LeafCAN Hardware V2
Chris H built and sent me a revised board for LeafCAN. The V2 board puts all of the components on the back of the board, instead of facing the LCD. By also eliminating all of the header pins (except for the ones used to connect the LCD), the assembly becomes considerably thinner than V1: Below [...]
OpenSprinkler – An Open-source Internet-connected Sprinkler Controller with Web Interface
My house has a crazy amount of sprinklers. In the front yard alone, there are 14 channels, which have been controlled by two very old Irri-Trol DewBee 7-channel units. I’m sure that they were fancy high-end stuff when they were purchased, but they look like they’re over 20 years old. Not only were they a [...]
Teensy 3.0
I just backed the Teensy 3.0 on Kickstarter. It’s designed by Paul Stoffregen, the same wizard behind the Arduino-compatible Teensy boards. It sports a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 chip, and is programmable via Arduino and C. This looks like it’s going to be a great platform for building embedded projects that need more power than the [...]
How to use a WiFi Dongle with Raspberry Pi
My house isn’t wired for Ethernet, so I needed to get my Raspberry Pi networked via WiFi. USB WiFi dongles are cheap, and can easily be found for less than $10. I just happened to have an Airlink101 AWLL6075 laying around. By coincidence, it uses the RTL8191SU chipset, and the official Raspbian distribution is preloaded [...]
How to Install Emacs on Raspberry Pi
I just got my Raspberry Pi up and running on Raspbian, and was finding nano, the pre-installed text editor a bit lacking. I’ve been using Emacs since college, and decided to get it up and running on my Pi. It turns out that it’s quite simple to install GNU Emacs: $ sudo apt-get install emacs If [...]
SLA (Stereolithography) First Printing Attempt with 405nm Laser Curing UV Resin
olio & I are working on SLA (stereolithography) printing using lasers, rather than a DLP projector. The goal is to print with either a polygon mirror assembly as is currently found in laser printers, or a galvanometer, such as is used in laser light shows. For initial tests, we are using a 100mW blu-ray laser [...]
Printrbot Tweaking
I’ve had to do a lot of experimenting and tweaking in order to get decent prints out of my Printrbot (NOTE: Just to be clear, the Printrbot I built was not from a kit from Brook Drumm. I self sourced the parts, included the printed bits, which were given to me by a friend. You [...]
Colorduino Library v1.2.3 Released
Thanks to wiltwong and Markus Lange, I have added support for Arduino Mega and Leonardo to the Colorduino Library. Markus also helped to clean up the code a bit for Arduino 1.x. I have added the ColorFill() function to the ColorduinoObject class, as well, so you don’t have to copy it from ColorduinoPlasma.pde. You can [...]
Reprap: Print Replacement Parts for Household Items
Looking for something useful to do with your Reprap? I used mine to fix a couple of nagging issues around the house. First, one of the rubber feet on my Vitamix blender had gone AWOL a few years ago. It actually balanced fine on 3 feet, but after I got my Printrbot working, it was [...]
Reprap: Don’t Throw Away Your Cracked/Weak Parts – Fix Them!
Sometimes, my layers don’t stick nicely, or I print a part that’s too thin, and the part cracks between layers when I try to use it: There’s no need to throw them away and reprint them. Just use a q-Tip soaked in acetone and paint it liberally. Junk ABS bits dissolved in acetone works even [...]