time lapses – getting to know your intervalometer

I’ve been inspired to shoot more pictures lately. Like everything else in my life I tend to go for quantity over quality, so I shot a LOT of pictures. I acquired a battery/intervalometer for my Nikon D40 a while back and didn’t even notice the intervalometer settings until recently.

 

I’ve shot quite a few tests with it and I’ll post them below. The first was clouds through my kitchen window.

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QwlmFD_iQk&feature=channel[/youtube]
The second was more clouds from the roof at my work.

 

Continue reading “time lapses – getting to know your intervalometer”

usb camera trigger / usb mouse hack

This is a super easy hack, but I decided to post it because I think that it could benefit a lot of makers out there. Anything that makes documenting your work easier is a good thing in my book

So this could be so much more(-or less) depending on how you use it, but I don’t have a remote for my camera and I wanted one. I always want to set up a camera on a tripod and shoot pics while I am soldering a kit or working on something in my shop. Ideally it would be something that I could use hands-free. I racked my brain for a bit and eventually came up with this solution:

Part 1- Camera connected to laptop via usb

Continue reading “usb camera trigger / usb mouse hack”

MIT Swapmeet was rad!

Two weeks ago I went down to MIT to check out their once-monthly swap. I wandered around and was impressed by everyone else’s high level of wizardry, as well as their piles of cool stuff. I didn’t end up buying much, but I got a ton of new ideas! The pics below show all of the stuff I acquired in beantown, a few gauges, some stepping motors, and four vacuum pumps. They were giving out the vacuum pumps on newbury street for free. I’m sure I’ll find a use for them some day, if nothing else, each one comes with 6 AA batteries!

Oh yeah, I also ran into Star Simpson (of the logan airport bomb scare ordeal) down there. Ok, more honestly I saw her / asked her which way to the bathroom, and then thought about telling her “I saw you on the internets!” then I went on my way. My mom would be so proud…

Lego NXT vs Arduino

battle of the microcontrollersI have always been interested in Lego NXT. It seems like a really easy way to get into robotics, and programming. I have never really figured out how functional it is in the “real world” (whatever that means)
The other day a coworker was really pushing the idea on me telling me I needed to buy a kit because it was so easy to build things. Now I really struggle with the arduino most of the time, but I enjoy the struggle, and I know that if I ultimately build something then I can replicate it fairly cheaply. That is my issue with NXT. It is REALLY expensive. It is expensive for legos, it is expensive for a microprocessor, and it is expensive for the peripherals. I think I’m past the target age of these things, but regardless, I priced out how much it would cost for me to “replicate” an NXT kit with and arduino.

Continue reading “Lego NXT vs Arduino”

ModernDevice Company is the best!

Sometimes I get bummed out about how much of the internet is negative.

Here’s my chance to say thanks for someone doing something positive. I’d like to give a lil’ shout out to Modern Device Company for having really good customer service. I placed an order and included a few questions along with it.

The owner, Paul Badger (and probably sole employee) sent me a quick reply, and ultimately was very generous in finding a solution that fit my needs. It didn’t probably cost him much more than the dollar-menu would, but it was the effort that went into it that earned my appreciation and future business.


Thanks Paul!


PS – I grabbed a bunch of female and male headers and a few lcd117 kits. I have only had male headers for a while now, and without getting into locker room humor – it didn’t work with just the males.

LCD SUCCESS!!

I’m pretty happy I FINALLY got the arduino to hook up correctly with two different hd44780 displays. I used the arduino example found here. I had done this before, but I found out that the Liquid crystal library is kind of broken. It needs to have a few lines swapped out in order to load properly in arduino 11.


After that I dug out my crystalfontz cfah-634 serial LCD and tinkered with it for a bit. I’ll update this with pics and more details later on, but there needs to be two jumpers closed on the back of the 634. I think the two jumpers are for “inverted” and “0 to 5v” The display seems kind of twitchy right now. That might be because I have it at 9600 baud, and it might be because I have all of the wires coiled into bundles. That could probably set up some weird ghost signals on the serial line.


One thing that I am having trouble with is that it seems like the display won’t behave properly if the “serial.Print()” code is in a subroutine. That’s fine for now, but it certainly makes things tougher down the line.


All of the mess and wiring trouble I had hooking up the 8 bit display has really made me want to dig out the phanderson serial backpack I have and build it.

Sheesh… Sorry I haven’t called! It’s been a while!

so in the last lil’ bit I have not been blogging at all. Happily that has been because I’ve been swamped with projects, vacation, and work. Now I’ve got a big old backlog of updates on everything. Here we go!


Grow your own shiitake mushroom log
Shitake mushrom box
My beautiful girlfriend gave me a kit two years ago that I finally got around to working on. The ‘kit’ is a log impregnated with mushroom spores. The directions say to soak it under water for 24 hours, “Thump both ends on the floor”, and then to let it sit in a shallow pan of water till the buds start poppin!
Shitake mushrom log
I did all of those steps and it kind of looks like I have a moldy log to show for it. Now I’m no mycelologist (best guess at that one!) but I guess mold and mushrooms could be distant relatives. The directions say that buds should appear within 2-5 days. Well, i guess that stretches the definition of buds, but I’ll roll with it.
Shitake mushrom log closeup Continue reading “Sheesh… Sorry I haven’t called! It’s been a while!”

A new frontier(s) in geekdom

After taking receipt of my arduino kit from adafruit industries I have been looking for cool projects to make. There is so much cool stuff out there! The first and most exciting one is from a youtube video.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_hiz-Kx0kM[/youtube]
I love the whole idea of this. Creating your own type of bell tower (or orchestra) controlled by a computer is beyond awesome.


The second project is from here It is a gmail notifier based on python and arduino. I’m gonna try to massage it so it works with my email server, but other than that, it looks like it should be pretty simple!


In the last week, i’ve gotten into processing and puredata and started to learn arduino code. So much to learn… So fun to learn…


I’ll update once I actually do something!

I’m waiting for a package like a snake in the grass.

And by that I mean I’m stalking fedex.

I’m currently waiting for my Ardino starter pack to arrive from Adafruit Industries and I’m getting a bit impatient. I decided to automate the psychotic task of manually reloading the tracking page every ten minutes.

I’m sure there are web sites out there to keep you updated of your packages progress across the world. I couldn’t find any and decided to put together my own FedEx stalking kit. This is only for Mac, but you needed a reason to switch, didn’t you?

Ok, this is admittedly not the best way to do this, but it works. Here we go…

Step 1 – applescript
Write an applescript telling firefox to open the fedex tracking link. Save it to somewhere you can remember
fedex stalking

Step 2 – iCal Continue reading “I’m waiting for a package like a snake in the grass.”