IoT Paper Lantern, Milestone One

In my personal blog, I keep alluding to — but not actually getting around to writing about — a recent Disneyland trip with my sweetie. I’ll keep alluding to it here, since this blog is for projects, not personal stuff. (Though if you also like Disney stuff, you might be interested in my May the … Continue reading IoT Paper Lantern, Milestone One

Building a Custom Kitchen Timer

I have been learning to cook over the past year. Or technically, learning to cook better. I have had a reserve of about 6 recipes I’ve always used — mostly large trays of food like lasagne and casserole, with a week of leftovers. Baking is a different skillset, but one I’ve always been good at. … Continue reading Building a Custom Kitchen Timer

NES Sprite Display

Let me tell you a little bit about a project I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. The NES Sprite Display is an Arduino-based program to display assorted NES-era game sprites (primarily Super Mario and Zelda) on a large 32×32 LED matrix. It looks a little something like this: The inspiration for this project came … Continue reading NES Sprite Display

Designing Game Show Buzzers

At my workplace, we have all-company Friday lunches. Often we will have a speaker giving a presentation — either someone from within the company or someone from the local community. Once, we had a silly game show. It was successful enough that we brought it back a second time, but this time with a little more … Continue reading Designing Game Show Buzzers

Building an Unusual Video Game Controller

Every so often I visit OMSI After Dark. These are occasional adults-only evenings that the local science museum puts on. A few months ago the specific After Dark event was about the history of video games. They had (and still do have, for a little while longer) a full exhibit, including some free-play games from Ground … Continue reading Building an Unusual Video Game Controller

Reading Atari Cartridges with an Arduino

There are a lot of online repositories to download video game ROM images. Whether it’s from a website or BitTorrent, you end up with a collection of binary files, each file corresponding to the code stored on a cartridge or an arcade machine’s internal chips, which you can then load into a console or arcade … Continue reading Reading Atari Cartridges with an Arduino

Building light-up R2D2 mouse ears (May the Fourth)

I basically grew up at Disneyland. As a kid, my family lived about 20 minutes away and we’d get to go twice a year: once on my birthday and once on my sister’s.  In my 20s, I had an annual pass and would go on the weekends, or just pop by for an hour after work … Continue reading Building light-up R2D2 mouse ears (May the Fourth)

Interactive Halloween thunder effects

This is one in a series of Halloween electronics posts. Read the full series: Spooky motion-sensitive Halloween eyes Interactive Halloween thunder effects Halloween goggles In my last post, I presented the motion-sensitive electronic eyes I designed for a friend’s haunted house. In this post, I will show you the module I built that generates ambient … Continue reading Interactive Halloween thunder effects

Introducing InfoNinja

Say hello to InfoNinja. InfoNinja is an Open Source Ethernet-connected desktop heads-up display. It works in tandem with a desktop computer to give you an at-a-glance secondary display of both text and ambient (color/blink/fade) information. It is also a tea timer.  You can learn more at the project pages: Project Overview Hardware/Firmware Software The source … Continue reading Introducing InfoNinja