projects

This one has been done a million times before, but I figured I’d write it up anyway. I also seem to have ended up being written up in Make Magazine’s Blog, so I figured I might as well document it in my blog as well.

For details on construction, read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago I finished my latest batch of beer, this time a nice Scottish Ale.

The results were quite good, and the whole process was much smoother than the last batch. I had very willing helpers for the boil (my parents) and for bottling (my girlfriend) which helped a lot. I also switched to a “pump-style” racking cane, which eliminated the painful siphoning process I struggled through last time.

Read the rest of this entry »

This one’s a pretty short one. I wanted some tripod leg pads for the Gitzo Basalt Reporter tripod I picked up used (and got a great deal on) but I didn’t feel like paying over $40 for a set from B&H. So I made my own.

Read below for more instructions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every “maker” (crafty person who makes stuff, in the sense of “Make” magazine) needs a good place to store their supplies and tools. Especially if they live in a 600 square foot studio apartment like me.

This is mine. Click through to Flickr to see the details of all the stuff I crammed into it. It started as a standard IKEA shelving unit that I decided to convert into storage, but when I discovered that they had discontinued the cabinet (and more importantly the doors) I bought the last set of doors they had and painted them flat black.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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

Hopefully somebody else will find this useful.