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Projects, notes, etc by Will O’Brien

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Month: October, 2008

They sold out! More RGB keypad bezels at SparkFun… soon

22 October, 2008 (23:33) | Uncategorized |

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.

Sweet little firewalls

22 October, 2008 (22:09) | Toys | 2 comments

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 [...]

Easy fix for crappy Arduino connections

20 October, 2008 (10:00) | Uncategorized |

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, [...]

Ladyada’s Xport Arduino Shield

20 October, 2008 (08:44) | Uncategorized | 4 comments

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 [...]

Guess the hardware, get a prize

19 October, 2008 (19:52) | News, Projects |

 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 [...]

Hack job powerbook g4 repair

19 October, 2008 (19:46) | Uncategorized | 1 comment

My wife trashed the power plug on my old her 15 inch Powerbook G4. I cleared enough room on my workbench and finally got around to taking the thing apart. I desoldered the old power jack – I was pretty impressed at how well it held up. Unfortunately, it had pieces of old power plug [...]

New recipe: Coconut Chicken Curry

19 October, 2008 (16:09) | Uncategorized |

I decided to try my hand at making Coconut Chicken Curry last night. It came out great. You can grab the recipe here. It was a bit spicy for my wife, so I made some sweet Lassi to go with it. (Hey, I can mix indian and thai food in my house if I want!)

Espresso Repair: Pressurestat

6 October, 2008 (17:51) | Uncategorized | 2 comments

I finally got around to replacing the pressure stat in my ECM Giotto this week. The hardest part was removing the old P-stat without small wrenches. I finally settled for using a crescent wrench on the pipe and a pair of channel lock pliers to grip the metal lower where it crimps around the body [...]