long-exposure photos: There is a bike club in Jersey City, NJ called BikeJC.org, and during nice weather they get together at night and bike around with lit up bikes. I wanted to participate and jazz up my bike, and after several design iterations, I’m […]
After I did the 100,00ft balloon photography, I wanted to make further use of the APRS radio transmission tracking technology. I became interested in “Pico” balloons, which I’d seen references to, which consist of: A small battery-powered “tracker” flight computer A small balloon Time […]
I set out to take photographs at an altitude where I could see the curvature of the Earth. The premise: Float a balloon to an altitude where you can see Earth curvature Have a camera rig suspended below it, taking pictures continuously Computer system […]
This was such an in-depth project, definitely the most difficult thing I’ve done so far. It took several months to research, prototype, and build. I started out wanting to better understand sound and music, and in exploring that concept I found I wanted to make […]
This wasn’t so much a useful project as it was an experiment with some technologies I’ve wanted to play with. Capacitive Touch sensing LED Multiplexing PCB Art I thought I could combine them to make a stylized Turkish “Evil Eye.” It would: Sense when you […]
My apartment building has a remote-controlled gate to the parking lot. The remote has a secret 10-bit key encoded in it for security. Recently my remote broke and in replacing it I thought about how hard it would be to make my own remote. I […]
I wanted to be able to turn things in my apartment on/off remotely for a few reasons. Lights — I have a lot of lamps, and I turn them all on/off a few times daily. ACs — It’s hot and the ACs don’t run during […]
This project was a prototype replacement for the transmitter on my long distance pico balloons (link). The pico balloon flight computer uses APRS which: Takes 5 seconds for each location transmission Has a range of 150 miles The duration is good. Short messages […]
I became interested in understanding more about processing sound, and relating that to frequency distributions. I had the idea of making a device always listening to the environment and to color a light based on the sharpness of the sound it heard. Ideally, it would […]
I had bought some temperature sensors and thought it would be fun to make my own Indoor/Outdoor Thermometer. Technologies Microcontroller Temperature sensor DS18B20 (first time) Servo motors Chopsticks, paper plates Research and Build The primary difficulty was learning how to operate the […]
This project is just for laughs, but still got to practice a few technologies. It’s Christmas time, and I wanted something Santa-related. I also wanted to try out some ultrasonic measuring modules I picked up. The result is a Santa doll that notices your presence […]
This project came from an idea I got while disassembling a printer for parts. The print head slides along a track, driven by rotary-encoder-controlled motors. I thought it’d be fun to make a device which drives a sliding mechanism. And why not make it a […]
For this project, I was interested in building something more physically interactive than buttons or lights. The “Most Useless Machine” idea had been in mind and I wanted to give it a shot. For those not familiar, this is a device which: Has a single […]
I wanted to make a PCB with some nice lights on it to flash and be animated, so I looked into how to do it. The LEDs would be driven by a microcontroller and all powered externally. Technologies PCB Layout software (Eagle) AVR Atmega328P […]
Like many projects, this was an opportunity to try out some technologies and make a fun toy in the process. The objective was to create two boxes with wireless capabilities to allow two people to communicate with one another remotely. Press a button on your […]
I decided I wanted a “remote vision” kind of project after seeing the new VR goggle products hitting the market. Basically, it’d be fun to look through the goggles and see a live video stream and keep seeing live video wherever I turned my head. […]
The Sunshine demo is a pure CSS experiment (no javascript), and like the Hearts demo, is an offline web app as well. This demo: Works like an app (manifest.json): icon, fullscreen, offline (cache.manifest), locks orientation. Uses CSS animations to drive all motion. Uses CSS […]
The Hearts demo brings together a number of HTML technologies and makes kind of a fun app out of it. This demo: Works like an app (manifest.json): icon, fullscreen, offline (cache.manifest), locks orientation. The background is an array of hearts which all cascade toward […]
This project is a combination of wanting to understand stock trading strategies and also to play with HTML5 Canvases, plus more substantial javascript class creation and web app programming. This app: Explores the bounds of profit and loss for a given stock trading strategy […]
Graphviz (link) is a utility which allows you to generate nicely arranged visual graph relationships through simple text input written in DOT code (think markdown). It turns out that the utility was converted to a javascript LLVM bytecode and exposed as a library. I put […]
This was one of the first projects I worked on when I was learning about HTML5/javascript and image processing. Initially, I wanted to learn about Histogram Equalization, which basically brings out the details in images where an image with a lot of similarly-shaded pixels. Before/After: […]
