Maniacal Labs

This project was briefly teased before, but it seemed like a good time for more details. Originally conceived as a coffee table build,it quickly morphed into what will eventually become a wall hanging and has been a test-bed for a lot of my LED work. Having worked a great deal with a variety of these digital LED strips, I noticed that in most cases they were manufactured in 0.

While the standard Arduino (especially variants like the Pro Mini) truly is a lilliputian computing device, even it sometimes seems like trying to swat a fly with a sledgehammer. Sometimes you just need a few I/O pins for a status light, timer, tiny sensor, etc. Enter the ATTinyX5 series of chips. The ATTiny25, ATTiny45, and ATTiny85 have 8 pins, 6 I/O and 2048⁄128, 4096⁄256 and 8192⁄512 bytes of flash/RAM respectively. The ‘85 can be had for just over $1 from sites like Mouser.

Awesome skull-shaped vodka bottle plus Arduino Pro Mini plus NeoPixels equals: I’ve had this (empty) bottle of Crystal Head vodka for a while. Admittedly I mostly bought it because the bottle was really neat and I wanted to make it light up. Up until this point, I was using a small version of the RGB clock to illuminate it. It was a neat effect, but not very bright. It was time for an upgrade.

While I rarely sleep past 6am, or sleep at all for that matter, my wife does require an alarm clock from time to time. After a recent few days of her alarm going off right in the middle of a R.E.M. sleep cycle she mentioned a desire for a more gentle alarm. I’ve seen those sunrise alarm clock lights many times before, but they but they are a bit pricey and she didn’t want a light that would be right next to the bed.

To the chagrin of the open source community, I’m a Windows guy. I do really like Linux based systems, but much of my professional career has remained at least partly in the Windows world. 15 years of using Visual Studio (the only Microsoft product I truly like) have brought me to prefer it greatly over any IDE out there. I even use it for all my Arduino/AVR work, but that’s another post.

MeterClock_LitUp I’ve seen a few meter clocks in my travels of the web, and I love the idea. A few days ago, I decided that I must have one of my own. Such began the “How to do it” pondering cycle.

First off, hopefully after the end of this month, activity on the site will pick up a bit. We’ve got some neat projects we’re working on that would definitely be worth sharing. So yeah, look for more soon! In the mean time, here’s a quick look at some updates I’ve made to the Polar Giraffe. Those who were able to see it at Maker Faire NC commented on how the the gondola was floating in mid-air.

Dan and I just got back from NC Maker Faire 2014 here in Raleigh and our brains are still buzzing with all of the awesomeness of the day. Many, many thanks to the great staff and volunteers of this years Faire for creating an awesome experience for all, both maker and attendee. For those that we had wonderful conversations with and are now just checking out our website, you can find more details about all of the projects we were showing off today at our NC Maker Faire 2014 page.

Just a quick teaser for the upcoming NC Maker Faire on June 7th. These are just some animation tests for my new LED display. It’s a 24 x 24 pixel LED matrix built from LPD8806 LED strips and mounted on a 24” x 24” sheet of acrylic. The animations are generated by some python code running on a Raspberry Pi. LPD8806 Matrix

In the near future, Scott and myself will be taking a crack at Adafruit’s Arduino-powered immersion cooker. I’ve looked at this tutorial a few times, and I have now amassed enough of the parts as a result of other projects to make this a not-very-expensive build. There was one wrinkle, though. This project requires the control of a 120V outlet with an Arduino. The recommended Power Switch Tail is, at this time, difficult to come by.