpler wireless temperature sensor modules again."

Posted December 16, 2013 by Chris

"This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the RFID Guardian, the first-ever unified platform for RFID security and privacy administration. The RFID Guardian resembles an ‘RFID firewall,’ that monitors and controls access to RFID tags by combining a standard-issue RFID reader with unique RFID tag emulation capabilities."

Posted December 15, 2013 by Chris

"In essence, my new business/visit card would need to meet a set of basic requirements: Use a thin, one-side printed circuit board (PCB). Silver plating on black or blue mask. Show contact information – email, phone, URL, and so on. Include the simple LED driver circuit from the DEFCON badge, thus mixing hardware and software into the card. Be about as thin as a normal card. Include a personal motto. Be updatable from the web (uh?)."

Posted December 15, 2013 by Chris

"The circuit works great for dropping coins, marbles, fruits and the like into a glass of water, but the microphone pre-amplifier is just not sensitive enough to detect a single drop of water falling from a height, unless you hold the microphone really close. Am still working on a more sensitive version that should be able to do that."

Posted December 13, 2013 by Chris

"The Ben version of NanoNote is an ultra small form factor computing device. The device sports a 336 MHz processor, 2GB of flash memory, microSD slot, head phone jack, USB device and 850mAh Li-ion battery. It boots GNU/Linux out of the box and also boots over USB. It’s targeted squarely at developers who see the promise of open hardware and want to roll their own end user experience."