I used to spend a lot of time playing with various home theater toys. It was one of my main hobbies before I owned a house. Once I bought a house, my priorities changed a bit out of necessity. When we got the house, I did replace my diy video screen with an electric drop [...]
So it begins. I’ve acquired a Bradley Smoker. This particular unit is an interesting beast. It’s essentially a mini-fridge chassis (built for heat rather than cold). Up top is a standard grill smoke release hole, in the bottom is a undersized 500 watt heating element. Mounted on the side is the ‘Bradley smoke generator’. The [...]
It was bound to happen. My Mac Mini started to crash, and hard. When I’d login, it was a crap shoot until it would lock up. Eventually it started happening immediately after login! It’s about 1 year old and I could have sent it off to apple. Being me, I decided to do a fresh [...]
I’m working on a new car controller. It’s based on aftermarket remote start, a jailbroken iphone and some open source hardware. This post covers setting up the iPhone for that use. It’s really just a nice, cheap (if you have it) script-able serial telemetry platform. iPhone jailbreak notes: I used an iPhone 3g, downloaded 4.2.1 [...]
I want to launch a new hardware/software platform for energy monitoring and usage. Check it out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/willobrien/microhome-smarter-houses-save-energy The project site is http://microhome.org
Check out this sweet test rig that “Old Man Mike” built for evaluating motors for copters. It uses a PIC microcontroller to measure thrust, current, voltage and throttle to measure efficiency and wobble factors to find the best motors. Test Fixture Evaluates Motors/Props/ESC for Quadcopter Performance from Old Man Mike on Vimeo.
Yesterday, Hack-A-Day had a nice write up listing the various development boards available these days for projects. If you’re looking for a brain for your next creation, you should definitely check it out. It includes boards that start at $4 and up.
I upgraded my desk at home a bit with a new monitor – A Samsung P2770H – a pretty decent 27″ 1080P display. I was wondering how I might calibrate it and the pair of 24″ displays next to it to have reasonable color matching and ran across this article on doing the job with [...]
I traded in my venerable Jeep Liberty for a new ride recently, a Subaru Tribeca. Subies are well known for their reliability and their AWD. The Tribeca is basically an overgrown outback – in fact the new outback looks alot like a Tribeca. After pondering my driving habits for a bit, I thought that an [...]
I’ve finally gone the iPad route. It’s surprisingly handy during conference calls and it’s great for slipping into a motorcycle jacket. It’s not a laptop replacement, but it’s great for in between stuff. Major faults? No printing, no camera. I don’t care about video as much as document capture. I’d like to see it augment [...]