The Results of Boredom

-
Have you ever felt it would be handy to have you blinds open and close by themselves? Well I did! so I had them do just that.

I used a photoresitor and switch to sense the lights levels outside, and the position of the blinds. A small 12v toy motor and gear box provides the opening action. Everything is controlled with an Arduino.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Engagement Ring Design

-
Image
 I spent a couple of weeks working on the design for this ring. My fiancée wanted a ring with story, so I thought I'd give it my own. Every part of the design is intentional and has a specific meaning. The entire design was done in Fusion 360 and printed on a formlabs printer. The design was done in fusion 360. There was a bit of a learning curve, but it worked for my application. I ordered a couple of cheaper rings to help settle on a thickness and width. I did end up increasing both of those on the recommendation of a professional jewler. The prongs for the diamonds were also increased in diameter on the recommendation of a jeweler. I also didn't spend too much on the diamonds. My fiancée wasn't super concerned about diamond quality, and to be honest you're not really going to notice the difference with the naked eye anyways. Talking about these details with your significant other is something I would recommend before dropping money on a ring. If you're thinking a...
Read more

xyz Da vinci with Repetier firmware flash

-
Image
  This is doubtfully the prettiest 3d printer you've seen and thats because I found it on the side of the road. It looked like it had been spartan kicked down 6 flights of stairs. The rods for the x and z axis had been bent and the print deck was cracked. to finish it all off, many of the wires were cut or ripped and the heated was cracked. A couple of dollars in materials and a trip to the framing section of Micheal's (for a print bed) and the printer was ready to go. Unfortunately, I didn't realize how much of pile of garbage the proprietary print software was and I wasn't the only one. someone had already worked out the details for an eprom flash that supported repetier. It was as easy as flashing an Arduino because I was flashing an arduino. Big thank you to the designers of the firmware - https://github.com/luc-github/Repetier-Firmware-4-Davinci I used fusion 360 to work out the designs, the videos below are a short build compelition. I designed some 1/4 inch socke...
Read more

Programming Cellular Automata - Life in 3d

-
Image
  This post covers the basics of cellular automata via Conway's game of life and a 3-dimensional derivative of it that I programmed. The images below are a couple frames extracted from that program. While at community college, I attended a night class in C-programming where I had the opportunity to develop Conway's game of life as a text program. It initiated a deep fascination for cellular automata and the idea that a computer could generate an entire world given a basic set of rules. Interestingly enough, Conway was not actually the founder of cellular automata. it was theorized 30 years earlier by John von Neumann & Stanislaw Ulam. von Neumann was interested in different methods of colonizing mars, and one of them involved self-replicating robots to setup living environments for humans. As a result of breaking that concept down to its foundations, Neumann was able to extract the theory of cellular automata. Conway popularized cellular automata with his game of life. He o...
Read more