make

You are currently browsing articles tagged make.

Arduino Hacks: Using the built-in LED’s and button on the LadyAda ProtoShield

October 21, 2007 by Chris Metcalf | 2 comments

This week I finally received my Arduino Starter Pack from Adafruit. The Arduino is an awesome, Open Source, easy to use platform for getting started in embedded programming. It uses the ATMega168 AVR processor, and there are a bunch of great Open Source toolkits for programming and working with the platform. Very fun.

One of the great things about the AdaFruit starter pack is that it comes with the ProtoShield, an easy daughter-board for prototyping. The ProtoShield also comes with two extra LEDs and a spare button you can wire up to use in your projects. They’re great to use as built-in status LEDs or mode buttons.

But there is no documentation anywhere on how to use them. Poking around at the board and looking at the schematic, I eventually figured out that there were just a couple spare holes on the board that you can use to access them. But they don’t lead to any of the onboard headers, so they’re hard to use.

Fortunately I had a left over three-position header from the kit, so I wired it up with jumpers on the underside of the board.

The Ugly Underside
The Ugly Underside

Its ugly, but it works. Now I can just run jumpers to my breadboard to take advantage of them.

Using the new header
Using the new header

Hopefully somebody else will find this useful.

Tags: , , , , ,

Making Messenger Bags – The “Beta”

August 15, 2007 by Chris Metcalf | 8 comments

Most people who know me well know that I’m a bit of a bag whore. I seem to accumulate them. Special purpose bags mainly. Bags for backpacking. Bags for sailing. Bags for hauling laptops. Bags for protecting cameras.

And for general purpose bags, I’ve accumulated a couple messenger bags, namely a Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger and a Patagonia Critical Mass bag. The Critical Mass, by the way is a great bag – practically indestructible and big enough for up to a week long trip. Big enough, also, to often be too big.

But I’ve always been craving something a bit more unique. Sure, there are companies like R.E.Load (an awesome Seattle-based custom messenger bag company), but I don’t feel like paying $300 for a full-on custom bag. And it would be much cooler if I made it myself. And I just happen to own a sewing machine. Yes, I’m a straight guy who owns a sewing machine. Don’t mess with me or I’ll sew you a pillow or something.

Fortunately there have been a lot of cool messenger bag designs popping up on the Internet lately. I picked out one of the more popular designs which has also been featured on Make Magazine’s blog. I especially liked his last design, the one based on the pythagorean theorem. Ignore all the mumbo jumbo about “perfect ratios” – what you really end up with is a bag with a nice wedge shape that you can pack full of stuff but still close tightly. And it’s very similar to other bags that I really find comfortable, like my Timbuk2 bag.

Final Results
Final Results

Read on for more details.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , ,

Ack! Makezine-Dotted!

May 16, 2007 by Chris Metcalf | 1 comment

So it appears that my post about home-built speaker stands has been featured on Make Magazine’s blog. The sudden inrush of traffic was so dramatic that it overwhelmed my server before my monit alarms could even go off. Apache spawned a shit-ton of connections, MySQL was overwhelmed, and quite quickly my whole blog went down. My box hit a 1-minute load level of around 80-90 before it finally stopped responding to connections.

Fortunately through monit’s web interface I was eventually able to bring Apache down for long enough to get sshd back up. I managed to log onto my box and drop in wp-cache-2, an excellent Wordpress plugin that automatically caches your posts. 5 minutes later my blog was up and running and it’s now humming around at a much more reasonable level.

Tags: , , ,

How-To: Dirt-Cheap Speaker Stands

May 15, 2007 by Chris Metcalf | 46 comments

Update: Hello Makers! Sorry about the brief outage earlier. This post has been featured in Make Magazine’s blog and the temporary spike in traffic took my server out for a short period of time. But, with the power of wp-cache, things are back up and running quickly and they should be more stable.

I’ve recently been building out my home theater system. One thing that’s always difficult, especially in an apartment without a dedicated TV or home theater room, is where to place your speakers.

Traditionally you’ll wall-mount them or put them on speaker stands. But wall mounting isn’t a good option for me, since all the “good walls” are too far away or obscured by doors or bookshelves. And stands are out, because they’re prohibitively expensive ($40-100 each) and generally too short to stick up above the back of my couch. Plus I have an overactive cat who gets her thrills by bouncing off of and knocking over things, so normal speaker stands generally aren’t stable enough to withstand her abuse.

So I decided to build my own. What, I thought, is:

  • Tall
  • Black
  • Stable
  • And most importantly… cheap?

The answer came in the form of a pair of Walmart “torchiere lamps”, those tall, wide-based lamps that are pretty much ubiquitous in everybody’s first apartment. The results were quite impressive, given the materials I started with.

Cheapo Speaker Stands
Cheapo Speaker Stands

Read on for more details…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , ,

Newer entries »