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 would be fun to build something like it, but much more integrated. I’ve also never worked on “outdoor” projects and want to learn more about weatherproofing, solar charging, etc… (What I really want to do eventually, is build an ultrasonic anemometer, but I told myself I won’t start down that rabbit hole until I have a fully working weather station.)

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).

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 break. When I had to explain my “employment status” to people, I decided that the term self-funded sabbatical was the most appropriate. Looking back almost 5 months later, It’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.

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 ago, stumbled onto Alan Wolke’s (@AlanAtTek) video about panel meters

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.

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.

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 inefficient. If the goal is to shoot things with lasers, the only thing moving should be the laser beam.

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 then, but never really got around to it… This post covers the mechanical aspects of the project. I’ll write about the electrical/firmware/software some other time.

I just switched to using Jekyll instead of Wordpress for this site. I started hosting it on a VPS and don’t want to have to deal with all the apache/php/mysql security issues. Now I just use Jekyll to make a static site and run it on nginx (the nginx part was just for fun).

I’m still recovering from Maker Faire last weekend. Here’s a quick video about the laser shooting gallery we set up.

The laser turret was there as well, but playing against other people was much more entertaining. Time permitting, I’ll post details about the exhibit and how it works.