Yakima makes some handy roof racks, but personally, I think that they charge way to much for their matching lock cores. Luckily, you can modify the cores that come with the gear to match on your own. It’s a quick, easy project and it’ll make your key ring smaller. Read on to find out how.
I’ve been pretty quite for a little while. I’ve been busy putting together my new office. We had a garage that was just full of junk. I’ve been busy studding it out, insulating it, adding drywall, a huge window and a handy exterior door. While I was at it, I ran a new 20 amp power circuit, added some recessed lighting and three way light switches. Nearly all the drywall is hung, now I just have to motivate myself to tape it up and get ready to paint it.
I’ve got a throw rug and some work out mat style floor to use temporarily, but after a while the cold hard concrete will get covered in some sort of carpet.
I finally got around to building a fairly small photo box for lighting small project pieces. This little guy was shot inside the box with pretty cruddy lighting. I upped the levels a bit, but for a first try with just florescent light, I’m happy.
The box itself really is pretty small…
It’s a cardboard box with white flannel taped in place of the sides and some heavy white bristol paper lining the back and bottom.
Earlier this year, I got the chance to add a Sumo Sac to my family room. It’s essentially a gigantic beanbag filled with an entire couch (sans wood chips). My model weighs in at a mere 60 lbs. When it’s stretched out, it’s absolutely huge. Virtually everyone who sees it immediately tries to jump on it. (Even forty year old computer programmers)
The sac arrived unceremoniously on my doorstep with a fedex tag attached. After dragging it across the floor I let it roll downstairs to my basement lair. I immediately regretted this, as I realized that any small creatures in the way would have been crushed, deep fried and made to resemble a spider roll at the sushi place.
Inside the shipping bag, I discovered the actual sumosac wrapped inside a plastic bag. (They package the sac for delivery by dropping inside the plastic bag and vacuum packing it to get the size to a manageable shape.)
Totally unwrapped, the bag looked alot like a giant piece of tofu. From there, the waiting began.
The sac took a few days to mostly expand, and a good week in my colder basement to fully expand. While I was waiting, I decided to check out what was inside the bag. Instead of traditional foam beans, they chose to use shredded urethane foam - essentially the same as shredded couch cusions.
After a few days, the Sac had mostly expanded, but quite a bit of the foam was still stuck together. I put my 15 inch powerbook g4 in the shot for scale. (That would be a full size couch hiding behind it.)
After a couple of weeks of use, the full size of the bag becomes apparent. (My wife is about 5′9″) to give you an idea. If you’ve got the space for something this big, I suggest picking one up. It’s great for watching movies, playing video games or cushioning your fall from a 5 story building. (don’t try that at home, kids)
I’m finally getting around to replacing my long lost oscilloscope. If you’re hunting for one, ebay has a great selection. Here’s a rather nice intro to the used scope market
. I decided to hunt for a tektronix since they’ve been around for so long. The 465 series appears to be a great choice, but then I discovered a the 7000 series. These things have optional plug in modules that will make this older scope deal with ghz bandwidth or even become a spectrum analyzer. Of course, the mainframe design means that they’re pretty damn big, but this isn’t an issue in my workshop.
I picked up a 7633 complete with a few modules for half the going price of a 465. It should be interesting to check out when it shows up. The 7633 was released in 1970 and wasn’t replaced in the model line until 1990. It’ll do 100Mhz out of the box, and with three module bays, you can feed it six traces if you like. The scope can even export waveforms to a PC (hopefully via serial). These are considered to be very high quality, but just don’t get the love that the 465 does, probably due to their monster size.
Spark Fun sold out of the first batch of keypad bezels I made. They’ll have another batch once I get them shipped of. By the way, shout out if you’ve put one together, I’m looking forward to hearing about it.
I’ve been spending most of my week in training for netscreen firewalls. We’ve been using quite a few of the inexpensive SSG5 units (along with a few big hairy ones in the core network) to deploy all sorts of VPNs, firewalled networks and various network builds. These little boxes are quiet (no fans), small and really, really flexible. If you’re cheap and have a spare box, Devil-linux rocks, but if you don’t mind spending a couple hundred on ebay (or 6 ish new) you can pick up a sweet little box that’ll do everything from VPN tunnels (policy based or routed!) to running transparently on a network.
I spent some time putting together a LCD interface to test out an old 2×16 LCD I had laying around. Sadly, the LCD seems to have some issues - it would only write the first 8 bit block for some reason. (It could be a software tweak, but I doubt it at this point) However, I did notice that my Arduino was making pretty crappy connections to the wires since I started using shields with it.
Here’s the fix: break off some male headers to put into the I/O female headers. Then grab some jumper wire and strip the end. Make a small loop with some small needle nose pliers, then crimp the loop around the tip of the header that usually goes into a PC board. Once you have a few crimped on, grab your iron and solder the connections to get em solid. This makes pluging into a prototyping board easy and you can remove the Arduino from the circuit as needed without destroying the build!
Male headers are dirt cheap, so stock up next time you order some parts.
(I updated the timestamp to CST instead of GMT, it may cause problems…)
Around the beginning of the year, I ordered one of Limor/Ladyada’s XPort ethernet shields for my Arduino toy box. I *finally* soldered it up and started playing with it.
The XPort is a pretty neat piece of hardware. It’s essentially an Ethernet to serial(ttl) bridge. You could use it to put a network interface on your home theater projector’s serial port, or in this case, give the Arduino a voice on the network that doesn’t require a server. That said, I would suggest writing web gateway applications that send commands to the XPort and keep the users away from it! I’d also put it on a private network or behind a firewall since it just uses telnet.
It took a few minutes to negotiate DHCP on my network. It was so long that I thought it might be defective. After that, I connected via telnet to it and set up a static IP. Now it starts pinging within a few seconds of power up. I also finally rescued my Decimilla from my door lock - now a boarduino lives in the door lock. Since I didn’t have a ttl cable to program the boarduino on hand, I just swapped the Atmel chips between them.
Now the question is what to do with it… I’ve got a few ideas:
Networked Thermostat controller
Networked, PID controlled, power managed espresso machine
Networked 1-wire interface controller
Both the thermostat or espresso mods will save me money and the world some energy so I’ll probably build both. I’ve got some Dallas 18S20 1-wire temperature sensors that I think I’ll go ahead and wire up to get things started. The espresso setup will require a thermocouple interface, but the 18S20 will be great for ambient temp sensing for the thermostat build.
I picked up some new sample hardware to play with. The surface mount pads are freakin tiny, so I had to get creative to break out all the pins I need access to. I murded one pad with a piece of 24 gauge wire that put too much stress on it, so I pulled individual strands of copper wire from some cheap speaker wire. That stuff works great, and I didn’t screw up any pads during the soldering job.
If you can name the chip, I’ll send you one of my laser cut RGB keypad bezels - free in the US, or for the cost of postage if you live elsewhere on the globe. Comment away! (only the first correct guess wins it) Oh, if you just want a bezel, you can buy them from SparkFun Electronics.