This one might have to be filed under the fail column – at least for now. While throwing around some ideas for the next incarnation of DJ Big Gulp, I decided I needed to figure out how to make my own lithium ion battery packs. I bought a couple of INR18650s, some battery protection boards, and some nickel strips to connect them together. All I needed was the welder… The showstopper I thought it might be safer to try this rig out on some alkaline batteries before diving straight into the lithium ion. At first the welds seemed to be Continue Reading
DJ Big Gulp
Need tunes on the river? DJ Big Gulp’s got you covered! Bluetooth enabled and ready to party for hours!
Light Up Bean Bag Toss
A while ago I got my hands on some scrap photoelectric sensors from work. The defects were only cosmetic, so I mounted a pair of them to a flimsy bean bag toss (aka cornhole) set I had made a couple months before. I drilled 12 small holes in a circle around the main hole and filled them with LEDs. I added a little box with some batteries and a couple 555 timer circuits so that the LEDs would flash for a few seconds whenever a bag went through the hole. The effect was kinda cool considering it was mostly just Continue Reading
LED Matrix
Not sure why, but I’ve always thought making a huge LED audio spectrum analyzer would be cool. With that goal in mind, I picked up some dot matrix LED blocks and started breadboarding. This project started long before the days of Neopixels, so the most advanced tech on my PCB is slew of LM317s for current limiting and a handful of high-current shift registers for multiplexing. As you can see, there was a pretty bad ghosting effect as the letters scroll by. It took me a while to figure out that the display needed to be left completely blank for Continue Reading
Solar Reflector
Whipped together a quick solar reflector. My goal was to get it to boil some water, ended up cooking lunch with it.
Spurious Emissions Goes Live!
So I’ve tried this sort of thing in the past, but it’s never really stuck. This time will be different though because I actually paid for a real domain, right?! We’ll see… Anyway, here’s another crack at making a site to ramble about random things I do in my free time. I’m going to start by working through a backlog of projects I’ve done in the past as a way to figure out how this whole blog thing works. Potential topics include: electronics, 3D printing, making stuff with wood, banging my head against the wall with GNU Radio, learning machine Continue Reading