Arduino is awesome, but using their IDE is uncomfortable for people that would prefer vim or emacs. There is an option in the IDE to allow you to use an external editor, but you still need to use the GUI to get access to the compile & upload tools. Here’s my setup, for a vim-only setup (would be similar for emacs). Continue reading »
Oct 072011
Sep 232011
As prep for future projects, I’ve built a simple 2D array of individually addressable LEDs. This canvas will ultimately serve as the platform for some games (snake, pong, etc), but I’m hopeful that other people will find this useful and come up with some cool applications. Continue reading »
Sep 222011
I picked up a telegraph sounder on ebay this week. I don’t know much about its heritage, but it definitely looks vintage. I wrote some code (see below) to get my Arduino to clack away on it. In the video, the sounder is tapping out the Gettysburg Address, which is the example text in the code. Continue reading »
LED strips are growing in popularity and ease of use. I’ve been playing around with them lately (with my Arduino), and, for the uninitiated, here’s an overview of what’s available, and how much it costs. Continue reading »
At Braintree, the developers get every other Friday to work on non-work-related projects of their choosing. Collaboration is encouraged, but even if you end up working on something alone, it’s a great way to spread your excitement about whatever interests you at the moment (and it’s a nice perk to the job).
This week, my project was to get some LED strips unboxed and working. The strips are flexible circuit boards, with full-color LEDs dotting one side. Each “LED” is actually three LEDs clustered together (one red, one green, one blue), and with 21 control bits, they can display more colors than the human eye can distinguish. I bought a variety of strips, with different features, and I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with them, but step 1 is to learn how to use them. Continue reading »
I’ve completed the first pass of what seems to be a popular electronics self-education project: a home thermostat. I’ve already written about some of the software, and now I’d like to share some of the hardware details. Continue reading »
Jun 272011
My latest project, Hot Or Not, is live! It combines Arduino, NodeJS, Coffeescript, and Google Calendar, to make a thermostat which is remotely controllable via the internet. You can check out graphs of the data on the site, and get the code on github. Continue reading »
Mar 292011
I finished my first significant electronics project in a while: Power Hungry. The idea is that I use sensors to monitor the actual voltage & amperage usage of various devices in my apartment, and I wirelessly transmit that to a base station, which calculates various statistics. The results are then beamed to my linode server, where I have some graphs of the data. The ultimate goal is to use this data to reduce my overall energy usage, but for now I’m just working on establishing a baseline, so I can best judge the effectiveness of whatever changes I make. The results so far, though, are fairly interesting. Continue reading »
I recently picked up a graphic LCD display and a clear touchscreen panel for a project I’m starting. They’re a lot of fun (and pretty cheap), but there are a lot of wires needed to get it hooked up, which means it’s somewhat fragile to move around.
If (like me) you like to move around when you code (couch/coffeeshop/bed/etc), then you’ll want to build a breakout board for your setup. Continue reading »
I'm a software engineer in Chicago, working at 
