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USB Cable Tester

Ever wonder if your USB C cable is USB2 or USB3? Do you have some charge-only cables hiding in a box just waiting for the right moment to spoil your project plans?! Fear no more! I’ve made a simpl...

Weather Station Project - One Year Later

It’s been over a year since I wrote about my weather station project. A lot of things have happened since, so I figured I would post an update. ...

Weather Station Project Overview

I’m not sure exactly when I became interested in building a weather station. It was at least year or two ago… I remember seeing the Project Curacao 2 post on the SwitchDoc Labs page and thinking it...

Nui (IR Volume Controller)

Nui is an IR controlled volume controller for analog audio. It sits between your audio source and speakers and can amplify or reduce the volume using IR commands (and eventually BLE). Why do I nee...

(Self-funded) Sabbatical

As you might, or might not have, heard, I left my last job in May. It wasn’t an easy choice., but after thinking about it for a very long time, I realized I wasn’t happy where I was and needed a br...

Driving Analog Gauges with DAC

A few years ago, I bought a couple of these analog gauges(galvanometers) at the electronics flea market. Like many other things I buy, they ended up in a box stored away in the closet… Not too long...

Mojo v3 (Xilinx Spartan 6) FPGA Development on OSX

What is this? These are instructions for getting the Xilinx tools up and running on OSX to work with the Embedded Micro Mojo v3 FPGA development board. Why am I doing this? I bought the Mojo v3 de...

Portable Flux Capacitor

This year’s work holiday party was Back to the Future themed. I didn’t have any good costume ideas, so with a week to go, I decided to build a portable flux capacitor to bring instead. The fir...

Laser Turret Project v2 - Part 1 - Overview

After last years DEFCONBOTS competition, I decided to try something completely different. (Check out last year’s robot.) Having to move the entire turret/camera/laser around is incredibly inefficie...

Laser Turret Project - Mechanical

The last turret update (with actual content) happened back in February. I continued working on it through August, taking it both to Maker Faire and DEFCON. I had planned on writing about it back th...