Cows and Chickens

At work we have a KVM switch for our test rack, the very nice Mas­ter­Con­sole IP 116, from Rar­itan. The switch has a com­pet­ent web user inter­face, but no pub­lished auto­ma­tion API. I guess it’s reas­on­able to assume that nobody would want to auto­mate a KVM switch, but once in a while, you might find a need. We have a large screen […]

Yes­ter­day I did a small lecture/demo intro­du­cing sev­eral mem­bers of the Hack­lab to the Micro­chip PIC plat­form, gave a walk­though of a basic, free tool­chain for devel­op­ment, and demon­strated using the PICKit3 pro­gram­mer. In the slides you will find links to import­ant resources, a schem­atic for the sample cir­cuit, and source code for a min­imal pro­gram to test your cir­cuit. Thanks […]

I’ve been hav­ing a lot of time lapse fun with my little Canon SD800IS and the excel­lent CHDK firm­ware. Shoot­ing time lapses at sev­eral mega­pixels onto a 2GB card gives lots of options for crop­ping and scal­ing, and the abil­ity to cap­ture a lot of frames. The only lim­it­ing factors are bat­tery life and the camera’s max­imum shooting […]

To help my friends eas­ily pub­lish con­tent for Blinken­lights Ste­reo­scope, I’ve made a simple con­verter in Java that will allow you to con­vert an image sequence into a Blinken­lights movie. All you have to do is gen­er­ate a grey­scale image sequence (PNG format is prob­ably best) in your favour­ite pro­gram (After Effects, 3D pro­grams, Pro­cessing, Logo, whatever) and […]

Andrew and I developed our second-generation door access con­trol sys­tem for our work­place, to replace our (failed) pre­vi­ous 1-Wire based sys­tem. Andrew did the hard­ware and firm­ware, and I did the Java-based server soft­ware. We’ve been allowed to release the pro­ject under an open-source license, so if you feel like get­ting your sol­der­ing iron out and buying […]

I just fin­ished work­ing on a freel­ance pro­ject with a group of vir­tual friends. The com­pany Enel SpA wanted a pres­ence in the game Second­Life, and a small pro­ject team was retained by their mar­ket­ing firm to com­plete the pro­ject. It’s sort of like a web site for the com­pany, except it is inter­act­ive and based entirely inside a video game. […]