Projects

Description: This is a little web application I’ve written to make it very easy for me to dump videos from youtube on to my fileserver such that they’re easily viewed on my TVs. Since my TVs are driven by machines running xbmc or boxee, it’s easy to play stuff from my file server. Thus I wrote this little application that gives me a place to dump youtube urls for stuff I want to hold on to. My intro post on it here has a little more detail.

Project Status: Up and running.. Will probably iteratively add stuff to it when I need to procrastinate something else. I eventually want to add features to get it to crawl YouTube and automatically download content for me.

Description: MakerBots are 3D printers for the masses. It took me 3 full days to assemble mine when the kit arrived. With it, I can “print” out a wide range of plastic do-dads. The limit is my imagination. My MakerBot is from Kit #155 – so it’s one of the first, as I imagine there to one day be millions+ of these machines (or at least, their decedents).

Project Status: Construction Completed. Have printed a relatively complex little “treasure chest” as can be seen in the image to the left.

End Stop sensors are not yet fully functional and the Plastruder needs to be rebuilt after this incident.

Description: I grew tired of lameo peripherals all over with my laptop and thus decided to integrate my USB wireless network card inside of my USB Mouse. It went off very well and now I have a mouse that looks completely normal, but weighs a bit more and my computer can network through the thing! AWESOME. I love this hack because it’s simple and functional.

Project Status: Successfully completed & Featured on Hackaday.com!

Description: A Reinvention of the classic Shit Talker application. This is used to make “prank” phone calls using a handy interface to a speech synthesis engine. Currently STP is known to function on OS X 10.4+.

Project Status: STP version 1.0 released in January 2009.

Description: The HypnoOrb is an Arduino controlled RGB LED lamp project. It started as an educational endeavor to learn more about assembling circuits and programming microcontrollers. However I love this thing so much that the project wasn’t closed as soon as I got the thing going at the proof-of-concept level.

Project Status: Prototype fully functional. Currently developing more streamlined versions, considering opening up for sale

Description: This project was something that occurred to me as a Christmas gift. I tore apart a USB Flash Drive, pulled out the pins for the LED (activity light) and integrated it all inside this most hideous rat thing. All said and done, the rat had a cool USB cable coming out the end of its tail and functioned completely normally as a flash drive. The activity light was embedded in the rat’s nose so I could tell when the drive was reading/writing data.

Project Status: Project Completed – nothing more to be done here.

Description: I found a really cool post on Hackaday.com explaining a great deal about how to build a little webserver on a business card. I decided attempting to build this thing would help me to learn a large number of subjects and in hind-sight I was correct. I went ahead a built my own and have had a great time doing it.

Project Status: Development on hold until I can get a PicKit2 programmer and replace the roasted ethernet IC yet again.

Description: This was a minor project, nothing was invented or anything. I merely assembled a Freeduino board. This is the device I’ve come to use for most of my Arduino projects/experiments so far. As a part of the assembly of this thing I learned about using an Ultrasonic cleaner, surface mount soldering (for the messed up FTDI chip) and probably some other stuff I’m unaware of.

Here’s some Arduino related projects of my own.

Project Status: Board is in constant use, an on rare occasion I find myself re-soldering the FTDI chip. Otherwise this is a closed chapter.

Description: A very basic calculator program written in Cocoa (for OSX). This is a buggy/screwy little program that doesn’t do much more than sort of make you chuckle at it. Some people may find reviewing this helpful for learning Cocoa programming basics.

Project Status: Old and neglected